AMONG THE GREAT unanswerable questions that haunt our city is this one: Why is there a giant, crappy K-Mart superstore sitting in the middle of Nicollet Avenue? For a city that is second-to-none in making catastrophic urban planning blunders, surely the decision in the late-‘70s to plop down a strip mall in the middle of … Read more
Travel back with me, if you will for just a moment, to those happy, halcyon days of the year 2001. Oh, what a time to be a young American artist it was! The world waited breathlessly for the final bombshell in Matthew Barney’s Cremaster film cycle to drop (spoiler: Gary Gilmore did it!), and your … Read more
Billy X. Curmano, performance artist and provocateur, doesn’t care much for the conventional wisdom that says artists must live in a large city. He may have grown up in Milwaukee and spent time in the East Village and other urban centers of art, but ultimately he decided to make his base of operations a picturesque … Read more
In accordance with standards for staging cosmic spectacles, (however low-budget), the cast of A Gift for Planet BX63 (above photo) appeared in glittering, metallic costume. But Off-Leash Area, an inventive, burgeoning troupe based in Minneapolis, had injected its intergalactic show—think The Little Prince—with another, rather unexpected feature: zero gravity. Rendered as a six-foot cube, simply … Read more