Blogs Field Guide

Contemporary Art 101 When You Want It

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The next time you’re in one of the Walker’s galleries, especially on a Thursday night, you might see a tour guide with an expression on her or his face that screams, “Talk to me.” Well, screams might be a bit strong. How about invitingly says? Art Chat is the next big thing in guided tours. [...]

The next time you’re in one of the Walker’s galleries, especially on a Thursday night, you might see a tour guide with an expression on her or his face that screams, “Talk to me.” Well, screams might be a bit strong. How about invitingly says? Art Chat is the next big thing in guided tours. At least, we’re hoping it might be.  

On Target Free Thursday Nights and other bustling attendance moments Art Chat guides roam the galleries solo, approaching individuals or small groups to talk about whatever they’re encountering. Luanne Coleman, a 10-year tour guide veteran, was initially apprehensive about the looser format.  “I thought it would be akin to cold-calling visitors,” she says, “but it’s been a lot of fun.” She tailors her talking points to suit whomever she engages and when she can’t explain a piece, she tries to help visitors develop their own interpretations. It’s about spontaneous conversations that can go deep or stay simple, offering a taste rather than a five-course meal.

Curt Lund, a guide since 2003, appreciates the flexibility of the Art Chat format. He can talk with people anywhere in the gallery and is a fearless leader when it comes to “busting the Midwestern ‘personal space’ bubble,” as he puts it. Lund has found that once patrons know the guides are available and approachable, “they’ll often invite you in.”

We live in a society where, most of us, are accustomed to getting our questions answered almost immediately thanks to our smart phones, our friends’ smart phones (if you’re a dinosaur like me), or the neighborhood café’s free Wi-Fi. Consider Art Chat guides your Bing or Google but with a pulse, smile and ability and willingness to customize on the spot. Oh, and they rarely mysteriously go off-line.

Remembering a Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Favorite

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Admit it. Whenever you set foot in the Garden you have a ritual. Some of you may slowly pore over the words on Jenny Holzer’s granite benches. Others of you may swing yourselves dizzy on Mark di Suvero’s giant Arikidea — a spider composed of a skyscraper. Many of you do your best to take [...]

Admit it. Whenever you set foot in the Garden you have a ritual. Some of you may slowly pore over the words on Jenny Holzer’s granite benches.

Others of you may swing yourselves dizzy on Mark di Suvero’s giant Arikidea — a spider composed of a skyscraper.

Many of you do your best to take that perfect, illusionistic snapshot of a friend biting into Claes Oldenburg and Coosja von Bruggen’s giant, metal cherry.

Well, if any of you are like me you also make some time to frame our petite but pleasant skyline through David Nash’s Standing Frame. Nash’s sculpture with its animated legs and giant view finder is no longer a resident of the Garden. The piece was removed in November because, in its twenty-third year of existence, it reached its natural end. The timbers decomposed from the inside out making the work structurally unsound.

When this news was shared with the Walker tour guides many of them wanted to share farewells. Below are some highlights from those who knew the work well. Read their thoughts, then please share some of your own as a comment. We’d like to hear your goodbye to Standing Frame and learn about other works in the Garden that are  meaningful to you.

“I have no contained stories or memorable quotes about the standing frame, though it was, in some ways, a moving piece to tour. Thinking about the observation that we look at nature through windows these days and through car windows at that, people would focus on what images of nature the work helps us see instead.  How could we look at trees when the frame was so high?  Was Nash only interested in our looking at clouds and sky? From what vantage point could the work frame the Basilica? As we moved around it, the more-or-less geometric frame on a tripod morphed into a headless walking creature framing nothing; we’d wonder about heads, tree-made bodies and how we find the images we see.” –Christine McVay

“I have loved Nash’s ecological sensibility, which I like to share with tour participants of all ages. Kids have always enjoyed going into the trees, standing on the block of concrete, and seeing the framed view of Mpls.  I’ve also liked the fun of comparison/contrast with Woodrow—kids think Woodrow is made of wood, then we talk about why it needs to be of more durable material. Then when we get to Standing Frame, although it looks like wood, they think it probably isn’t! So that is always a fun twist. Now I guess I will just show a photo of Standing Frame to exemplify why Woodrow is made of bronze. That won’t be nearly as much fun, though.

I also thought it made an interesting pair with Turrell’s Sky Pesher. Both framed sky, but the standing frame included the tops of trees and buildings and you could see things around the frame whereas Sky Pesher isolates the sky. It made for an interesting compare and contrast.” –Nancy Beach

“Standing Frame has been one of my favorite pieces.  We all know it frames the Basilica, but children also think it looks like a TV set or a camera (it has knobs and also legs). I love to have the children imagine the sculptures coming alive at night and our frame taking pictures. It is fascinating to think of the Di Suvero’s Arikidea walking about and Woodrow galloping through the Garden with the frame capturing all the action.  Just think of the ways the sculptures would move about. I will miss the piece.” –Carol Bossman

“I love the arguments as to which is the best spot to stand on to look through the frame.  As with all art, it’s all in your personal perspective.” –Jenny Skinner

“Nash’s Standing Frame is always on my tour of the garden, and I grieve its departure. 

His premise that nature frames our viewpoint is so welcome. Indeed it is all we have, in spite of our contrivances.

I loved watching everyone look at it from both sides, with the taller people insisting they could see the Cathedral.  It created lots of jumping…sometimes from greyhairs like me. 

My friend Odell, noticed that the tree trunks were upside down. 

And I liked it because it came from Taylor’s Falls, where I had learned to climb sheer faces. 

And it cast a shadow on our broader view of the world.

Love to the decay of the Standing Frame.  It has made an important impact.

Let it rest.”
–Lauri Rockne

“ … A great piece to tour and so well received given its local materials, brilliant design and concept. Its fragility is part of its beauty. –Sandy Boss Febbo

What’s your ode to Standing Frame?

Yves Klein: the Judoka

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In judo there are 67 recognized throws for bringing someone to the ground. Last Thursday, during the École de Klein judo demonstrations, Dominique Tobbell and Danny Hutchinson–2nd degree black belt instructors from St. Paul’s Midway Judo Club must have shown at least 20 of them. In the spirit of École de Klein, whose goal is [...]

In judo there are 67 recognized throws for bringing someone to the ground. Last Thursday, during the École de Klein judo demonstrations, Dominique Tobbell and Danny Hutchinson–2nd degree black belt instructors from St. Paul’s Midway Judo Club must have shown at least 20 of them.

Dominique Tobbell and Danny Hutchinson Photo by Cameron Wittig

In the spirit of École de Klein, whose goal is to provide visitors with a better understanding of artist Yves Klein’s work and curiosities, it seemed necessary to have judo represented. Klein was a dedicated student of the martial art form– he earned his black belt from the Kôdôkan Institute in Tokyo in 1952 at the age of  24 and went on to teach at the Spanish Federation of Judo in Madrid, wrote the book Le Fondements du Judo (The Foundations of Judo), and opened his own judo school in Paris.

Yves Klein with a judo partner at the American Students and Artists Centre, Bd. Raspail, Paris, c. 1955

If there is one central fear that must be overcome to become a judoka, it’s falling. Would Klein have been prepared to take his Leap Into the Void without his judo training?

Yves Klein, Le Saut dans le vide [Leap into the Void, at 5, rue Gentil-Bernard, Fontenay-aux-Roses, October 1960. © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photos by Shunk-Kender, © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, courtesy Yves Klein Archives"

ArtsConnectEd + iPads = win-win for teachers

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It was a win-win situation for Therese Cacek, the winner of the first ArtsConnectEd iPad Challenge. She had been trying to come up with a lesson that would inspire her 6th grade art students at Holdingford Elementary, a little less than 2-hour’s drive northeast of Minneapolis, to use the ArtsConnectEd website as part of an [...]

It was a win-win situation for Therese Cacek, the winner of the first ArtsConnectEd iPad Challenge. She had been trying to come up with a lesson that would inspire her 6th grade art students at Holdingford Elementary, a little less than 2-hour’s drive northeast of Minneapolis, to use the ArtsConnectEd website as part of an assignment to learn to use Photoshop Elements.

“In past years I had taken the students to the ArtsConnectEd site and encouraged them to find an image that they could manipulate and then digitally put something about themselves into the artwork. One frustration was that the students did not seem to ‘look deeper’ into the website. … That’s when I saw the ‘iPad Challenge’ with the direction to create a set as an introduction to the museums. It was a perfect. It was exactly what I wanted the students to do—become familiar with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center as museums and then compare and make choices about the works. The creation of the art set worked as a perfect teaching tool to guide my students into deeper consideration of a choice for their digital manipulation project.”

The possibility of winning an iPad was interesting to Cacek as well because of her growing passion for bringing technology into her art classroom. She muses,

“Technology has added a whole new dimension to teaching in the art room. Like paint, clay or pastels, technology also offers another avenue of creative expression. Today students are less intimidated and more willing to experiment with computer software used to create and manipulate digital imagery. The emergence of YouTube brings a keen awareness to the need to teach and understand media’s power and influence. Technology is exciting. It challenges and is continually changing.”

You can view Therese’s winning Set “Minnesota Museums Tour” on ArtsConnectEd.

While you are at it, take a look at the honorable mention Set “Photograms: A Cameraless Image” by Edina High School photography teacher Kim Raskin.

With ArtsConnectEd, users can not only access over 20,000 works of art and resources from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Walker, they can use the materials they find to build customized Art Collector Sets, save them, and share their work with others. Building an Art Collector Set is fun, but it is also a perfect lesson planning tool for teachers. The iPad Challenges are incentives for teachers and other users to produce outstanding Sets and share them with all ArtsConnectEd users.

iPad Challenge #2!
The next round of the ArtsConnectEd iPad Challenge is underway. Any K–12 teacher, active substitute teacher, home school educator, teaching artist, student teacher, and college education major is eligible to win an iPad. Just submit an original Art Collector Set that is relevant to a lesson plan by midnight January 7, 2011.

You could be the next ArtsConnectEd iPad Challenge winner!

ArtsConnectEd iPad Challenge #1 winners Therese Cacek (center) and Kim Raskin (right) with Susan Rotilie at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Educators’ Evening October 21, 2010.