Off Center

Performances of Trisha Brown’s Planes happen on the half-hour between 11 am to 2 pm Saturday and 6 to 9 pm Thursday, in the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery, through the run of the exhibition of Brown’s drawings, So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing. Here, three dancers perform at May’s Free First Saturday (about a dozen are on rotation in this trio) and, afterward, discuss the work.

The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, at the Smithsonian, is among winners of the 12th annual Webby Awards — the Internet’s version of the Oscars — as Best Cultural Institution for its Web site for Design for the Other 90%. The exhibition opens May 24 in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. As it happens, Smithsonian Education was nominated in the same category, earning the People’s Choice award there. The National Gallery of Art earned nominations in two categories (Art and Podcasts).

The Museum of Modern Art won a Webby in the Art category for its illuminating site detailing Richard Serra’s 2007 retrospective. Throughout, you’ll find captivating video, vivid photography and revealing interviews with Serra, who opens his intensive process and gives a detailed tour of his work on video.

No other American arts institution earned a nomination in the Art and Best Cultural Institution categories.

The Walker unrolled its first Jewelry Artists Mart, in the Skyline Room, at Free First Saturday.

Are we alone in the universe?

Do aliens exist?

Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds?

Answers to these questions aren’t posed only at the Roswell UFO Museum and Research Center. They also bubble up in Life on Mars, the theme for the 55th annual Carnegie International — America’s most enduring contemporary art exhibition. Former Walker curator Douglas Fogle, now curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, organized what he describes as a “collective self-portrait of humanity colliding with the economic and political events that define daily existence.”

Given the theme, it’s unsurprising that among the nearly 40 artists represented here, the vast majority are men, including Doug Aitken, Bruce Conner, and Paul Thek. In this video interview with WDUQ-90.5FM, Fogle calls the title — the first Carnegie International exhibition to bear one — “a metaphor about other worlds. The best contemporary art takes you to other worlds.” The exhibition opens Saturday and flies to another galaxy January 2009.

There are a couple notable distinctions to the May/June issue of Walker magazine. The first is the cover -- or, more accurately, two covers. Open the front, which bows to the 20th anniversary of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and you'll find a second cover, featuring an untitled photo from Richard Prince's cowboy series -- a nod to the Walker's Prince exhibition. Why two covers? The short of it: Twice the happiness. The medium of it: We recognize two programs worthy of the cover's spotlight.

By the way, in house, we don't call the first cover a cover (not if you want to preserve your kneecaps). It's a wrap -- the first in the short history of the magazine in its current format. It's printed on rough paper stock and, if one were so inclined, easily pulled away from the glossy magazine proper. Hypothetically, one could carefully pull the wrap away and present the May/June issue with a Prince cover. Nobody would be the wiser (indeed, the issue date and magazine logo are reserved for the inner cover).

Who would do such a thing? And why? You could pin the entire summer slate of Garden-related events (they appear on the back of the wrap) on your refrigerator or on your bedroom wall, alongside your black-light posters. Perhaps you’d like a Prince keepsake on the cheap. The Walker doesn't recommend engineering this cover separation at home -- or at your own museum -- nor is the Walker responsible for any ensuing injury.

The second distinction is the illustration adorning the wrap. Again, this is new to the magazine, which traditionally devotes the cover to artwork drawn from a current/upcoming exhibition or publicity still from a performance group or film. This tableau is drenched in PMS 802 -- the official color of the summer-long Garden anniversary celebration. Dare to imagine your summer day in the sculpture garden bathed in day-glo green.

To commemorate National Dance Week, Walker Art Center performing arts program manager Michele Steinwald sent out a call to 300 people in the Twin Cities dance community to gravitate to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Tuesday afternoon for a group photo in front of Spoonbridge and Cherry. Only two dozen showed up, not counting two dogs in tow, but Steinwald sees it as the launching pad to an annual photo shoot to mark this otherwise under-the-radar week.

Frida Kahlo’s art and story speak to untold thousands — or a specific number of thousands, as defined by the Walker’s attendance during the run of Frida Kahlo. For the author of Teleflora’s Flower Blog (”for everyone who’s as passionate about flowers as we are.”), who saw the exhibition in Philadelphia, Frida’s connection to nature and, particularly, flowers is undeniable. That connection appeared further enhanced, she writes, by the flower arrangement for an event at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The author contacted Walker associate curator Betsy Carpenter, who organized the exhibition’s premier at the Walker last fall, to elaborate on that connection.

Carpenter, quoted in Flower Blog, says “Kahlo may have also been drawn to flowers because she was fascinated with the theme of fertility, which reinforced her conviction of the unity of all things--human beings, flower and plants, animals, the earth, the sun and moon, and the universe. This idea of interconnectedness prompted her to paint several hybrids that combine plant and animal forms with human anatomy. This fascination with fertility may also have come in part from Kahlo's thwarted wish to have a child.”

Photographer Nubar Alexanian has worked alongside, behind the scenes and on the sets with filmmaker Errol Morris for 15 years. Alexanian accompanied Morris to the Walker Tuesday to screen and discuss Morris’ new film, Standard Operating Procedure. Here, in the Walker Art Lab, Alexanian discusses Nonfiction, his new photo book drawn from the sets of Morris’ films.