Off Center’s dear old friend Paul Schmelzer wrote a series of posts on his own blog, eyeteeth, about The Miss Rockaway Armada back in 2006. Paul hung out with the collective when the group of artists, performers, and adventurers were congregating in Minneapolis to begin their journey down the Mississippi river on homemade rafts. A traveling community, the artists perform, give workshops, and create spectacles along the journey.
The American Folk Art Museum has the largest collection of Henry Darger’s work and currently are exhibiting Dargerism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger. Darger was an untrained artist living in Chicago whose life-work, In the Realms of the Unreal, was hidden until after his death in 1973. Realms tells the story of a child rebel army dubbed The Vivian Girls as they battle against their oppressors. The Walker screened the documentary on Darger’s life, In the Realms of the Unreal.
Darger compiled his work into phone books, and often created two sided pieces that exceeded 10′ in length. One of these large-scale works was featured in the exhibition Body Politics.
The new show at the Folk Art Museum positions Darger’s work next to 11 contemporary artists, one of them being Amy Cutler. I first encountered Cutler’s work in the exhibition Dialogues: Amy Cutler/David Rathman and quickly fell in love with her whimsical, yet sour drawings. Light-bulbs went a’flashing off in my head as I looked at Cutler’s young girls with their 20′ braided pony-tails next to Darger’s unsettling intersexed child-battalion.
By the way, there’s a cute band called The Vivian Girls and they’re playing in Minneapolis on June 10 at Future Pasture. I mean, they’re no Best Friends Forever (but who is, really?).
Performances of Trisha Brown’s Planeshappen 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.
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.
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.”
Philippe Vergne, the Walker’s deputy director and chief curator, led a press tour Thursday of Richard Prince: Spiritual America. The exhibition officially opens Saturday, with self-appointed hipsters taking a sneak peek at our After Hours party tonight.
Under the weekly guidance of Twin Cities artists Matthew Bakkom and (Walker staffer) David Bartley, members of the Walker’s Teen Arts Council have spent the past couple months learning the nuances of collecting. Five of those teens — Marina Balleria, Olivia Ebertz, Zoe Sponsler-Hoehn, Libby London, and Marty Marosi – spent much of Saturday in the bowels of the Walker, curating and assembling the Council’s amassed items into a vitrene. Look for it on exhibit in the Bazinet Garden Lobby, beginning May 15.
After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Americans were urged to shop to keep the economy strong, advice that wedded patriotism to shopping. The suggestion sent Chicago-based photographer Brian Ulrich to the stores, but not to buy: he began documenting America’s peculiar and complicated culture of shopping at malls, thrift shops and big-box stores. A featured artist in Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, Ulrich took both surreptitious and art-directed shots of the spaces and faces, not to mention the rarely seen back rooms, of our consumer landscape.
In January, Brian and I, friends since we met through Adbusters magazine years ago, discussed his three-part, multi-year Copia project. While his work offers a critique of — “and maybe a warning” about — overconsumption, it also arises from empathy, a we’re-all-in-this-together acknowledgement of the commercial world we live in.
Here’s a 12-minute audio slideshow of our conversation:
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