MIDWESTERN STATES | MINNESOTA
Twin Cities: Minneapolis mind expansion
From an arts perspective, it's a city of derring-do, with varied spaces that showcase the daring and what they do.
Please Note: This story was originally published in the Los Angeles Times' Travel section on August 14, 2005.
Minneapolis
JAO, an artist dressed in paint-spattered cycling gear, bounced before an easel set up in the bed of a bright yellow pickup -- her "artmobile" -- decorated with cartoon men with rake-like hands.
While blasting a shrill police whistle, she did energetic warmup exercises to the high-adrenaline strains of Hungarian Gypsy music -- "the best music for speed painting," she said.
Speed painting is her specialty, and she was about to demonstrate it to a crowd in the parking lot of an old northeastern Minneapolis warehouse.
It's set in a gritty, industrial section sliced by highways and railroad tracks. But art blooms in this plant once used to process and package seeds. The brick, four-story Northrup King Building houses about 100 studios, where painters, jewelry artists, weavers and printmakers work.
Art blooms not only at the Northrup King Building but also throughout Minneapolis. The most recent development is this year's expansion of the Walker Art Center, which for decades has honed the cutting edge of "the art of our time."
The Walker's new galleries continue a trend that included the 1993 opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River and the continuing growth of the venerable Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
I try to visit the Walker each year when I come home to
As someone who often rambles through
"We seek to be a center for daring artistic experimentation, a place to experience something unexpected, an incubator for discussion and debate," Kathy Halbreich, the Walker's director, said of her museum. But her statement summed up the broader Minneapolis art scene as well. A lot is happening here, in the museums, the galleries, the studios. And that's even without considering neighboring St. Paul.
Walker Art Center
ONE of the most-photographed objects in the city is "Spoonbridge and Cherry," by
Nearby, in the garden's humid palm-frond-filled and lilypad-perfumed conservatory, Frank Gehry's 22-foot-long "Standing Glass Fish" -- his personal ode to a carp -- filled the greenhouse.
At the Walker, artistic media are not restricted to bronze and oil on canvas. On an outside wall, a sign reading "Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole" is itself a text-art work in anodized aluminum that invites the viewer to give it meaning.
Inside, Mike Kelley's "Four Part Butter-Scene N'Ganga" employs galvanized steel washtubs. Jac Leirner's "Blue Phase" is an irregular round formed from thousands of devalued Brazilian bank notes pressed together so tightly that you can see only their edges. And even though Sherrie Levine's "Fountain (after
Irony is a common commodity at the Walker.
The recently completed improvements added 130,000 square feet, nearly doubling the museum's size, increasing the gallery space by a third to 45,000 square feet and expanding facilities for the performing arts. After exiting rooms displaying Warhol Jackies, a
The Weisman Art Museum
THE Weisman, like the Walker, stretches your mind, pulling it in unaccustomed directions. It has a smaller collection, so take it in before the Walker, as an appetizer, or afterward, as a dessert. From across the
Inside there was abundant space; each work had room to breathe and conduct its own dialogue with the visitor. There was a wall-sized Lichtenstein comic-strip woman with long, eel-like fingers; another of Gehry's fish, this one in the form of a lamp; and a Warhol portrait of the museum's major benefactor, the late Frederick R. Weisman, who attended the
These internationally known artists join local ones such as Charles Biederman, whose paintings take inspiration from rural Minnesota, or Eugene Larkin, whose "An Artist's Odyssey" is a series of woodblock prints on mythological and Biblical themes.
The full-scale "Pedicord Apartments," by Nancy and Edward Kienholz, took me literally inside the artwork. Based on an old apartment building in Spokane, Wash., it is complete with frowzy lobby and stains on the wall that you wouldn't want to analyze too closely.
I walked down its dim, gloomy hallway and paused, as suggested, at each doorway. Triggered by sensors, sounds emerged from each apartment. Sobbing could be heard in one, a dog barked a warning in another, in a third someone was listening to a ballgame. I found myself oddly compelled to know more about the fictional residents.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
THE Minneapolis Institute of Arts is one of the nation's great fine arts museums. It has acres of gallery space in its southern Minneapolis quarters with more than 100,000 objects in its permanent collection. Picassos and Klees share the building with other works of diverse genres, cultures, eras and continents.
There, I can analyze a 19th century Japanese woodblock print, visit three centuries in period rooms or enjoy a Gauguin Tahitian landscape or a Van Gogh olive grove. I can examine art's beginnings in a Venus figure 22,000 years old, give or take a few. And only last month, the institute's period rooms got a new neighbor -- the 1735 Grand Salon from the Hotel Gaillard de la Bouexiere, one of the most intact existing interiors from early 18th century Paris.
Northrup King Building
AS fine as they are, the Weisman, Walker and MIA rarely let you speak with artists whose works you admire. For that, you have to go to the Northrup King Building.
There, Nancy Stephani, for example, does multimedia assemblage, combining metal and layered acrylic. One, titled "Tuna," is a cat fashioned from flattened cans. Many of her works are diptychs or triptychs, and for a good, practical, typical Minnesotan's reason: "It's easier to fit them in a car," she said. In another studio, Pamela Belding created wry collages based on 20th century advertising. In one, three altar boys look pure of heart until you look at their thoughts, revealed above their respective heads.
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