Recently by Stephanie Xenos

When you think about it, the library is the ideal place for an art gallery. It draws people from all walks of life. There’s an energy and vitality that many a gallery would envy. And the Minneapolis Central Library’s Cesar Pelli-designed building is a work of art in itself. Not surprising, then, that a show like 32x4, with its focus on community and shared history, fits in well.

The name of the exhibit refers to the four photographers—Michael Dvorak, Dusty Hoskovec, Sarah Stacke, and Xavier Tavera—commissioned to photograph thirty-two Twin Cities neighborhoods. Some of the neighborhoods are familiar, others not so much. Yet odds are you’ve driven through many of them at some point, even if they didn’t register as distinct neighborhoods.

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Artist's books defy easy categorization. They are works of art in book or book-like form, or, in some cases, art that simply incorporates books but would be difficult to, say, read. The Walker pays homage to this enigma with " Text/Messages: Books by Artists," a new show that draws from the center's sizeable collection of artist's books. 

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The first ever U.S. retrospective of the work of post-war Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo opened this week at the Walker Art Center. The exhibition, which consists primarily of installation pieces and sculpture, is spread out over three galleries with work representing three decades of pure provocation.

Kudo has been described as having a "strikingly eccentric visual vocabulary," and the exhibition affirms this, emphatically. His seminal "Philosophy of Impotence"—a room peppered with hanging black objects, part phallus, part chrysalis—provides one of many examples.

The exhibition traces the evolution of his unique take on metamorphosis. From "Philosophy of Impotence," the exhibition moves on to more overt representations of a "new ecology" in which humanity merges with nature and the manmade world in a rather grotesque tableaux.

"Grafted Garden," an installation populated by wilting day-glow flowers, severed limbs, and the occasional pulsing electrode, places humanity on the same level as even the most reviled corners of reality. Kudo explains his opposition to the dichotomies of the West. "I wanted to tell Europeans that humanism and love and sex are virtually on the same dimension as such mundane commodities as instant soup or cigarettes."

It's impossible to ignore the likely influence of world events on Kudo's art and attitude. His notion of a "new ecology" that resembles nothing so much as a radioactive wasteland hardly seems coincidental. Those forced to assimilate to Japan's post-atomic landscape would surely find logic in Kudo's idea of metamorphosis.

Yet, dark as his visions are, Kudo's fixation with the possibility of renewal (even if into a form unrecognizable or even undesirable to most of humanity) keeps his work from spilling over into total nihilism. His later work, from the 1980s, features cocoonlike sculptures wrapped in dark and light string, as well as cast skulls and his trademark detached phallus with colorful string curling around and trailing behind, which bears the title "The Survival of the Avante Garde"—are indications that Kudo seemed to be casting his gaze inward later in life.

Kudo's overriding vision remains consistently dystopian, but his apparent cynicism isn’t meant as a wakeup call or even a cause for despair. Rather, the ugliness, the decay, the pollution, are all part of a process of metamorphosis, the outcome of which remains unknown.

Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis continues at the Walker Art Center through January 11.

Everyone has seen an eye chart at some point (if not all the letters on it). It's one of the most recognizable diagnostic tools. The chart's purpose is simple. It measures the strength of one's vision on a scale from 20/200—the big letters at the top of the chart—to 20/10—the little type at the bottom. New York–based artist R. Luke DuBois has adapted the ubiquitous chart for a novel purpose in his new show Hindsight Is Always 20/20, which opened at the Weisman this weekend.

DuBois substitutes words culled from State of the Union addresses from forty-one presidents and arranges them top to bottom by frequency, omitting the most common words (“a,” “of,” “the,” etc.) At the top, a single word followed by smaller words, first two, then four, then whole strings of them.

Hindsight Is Always 20/20 offers up layers of meaning and interpretation. On the one hand, the exhibition acts as a modern window into American history, and points us toward the concerns of each era. Buchanan's "Slavery" next to Lincoln's "Emancipation," offers a singular example. On the other hand, it asks a series of intellectual and aesthetic questions about the arrangement and resulting meaning of such information. DuBois describes himself first and foremost as a composer who happens to work in a variety of media, and those familiar with the information design guru Edward Tufte will see a definite affinity here.

The exhibition raises questions, but it also offers simple pleasures. The bold words topping each chart are like the introduction to a brain teaser, drawing you in and making you want to try to piece together meaning. Some are obtuse. Why on earth would Ulysses S. Grant use the word “Procedure” so regularly in his State of the Union? Or McKinley, “Puerto”? Others draw you in with their ominous tone. Truman’s “Soviet” and Hoover’s “Unemployment” come to mind. Or come packed with ironic humor. Nixon’s top word: “Truly.” Still others strike as possibly prophetic. Bill Clinton’s chart starts with “21st” followed by “Got Lost.”

Dig deeper and you’ll find other amusing and telling juxtapositions, too. On one line toward the bottom of the chart for Jimmy Carter, the words "abuse I've endured" meld into a rather loaded phrase. In the chart for Lyndon Johnson’s speech, the very contemporary phrase, "beauty police," pops up.

Perhaps the most striking juxtaposition of all though is between the chart for George Washington and the chart for George W. Bush. “We go from ‘gentlemen’ to ‘terror,’” says DuBois. “Had George Washington lost the election 250 years ago, he would have been hanged for treason to the British crown, and gone down in history as a terrorist—yet his number one word is ‘gentlemen.’ Now we have a president with the background of a gentleman—he is a Yale graduate—but he’s fear-mongering, trying to make us scared.”

Hindsight is always 20/20 runs through January 4 at the Weisman Art Museum.

Word has it that Yuri Arajs, a fixture of the Twin Cities art scene in recent years, is moving on. Arajs was the curator of the now-defunct Outsiders and Others gallery, a bastion of support for nonmainstream artists of all kinds. He was an enthusiastic booster of local artists, especially those who might not get attention otherwise. A show of his work at Rogue Buddha Gallery in Northeast Minneapolis is a fitting farewell.

Arajs's work has tended toward minimal, abstract landscapes. His current show, Reclaimed Memories, introduces found photographs and objects into this aesthetic to produce some fascinating image and effects. Arajs based the pieces in the show on the narrative within each photograph. "The photo had a story to tell me," he says. "I listened to it and what came back was my own version of a memory that is not mine. But I have now reclaimed these memories as my own and this is what they look like."

The images in the show are all old black-and-white photographs, and are populated by solitary figures and small groups, sailing ships, old homesteads, and children. The paper, the frames, even postal marks with a year and place, add context. But the pieces are more than interesting artifacts. Arajs's imprint is true to the promise of the show's title in that he uses these objects and images to create intriguing compositions that add to the mystery embedded in the lost worlds of the photographs. A man sits on a slanted fence rail in a dark suit, his expression impassive, an image that’s paired with a chicken wishbone and a small anchor. Two men stand against a backdrop of a mountain of timber juxtaposed with iron dust and cobalt acrylic, "No. 2" in red at the center. Arajs transforms simple scenes into vivid, layered, uncertain landscapes to explore–a little like memory itself.

He, too, will be missed.

Reclaimed Memories continues at Rogue Buddha Gallery through July 27.

Or check out the online gallery.

Thousands of artists received funds through the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal programs during the 1930s and early 1940s. Some of the artists became household names—Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, and Cameron Booth, to name a few. Many others did not, but their work became part of the fabric of American culture in the form of post-office murals and handicrafts. By the People, For the People: New Deal Art at the Weisman offers up the full spectrum of work from this era.

The show draws from the museum’s impressive collection of New Deal art. It’s organized by a mish-mash of aesthetic and topical themes: work and industry, abstraction, photography, the University and Minnesota, women. The themes only serve to underscore the premise of the show: that New Deal art encompassed far more than social realism. The Weisman folks even managed to come up with a few examples of Surrealism, which gives you an idea of  how eclectic and interesting this show really is.

The New Deal programs placed emphasis on regional folkways and traditions as subject matter. By the People contains many examples, but Lucia Wiley’s series based on the legend of Paul Bunyan—and, more broadly, the world of logging—caught my eye. She based a series of post-office murals on the oil illustrations, which resemble woodcuts in style. In one, Bunyan nearly fills the canvas. On one knee, head bowed, he cradles a young ox. The other images in the series swirl with energy, but the simple exchange between ox and man is oddly touching.

The show has a little of something for everyone. The colorful abstract paintings of Alexander Corrazo in one room, documentary photographs of Marion Post Woolcott in the next, and a handful of local landscapes of the Twin Cities circa 1940 in the next. The exhibit also highlights the work of women hired as New Deal artists, and will serve as the foundation for a series of lectures and seminars on this fascinating period in American art.

Through July 27, Weisman Art Museum.

Pictured: Dorothy Lau, Workers-Five O'Clock, ca. 1935-1940, oil on canvas

I was a little surprised to encounter a capacity crowd at last Wednesday’s lecture at MCAD by artist Judy Chicago. A diverse crowd at that—young and old, male and female, hip and conventional. Chicago is, after all, synonymous with Feminist Art, and supposedly we’ve moved on to a post-feminist era. Chicago pointed this out herself by way of introducing the topic, noting that many people, especially young women, consider feminism and feminist art passé. And she’s here to tell those people how wrong they are.

Chicago started by pointing out that the National Gallery collection in Washington D.C. is still overwhelmingly made up of the work of white males, a sobering fact for young women leaving what she describes as the “protective womb” of art school. She also noted that a million people have viewed her seminal work, The Dinner Party, over the years.

Chicago’s Dinner Party, which she completed in 1979, is the subject of a new show at Flanders Art Gallery. The actual piece—a triangle-shaped banquet table with thirty-nine settings—remains on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The table’s sides each represent a chunk of time from prehistory to the present. We start with “Primordial Goddess” and end with “Georgia O’Keefe.”

The show at Flanders consists of a large color photograph of the permanent exhibit and drawings of the design of each plate, along with illuminating text and a color photograph of the place setting. The Dinner Party draws you in with a feast of symbol and detail. For example, the Susan B. Anthony place setting features a crazy quilt border, a nod to a popular folk style of the time, and a red, fringed triangle representing both the symbol of the women’s movement and the red shawl Anthony often wore. The plates themselves echo the artistic style of the period—the plate devoted to Theodora, the empress of the Byzantine Empire, incorporates mosaic.

During her talk at MCAD, Chicago offered an abbreviated history of her career and of the evolution of Feminist Art that touched on some of the in-fighting among feminist scholars, which ironically relegates her own work to the margins for a period in the 1990s when, she says, women’s studies scholars got very, very confused. Chicago makes the case that Feminist Art encompasses far more than the work of a handful of women artists in the last few decades. She points to recurring compositional tendencies and visual motifs such as mirrors to underscore her claim that there is a specifically female point of view in art.

“I was told I couldn’t be a woman and an artist, too,” says Chicago. She first internalized this message, she says, but eventually rejected it wholesale and devoted her career to carving out a place for women in art history. With Feminist Art, Chicago and her contemporaries set out to create a counter iconography, to bring women to the table, so to speak. What better way to do than a dinner party? 

Judy Chicago at Flanders Contemporary Art continues through June 14.

While I missed the Friday night opening for the Scion Installation Art Tour exhibit It’s a Beautiful World at the Rogue Buddha Gallery, an abundance of empty Colt 45 cans still in evidence the next afternoon suggested a lively gathering. Gallery owner Nicholas Harper says the party drew upwards of 300 people.

Now in its fourth year, this is the first time the Scion Tour has come to Minneapolis. Minneapolis is the second-to-last stop on a nine-city circuit that wraps up in Los Angeles with a charity auction of the art in the show. And if Scion rings a bell, that’s because you’ve probably seen one driving down the street at some point. The Scion line of cars is an offshoot of Toyota designed to appeal to the city-smart younger set, which describes the vibe of the show pretty well, too.

The premise is simple: all of the art takes its cue from the show’s title. The aesthetic ranges from cartoonish to surreal to abstract to figurative, from both emerging and established artists, many of them recognizable to those acquainted with contemporary artists. The media is just as diverse—painting, photography, sculpture, and collage.

A few pieces that caught my eye: LeRat’s The Universal Soldier, a black-and-white stenciled painting of a soldier cradling a child. The foreground is filled with foliage, which, combined with the soldier’s bowed head, gives the scene a strange forlorn tenderness. Kenton Parker’s photo of New Orleans ruins with a riff on the “As Seen on TV” logo—a red sign with block letters spelling out “Not as Seen on TV”—comments rather more whimsically on another American tragedy.

Harper singles out Caia Koopman’s Migrant Respite as a piece that resonates for him based on its technical merits and figurative style. The painting offers up a whispy-haired waif set against a fairy tale backdrop, flowers in the foreground, rolling green hills, a tiny cottage dwarfed by a wind mill, a tree with a burning heart. He also points to Mike Giant’s vivid color photo of an almost deserted El Salvador street with ominous, low-hanging clouds and brightly colored buildings in yellow and green; a picture of desolate, dilapidated beauty.

It’s a Beautiful World continues at the Rogue Buddha Gallery through April19.

It took me a while to make my way to the Weinstein Gallery for the first time. I finally stopped in a few months ago to see the Alec Soth exhibition, Bogota Days.  Once there I quickly realized why it’s a magnet for great shows. The space is spare and simple, the light natural. Nothing interferes with the art. It’s unusually accessible for such high-caliber fare. The current show, a sampling of photos from August Sander’s influential People of the 20th Century project, is no exception.

The show consists of twenty-three large reproductions of black-and-white photographs taken by Sanders during Germany’s Weimar Republic period following World War I. A painter stands at his easel pasteboard in hand. A bricklayer effortlessly balances a load of bricks. A pair of middle-class children pose in their knickers and ribbons. A high school student strikes a foppish pose, a cigarette dangling for his right hand. Sanders turns an anthropological eye on German society across social strata, his stated goal being “to see things as they are.” But his images are anything but clinical.

The arc of a country road receding into the distance behind a farmer in his Sunday suit, or the perfect symmetry, not to mention the unwitting humor, of three rumpled “revolutionaries” perched on a stoop. Sander excels at simple compositions that hint at a world alive with every sort of person. Even though his intentions may be anthropological and his mindset the product of early twentieth century thought with regard to photography as an art form, his images manage to capture the uniqueness of the subject, and this paradox keeps Sander relevant. It’s also why the Nazis banned his work in the 1930s—because it didn’t support the vision of Germany as an Aryan redoubt.

Fans of the portraits of Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon or the documentary sweep of Robert Frank’s Americans, will recognize Sander’s influence. The direct gaze of the subject, strong compositions striking in their simplicity, the ambitious effort to document a time and place with an objective eye—all are hallmarks of Sanders work, and all good reasons to see this show.

Through April 12 at the Weinstein Gallery.

It’s almost spring. A recent trip to the west coast provided a vivid presentiment of the changes to come: cherry trees in full bloom. The pink blossoms reminded me not only of the season but of connections to the Pacific Rim. On a visit to the remarkable Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, we happened upon a kabuki performance the evening we visited, putting Japan squarely front and center in mind. I was already anticipating a trip to see the new MIA show, Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection, and the Asian inspirations of my San Francisco foray sealed the deal.

The show, which features more than 100 pieces from the collection of Dr. John C. Weber, runs the gamut of Japanese art—from hanging scrolls to folding screens to sculpture and textiles. The large, paneled screens and dozens of robes stand out right away. Cherry trees show up, too, in small details and as the main subject of two mid-seventeenth-century screens. “Blossoming Cherry Trees in Yoshino,” with its verdant rendering of a wild cherry tree grove, is a particularly lovely example, capturing the distinctive curve of the cherry tree trunk and evoking a refined world view complete with golden, scalloped-edged clouds drifting across an eternal spring.

At the other extreme—and equally engaging in their way—are the screens depicting famous battles described in Japanese epics as well as shrines and other celebrated spots in Japan. Where the cherry tree grove feels timeless, these renderings of moments in history offer something specific. They tell a compelling story with an astounding level of detail, drawing the viewer in with both their style and substance.

The many examples of robes—the long flowing sleeves of the furisode, the katabira summer robe, and the uchikake wedding robe, to name a few—provide a very different but no less compelling canvas for both symbol and story. A light blue robe depicting night fishing with cormorants suggests a way of life. An apple-green robe decorated with a landscape plays on motifs from classical literature. A bright red robe with wisteria vines and golden waves evokes a highly refined view of the Japanese landscape.

The show also offers an abundance of silk hanging scrolls, including Utagawa Toyaharu’s “brine maidens.” The painting’s flirtatious subjects are hard to resist. The artist founded the Utagawa school, which influenced ukiyo-e painting and printmaking, a movement popularized in the Edo period by the
likes of Hokusai and Hiroshige, and the connection comes through noticeably in the shape of the waves with their curves and curls.

There’s much more to see. But for me, the cherry trees alone make this show worth the price of admission.

Arts of Japan: The John C. Weber Collection runs through May 25 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

And check out our slideshow of exhibit pieces!