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Posts about Galleries

Minneapolis performance artists dis Cheesus on His big day

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: March 15, 2013 - 4:55 PM

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Stand by for outrage, people. Also lightening bolts from Heaven, assuming God the Father wields such things. Zeus was very good with a lightening bolt, but GTF, who knows? 

In any case, Minneapolis performance artists Jason Wade and Jaime Carrera are about to test the proposition that God is Not Yet Dead. If He is still perking about, He is likely to be extremely peeved by their performance on Easter Sunday.

Wade, pictured here, has apparently drawn the star straw and will assume the role of First Son in this new performance piece designed, choreographed, and otherwise slapped together by Carrera. In it, Carrera "continues exploring his recent obsession with terribleness."

As the press release helpfully explained, "Cheesus shoves the traditional story of the passion through a wood chipper of pyschedelia & ridiculous blasphemy. Aided by the unnatural talents of shock rock celebrity & filmmaker, Jason Wade, this performance piece promises to be horrifyingly sacrilicious."

(7 p.m. Sunday, March 31, $5. Soolocal (next to Pat's Tap), 3506 Nicollet Av. S., Minneapolis. www.soovac.org)

Andy Warhol art featured in Christie's Minneapolis sale

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: February 22, 2013 - 2:06 PM

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Gordon Locksley (left) and George Shea in front of their Mount Curve mansion in Minneapolis. (1969 photo from the Minneapolis Star Tribune files)

When it comes to Andy Warhol, Minneapolis was way ahead of the pack thanks to savvy art mavens Gordon Locksley and George Shea, who staged the first Minnesota show of the artist's work in 1975. Besides inspiring a legendary bacchanal, the show introduced Warhol to a lot of high-profile Midwesterners whose portraits he later painted in his signature silkscreen-on-canvas style.

Fans of that glamorous moment will want to shake out their wallets for "Andy Warhol in Minneapolis," a week-long show and sale of about 70 paintings, silkscreen prints, drawings, photos and Polaroid snapshots by the Pop superstar. The art is all from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which is selling it to benefit the foundation's grant-making programs.

Christie's is really emphasizing the Minneapolis connections for the event, said Amelia Manderscheid, a Warhol expert at the New York auction house. 

Prices range from $4,000 for a Polaroid photo of a toy airplane to $250,000 for a silkscreen portrait of publishing executive Gardner Cowles, whose family formerly owned the Star Tribune. Other local celebrity subjects include Fred Weisman, namesake of the University of Minnesota's Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, his son Richard and former wife Marcia. Studies and/or drawings for Warhol's portraits of Locksley, Shea and Miles and Shirley Fiterman are also featured. 

Other art includes drawings of a Fiestaware pig, a Polaroid snapshot of a toy frog, and a series of athletes including ice skater Dorothy Hamill. There will also be two sunset-themed silkscreens from a series Warhol did on commission for the Marquette Hotel, then a Minneapolis landmark.

In addition, Locksley and Shea are lending eight drawings and four paintings by Warhol that will not be for sale.

The event runs from March 16-23 at Aria, an event-space in the former Theatre de la Jeune Lune in the Minneapolis warehouse district at 105 N. 1st St. Open 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., free.

 

Soviet-era dissident artist Oleg Vassiliev, 81, dies in Minnesota

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: January 29, 2013 - 2:53 PM

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Portrait of Oleg Vassiliev with his painting of his wife Kira walking from a beach into a bowl of light. Star Tribune photo by Tom Wallace taken in November 2011.

Internationally known for his serene paintings and elegant graphic designs, Oleg Vassiliev was officially scorned in his Soviet homeland for his failure to embrace the government's aesthetic dictates. Despite foreign fame, he never had an official exhibiton in his homeland until after the U.S.S. R. dissolved in 1991.

Vassiliev died Friday, January 25, 2013 at a hospice near his home in Shoreview, MN, a suburb of St. Paul. He was 81 and had been ill with cancer for more than a year, although he continued to paint until shortly before his death.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Vassiliev and his wife Kira emigrated, first to Paris and then to New York City. His wife died in 2010, after which he moved to Shoreview to be closer to his son Alexei who survives him.

His death was announced by The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in Minneapolis on behalf of his family. The museum staged two exhibitions of Vassiliev's art in 2011. One was a quasi-retrospecitve featuring more than 20 of his paintings. The other showcased a suite of 30 etchings inspired by a story by Anton Chekhov. Executed in Paris in 1991, the Checkhov suite had not been exhibited previously in its entirety.

The Russian museum also threw a gala to mark Vassiliev's 80th birthday in November 2011. The event attracted friends and admirers -- artists, publishers, collectors -- from Paris, Moscow, New York and even Columbus, Ohio.

Born in Moscow in 1931, Vassiliev graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow in 1958 and spent the next three decades designing and illustrating books including children's tales which he injected with unusual sophistication and wit. The innocuous profession enabled him to earn a living while pursuing his own art in private. 

Non-confrontational by temperament, he slipped into a kind of internal exile to avoid antagonizing authorities. "The path to socio-political struggle . . . was impossible for me," he wrote in a 1997 biographical essay. "What we created for ourselves in the studio, we tried not to show to the officials. Our only viewers were friends and a narrow circle of acquaintances."

Nevertheless, his work was essentially suppressed in the Soviet Union where "even this pursuing of one's own work was criminal, according to the principle 'He who is not with us is against us," he wrote. His only show during Soviet times was a one-night exhibit at a Moscow cafe in 1968.

After the U.S. S. R. collapsed, however, his work was exhibited at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. They now own his work as does the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and museums in Bern, Switzerland, Athens, Greece, Lexington, KY and Denver, CO.

Vassiliev often used isosceles triangles as structural devices in his delicately marked paintings, arranging four of them so they converged as a horizon line at the canvas' midpoint. In both landscapes and abstractions, the geometric forms pull the eye deep into the interior space of the painting, as if luring viewers into a vortex or along a path through a woods. He loved the flat terrain of northern Russia with its stark birch forests, and often used drifts of leaves to suggest memories or past time.

Frequently he would depict skiers peering into the scene from the edge of a canvas, as if gazing into the distance or poised at the edge of a stage or film set. The skiers doubtless were meant as veiled portraits of himself and his lifelong friend Eric Bulatov, a fellow artist and book illustrator with whom he frequently went on long wilderness camping trips to escape the tedium of their official jobs.

Even in what he dubbed self-portraits, Vassiliev would typically turn his back to the viewer, gazing away into the life of the mind. In a recurrent image, he depicted himself seated at the edge of a stage, holding a glass of vodka, with the silhouette of a collapsing house sketched onto a theater scrim behind him.

A memorial event will be held in spring, somewhere on the East Coast, said Masha Zavialova, a friend and Russian-born curator at TMORA.

 

 

China's Terracotta Warriors set visitor record at Minneapolis museum

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: January 28, 2013 - 3:33 PM

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Two ancient warriors pose with Minneapolis curator Liu Yang.

 

"China's Terracotta Warriors," an exhibit of ancient Chinese tomb sculpture and artifacts, attracted more people to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts than any other show in the past 20 years. A total of 146,507 visitors saw the exhibition during its 12 week run from October 28, 2012 through January 20, 2013.

The Warriors attendance is the third highest in the museum's history, topping even "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,"  a 2000 exhibition of memorabilia from the Star Wars films.

The top ten shows at the MIA, ranked by their attendance figures, are:

1. "The Vikings," (1981): 212,956

2. "Impressionism: Selections from Five American Museums" (1990): 155,198

3. "China's Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor's Legacy" (2012): 146,507

4. "Star Wars: The Magic of Myth" (2000): 128,725

5. "Monet at Vetheuil" (1998): 124,316

6. "Degas and America" (2001): 118,137

7. "Eternal Egypt," (2003): 114,068

8. "Dale Chihuly: Installations 1964-1997: (1997): 112,197

9. "Rembrandt in America" (2012): 107,090

10. "Visions of the People: A Pictoral History of Plains Indians" (1993): 101,309

David Galligan returning to Walker as deputy director

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: January 18, 2013 - 10:50 AM

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Veteran Twin Cities arts administrator David Galligan will return to Walker Art Center as deputy director and chief operating officer starting April 15. He served in a similar role at the Walker from 1996 to 2002 under the title COO/treasurer.

He is expected to focus on bonding issues and developing a "campus plan" that will better integrate the Walker's building with the city owned Minneapolis Sculpture Garden across the street. A key question in the plan will be how to use the now-vacant land west of the Walker where the original Guthrie Theater once stood. It is now a popular sledding hill and site for community celebrations including the annual Rock the Garden concert. Various plans have been sketched out during the past eight years, but all have been shelved for lack of money.

During his previous Walker employment, Galligan helped plan the museum's 2005 expansion and was particularly influential in persuading the Minneapolis City Council to pay for a $25 million underground parking garage as part of the complex. He also championed new online education programs, helped diversify the center's financial support and balanced the budget throughout his tenure, a status the Walker has consistently maintained.

Following his Walker tenure, Galligan was president and CEO of the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts for four years, during which he restructured relationships with the organization's resident tenants, the Minnesota Opera, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Schubert Club.

A shrewd political operator, he engineered the Ordway's first public support of $8 million from the state of Minnesota and the city of St. Paul and raised $4 million in new endowment funds. He also balanced the Ordway's budget each year.

As an independent consultant since leaving the Ordway, Galligan's nonprofit clients include the Guthrie Theater, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the University of Utah.

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