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Posts about Museums

Walker Art Center showcases international designers in lecture series

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: February 25, 2013 - 4:08 PM

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Geoff McFetridge's 2012 design "3 by 3."

 

For the design savvy, Walker Art Center is the place to see and be seen on Tuesday nights in March. The Walker's "Insights" design lecture series will showcase talent from Los Angeles, Berlin and Amsterdam. Each of the four designers also has been commissioned to create a project for the Walker.

March 5: Los Angeles designer Geoff McFetridge of Champion Studio will launch the series with a talk about his whimsical, figurative designs which have garnished everything from limited-edition Nike sneakers to wallpaper and a music video for OK Go. The Walker hired McFetridge to design a pattern for the 10 ft. tall construction fence that will surround the museum's 1971 wing starting in early March.

The fence is expected to be in place through December while the building's original brick facade is removed, new insulation and drainage systems installed, and new bricks applied. In the 42 years since  that section of the building opened, moisture seeped between the bricks and the concrete block understructure. The condensation eroded the inner surface of the bricks, necessitating their replacement.

March 12: Berlin-based Eike Honig calls his studio, Hort, a "playground for creative people." In practice, the firm's playful aesthetic has been applied to everything from record-sleeves to the signage for a German architectural icon, the original Bauhaus building designed by Walter Gropius. Konig, who teaches graphic design and illustration at the HfG University of Arts, Offenbach, is designing a web-based project for the Walker.

March 19: Remember psychedelia? That 60s moment is apparently thriving in Amsterdam where Job Wouters, a.k.a. Letman, is a "practitioner of the lost art of psychedelic, delirious penmanship," according to the Walker. Wouters' clients range from the New York Times Magazine to Audi, Tommy Hilfiger and Heineken. For them he's done everything from illustrations, fabrics, posters and typefaces to murals and body-paint designs. He is creating a mural for the Walker where his lecture will include a demo of his hand-lettering techniques.

March 26: The only one of the designers known to have issued a manifesto, Luna Maurer claims to use "logic-based design as a tool to understand the ungraspable." The Amsterdam-based designer is intrigued by the relationship between people and technology, and plans to involve the lecture audience in one of her "social experiments." Be warned: her previous events have had people using tape, markers and sticky notes "to implement . . . algorithmic explorations of group thought." A visiting critic at Yale University's School of Art, Maurer also teaches "interaction design" at the Gerrit Reitveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Lectures, 7 p.m. Tuesdays in March. $85 four-part series; $24 each. Walker Cinema, Walker Art Center, 1750 Hennepin Av., Mpls. 612-375-7600 or walkerart.org/tickets

 

 

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.

 

Russian Art Museum plans first jazz concert

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: February 5, 2013 - 6:42 PM

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The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis will stage its first jazz concert featuring Estaire Godinez (vocals), Peter Schimke (piano), Billy Peterson (bass) and Irv Williams (saxophone). Given the intimate size of the concert hall in the lower level of the museum, seating is limited and pre-registration required.

(5 p.m. - 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 23, $20. The Museum of Russian Art, 5500 Stevens Av. S., intersection of Hwy 35 W. and Diamond Lake Rd., in south Minneapolis. )

Walker Art Center extends "Cindy Sherman" show hours

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: February 5, 2013 - 6:18 PM

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 Everyone loves photographer Cindy Sherman it seems, so much so that  Walker Art Center is adding hours on the Sherman show's  final weekend. (It ends Sunday, February 17).

Here's the deal: The popular show will open to Walker members one hour early, i.e. at 10 a.m., on Saturday and Sunday, February 16 and 17. And it will remain open for everyone two hours longer at the end of those days, i.e. until 7 p.m. General adult admission to the Walker is $12 and includes the Sherman show.

But, wait, there's more! Savvy art shopers know that the Walker is always free on Thursday evenings and that it always stays open 'til 9 p.m. Thursdays. Couple those fab facts with Valentine's Day, which just happens to fall on Thursday this year, and you've got a huge February 14 bonanza for your sweetie.

Other Valentine nite fun stuff:

5 p.m. - 9 p.m. Valentine's Day three-course prix fixe menu at Gather by D'Amico, plus Love Potion cocktails.

6 p.m. - 9 p.m.: Party People Pictures photo booth (dress up in Sherman drag, please)

7 p.m. - 8 p.m.: Social/Brief: The Love Version (share your own Hallmark-style love poems in 20 seconds or less)

8 p.m.: Take a "Love and Heartbreak" tour of Cindy's show.

 

 

Minneapolis Sculpture Garden celebrates 25th anniversary

Posted by: Mary Abbe Updated: February 4, 2013 - 3:16 PM

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"Gopher Hole," by Locus Architecture

Since its 1988 debut, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden has become a Twin Cities landmark attracting more than 325,000 people annually. To mark its 25th birthday, Walker Art Center is bringing back such popular diversions as artist-designed mini-golf, Monday-night movies and music across the freeway in Loring Park, and an artist in residence.

The annual Rock the Garden street party, co-sponsored with 89.3 The Current, is booked for Saturday, June 15, 4 p.m. - 11 p.m. with band line-up to be announced April 16.

Artist-in-residence Fritz Haeg is on a tear to replace front lawns with productive, edible gardens. He plans to transform a local yard into an organic edible garden and to launch a "Foraging Circle" filled with wild plants native to Minnesota at the heart of the Sculpture Garden. The Walker will also host  Haeg's "Domestic Integrities A05" exhibition including a crocheted rug made on site plus local foods and DIY projects. (May 11 - November 17)

A quasi retrospective of Claes Oldenburg's sculpture rounds out the season. Popularly known for the gigantic "Spoonbridge and Cherry" sculpture that he and his late wife Coosje van Bruggen designed for the garden, Oldenburg is the quintessential Pop artist, inventor of soft-sculpture, extreme scale shifts, and unlikely objects including shoestring potatoes made from canvas and a "Mouse Museum." (September 21, 2013 - January 12, 2014)

Two seven-hole mini-golf courses are being designed by local artists, architects and designers. They will share an 8th hole and include such mini-golf classics as a tiered Zen garden and gnomes plus novelties including a giant ant farm, bee hives, spiraling gopher holes, a French bagatelle game and, of course, rocks.

The mini-golf course, open May 23 - September 8, will be designed by Locus Architecture; Makesh!t; David Lefkowitz and Stephen Mohring; Nicola Carpenter, Susanne Carpenter and Bryan Carpenter; Sarah Balk McGrill and Wesley Thayne Petersen; David Hultman and David Wulfman; Aaron Dysart; Tom Loftus and Robin Schwartzman; Sean Donovan; Stormi Balise; Jeffrey and Tyler Whitehead; Karl Unnasch; Alyssa Baguss and Alison Hiltner; Chris Larson and U. of Mn. students.

 

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