McKnight Artists

Really cool "icebergs" have been growing in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design gallery, where on Friday the 2010 McKnight artists will show what they did with their $25,000 grants this year. By showtime the artificial icebergs most likely will have morphed into 3-D versions of those mysterious mountains that populate traditional Chinese paintings. And McKnight grant-winner Aldo Moroni will have coated them with mud and moss, installed a watering system and launched an erosion demonstration that will be part performance art and part an aesthetic homage to the landscape tradition. Moroni's elaborate project may be the most ambitious produced by this season's crop of McKnight talents, but it's likely to get serious competition from the droll paintings of Carolyn Swiszcz, the tributes to recycling painted by Michael Kareken and the multimedia installation of Piotr Szyhalski.

Free opening reception, 6-8 p.m. Fri 7/9. Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Artists' talk, 6 p.m. Wed 7/14, free.

  • Mary Abbe

'A Small Resurrection of Artpolice'

The underground zine and comic book Artpolice, which Frank Gaard and a dozen other Minneapolis artists published from 1974 to 1994, was so cheerfully depraved that its imagery drew the ire of everyone from the Star Tribune to the Anti-Defamation League. With raw depictions of sex appearing alongside highbrow political satire, Gaard made friends and enemies as our own local R. Crumb. By the time it folded, the zine had molested its way into serious art circles, winding up in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Smithsonian, the Walker and the MIA. On Friday, Sean Smuda's Shoebox Gallery mounts "a small resurrection" of the zine in its storefront window on Chicago Avenue S. Artpolice collector Stephen Rife will show off some of his 50 issues, and a video installation will flash some of the publication's black-and-white drawings into the street. An opening reception with the band Saltee happens upstairs in Smuda's studio.

Free opening reception Fri 7/9 6-8 p.m., music at 8. Shoebox Gallery.

  • Gregory J. Scott