SooVAC Grand Opening

Saturday: After 13 years in a Lyndale Avenue storefront, scrappy little Soo Visual Arts Center is growing up and moving on. Having established itself as one of the Twin Cities' best-run alternative nonprofit art showplaces, Soo has moved a few blocks away into a venue big enough to accommodate three simultaneous shows of watercolors and oil paintings. The opening exhibit will feature "Vacationland," Betsy Hunt and Zach Moser's multimedia documentary about a road trip by a bunch of gals known as the Rowdy Raccoons who try to banish boredom through aimless travel. In her "Spring Break" watercolors, Lindsay Smith depicts a post-apocalyptic world of survivalists in a poetic landscape of shattered civilizations and natural renewal. Snippets of imagery from films, Facebook, art history and his own fervid imagination collide in the paintings of Samual Weinberg's fragmentary "Mutable Dramas With Several Characters or Understanding the Pink Man," a scene from which is shown here. (Party 6-10 p.m. Sat., April 11. Free. 2909 Bryant Av. S., Suite 101, Mpls. Open 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed., 11 a.m.-7 p.m. Thu.-Fri., 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Sat.-Sun. through May 23. 612-871-2263 or www.soovac.org) Mary Abbe