Give free rein to the imagination of 30 artists and you get a pretty lively sampler of talent and ideas. Such is "Twenty," the 20th cooperative exhibition at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in south Minneapolis.
All the art -- etchings, monoprints, lithographs, silkscreens and other works on paper -- was produced at Highpoint, which provides professional facilities for co-op members. There is, of course, no thematic link among the 70-some images that cover visual turf ranging from poetic landscapes to bemused cultural commentary. That anything-goes quality injects an inviting casualness to the show, on view through Jan. 2. Like conversations overheard in a cozy coffeehouse, the sunny gallery has a jumble of ideas, styles, motifs and techniques pinned to its walls.
Intimacy is what draws many viewers to prints. Ranging from paperback-size to poster scale, they're typically fine-lined, softly colored, lightly textured and often quirky in content. These are not big drive-by abstractions that you can "get" in a glance. They reward careful looking.
Entering Highpoint via its back door, for example, I was momentarily stumped by what appeared to be a line of tumbleweed pictures -- eight intricate and virtually identical images by Roberta Allen of tangles of string or twigs. They seemed a little obsessive even for a diehard print enthusiast, but then curiosity kicked in and I found myself, inexorably, scrutinizing them for subtle shifts in design and texture (smooth, ridged), color (blue, rust, black), line (thick, thin, broken, solid).
Nearby, four of Allen's delicate woodcut/collages looked like sweet postcard tributes to Jackson Pollock. After 10 minutes of studying them, my eyes were freshly attuned to nuances the way a musician might lock into a harmonic scale before a concert.
Musings on nature
In the main gallery, things are a pleasant jumble. Landscape highlights include Clara Ueland's Art Nouveau-style intaglio "Forest Pool," which depicts watery reflections of a wooded shoreline, and Pamela Carberry's poetic intaglio "Another Day in Autumn," which applies the dreamy 19th-century style of George Inness to a golden marsh in a forest glade.
Kari Higdem keenly observes summer's passing in three monochrome gravures of a coltish girl swimming, and Ellen Wold introduces a cartoon kid whose skinny-dipping alarms a lake full of fish in her humorous "Invasive Species" print.