An image from Sean Smuda's portfolio "Blueprints," recently acquired by Walker Art Center.
Sean Smuda, a Minneapolis photographer, multimedia artist and ubiquitous fixture on the cultural scene, once unwittingly insulted Walker Art Center associate curator Bart Ryan. But Ryan hasn't held it against him. He recently acquired a portfolio of Smuda's work, "Blueprints," for the Walker's collection.
"I've pestered various Walker curators over the years to stop by my studio, with no real expectations," Smuda said, in his usual charmingly dry, affectless tone. "The first time I met Bart, he gave me a drink ticket at a Walker event, then I criticized a show I didn't know he had just curated."
"Blueprints" is a series of collages made from photographs of modes of transport from trains to hot-air balloons plane to a shopping cart -- against barren, fantastic landscapes, with excerpts of poems translated from many different languages embedded at the bottom.
Ryan said he was drawn to Smuda's work for its "constellations of knowledge, the interplay of information, identity and geography."
"I now feel completely justified for dropping out of art school," Smuda said. See and read more about his work at http://seansmuda.com/mosaic.html
