At mnartists.org, we published more than 125 articles last year – original essays, reviews, profiles and interviews – about and by local artists, covering the issues, personalities and trends relevant here and elsewhere in theater, visual arts, music, dance, architecture, fashion and more.
Below, you’ll find a rundown of the original arts writing with the most readers in 2012.
The most beloved art in the Twin Cities?: Andy Sturdevant unearthed a love story of sorts – about a Minneapolis bar, its many regulars, and a certain moody landscape painting with mystery and loads of apocryphal tales, which he argues may just be the most beloved artwork in the city.
Rural art gets its due Twin Cities-to-Mankato transplant Stephanie Wilbur Ash got ahead of the buzz on Rural America Contemporary Art (aka RACA) with this late 2011 profile on the artists behind the inception of the group aiming to “make nowhere into somewhere”.
A painter on painting: Artist Ruben Nusz gave a close reading of the haunting paintings by Belgian painter Michaël Borremans, on view in early 2012 at David Zwirner in New York.
Inverting the male gaze: Last spring, Sheila Regan looked at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ multimedia exhibition, The Sports Show, as a lens through which to assess our changing norms and mores about race and gender.
Inside the dance: Poet and dancer Lightsey Darst gave a candid personal essay on her years in ballet class — the devotion and the ordeal of daily practice, and the human moments of pain, pettiness, and triumph.
Other well-read articles on mnartists.org this year, including a few deep catalog surprises:
“Seeing Target Field,” on the art and architecture of Target Field, by Michael Fallon
“First Crayons,” musings on the pleasures and perils of trying to raise a creative kid, by food and wine writer Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” a look at co-working spaces in the Twin Cities by Alison Morse
“Dolly Parton Dreams, Reconsidered,” or, “My Dream of Moving to the Country to Write a Book and the Pygmy Goats and Insouciance I Didn’t Get”, a personal essay by Sari Gordon
“Becoming an Artist All Over Again,” Ann Klefstad’s profile of Duluth-based artist Marian Lansky, a graphic designer who reinvented herself mid-career to create Shy Nimitta.
“McQueen’s Delicious Delirium,” Camille LeFevre’s 2011 dispatch from New York, on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition of the fashion, performance art, and fetish objects of Alexander McQueen
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