There’s just so much arts news and event information that crosses our desks around here, and I know I’m not alone in collecting those bits and bytes like a magpie. We’re already sharing some of it with you via our Facebook page; we invite you to use our “wall” there to do the same. And now, we’re also launching Tipsheet, a new weekly feature in the mnartists.org blog: it’s part cheat sheet for local arts news, part staff picks events section. Each of the four of us on the mnartists.org team will comb through the site’s DIY calendar, as well as our respective RSS feeds, email inboxes, press release folders and various and sundry social media invites to bring you a grab bag of local arts news, events, and opportunities that might have slipped under your radar. Every week, you’ll find a new Tipsheet, written by a different staffer, based on the notable news and doings they’ve gathered of late.
Here’s what’s flagged in my calendar for this weekend and next. Maybe I’ll see you out?
The MovingCompany presents Come Hell and High Water
Southern Theater, Minneapolis, May 12-29, tickets and show-times
Even now, as the beleaguered venue struggles to gather the finances to survive and with much of its spring 2011 season cancelled or postponed, the Southern is nonetheless offering some truly wonderful stuff in the coming weeks. Case in point: Come Hell and High Water by MovingCompany, a new ensemble led by Dominique Serrand and Steve Epp of Jeune Lune fame. They’re billing this show as an “American oratorio” — mixing music, movement, and old-fashioned dramatic narrative; the performance uses William Faulkner’s novella Old Man as a starting point from which to offer a retelling of the events connected with the devastating 1927 flood of the Mississippi River.
And as an aside: Walking Shadow Theatre Company is offering an act-of-God sort of show as well, with After the Quake (soon to be reviewed for mnartists.org by Christy DeSmith). The play is loosely adapted from Haruki Murakami’s trippy novel by the same name and was inspired by the 1995 earthquake in Japan. After the Quake runs through May 21 at the People’s Center Theater in Minneapolis.
Artist talk with Liz Miller (Ornamental Invasion) and Paula McCartney (Field Guide to Snow and Ice)
Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MAEP Galleries), Minneapolis, May 19 (7 pm)
Artists Liz Miller and Paula McCartney will be on hand to discuss their current exhibitions of work in the MAEP galleries. Miller’s site-specific installation festoons the gallery space with brightly colored industrial felt forms to create fantastic networks of webby, organic patterns. McCartney’s evocative series of photographs recall the imagery and textures of deep midwinter, but are rife with optical tricks playing with form, materials, and scale.
Tony Tasset: Life During Wartime
Rochester Art Center, Rochester, opening reception May 14 (7 pm), and on view through September 4
Life During Wartime — one of the largest exhibitions dedicated to the influential, Chicago-based conceptual artist to date – collectively presents the work Tasset created in the years following 9/11, while the U.S. was involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The exhibition is huge, sprawling over 6000 feet of gallery space, and will include a number of pieces created especially for this presentation. This ambitious show promises to be well worth a road trip, not to mention the fact that it’s quite a coup for the southeastern Minnesota art space.
Various studios and gallery spaces in Northeast Minneapolis, May 20-22
This beloved annual festival hardly needs an introduction, but below you’ll find a few Art-A-Whirl happenings I’ve flagged in my own itinerary for this year’s gallery-hopping:
- New this year, Franconia Sculpture Park is setting up a satellite sculpture park in the Casket Arts complex May 20 & 21, complete with food, live music, demonstrations and workshops
- The Best and Worst of Frank Gaard, spanning four decades of work by the irreverent Twin Cities icon, on view at Co-Exhibitions through May 28
- Fox Tax Gallery’s Art Form 1040: Mission Accomplished: Nicholas Golfis, John Diebel, Colin Kopp, Melissa Loop, Aniela Sobieski, and David Hansen each present a pair of works reflecting on the politics and pop culture of the American “oughts decade”
- CURIO, Michael Thomsen’s retrospective of wonderfully surreal sculptures at Rogue Buddha Gallery
Today at 7:05 pm, Saints Stadium
While the Saints have a demonstrated affinity for the local arts community, that’s almost beside the point for me. I just want to take my five-year-old son and new baby girl to their first big baseball game. Cross your fingers that tonight’s opener doesn’t get rained out.