Minneapolis, May 5, 2014—The lights stay on and the galleries remain open, 9pm – 6am, Saturday June 14 – Sunday, June 15, for Northern Spark the annual city-wide dusk-to-dawn festival. Join us for a range of indoor and outdoor activities to engage curious all-night adventurers. The Garden Café by D’Amico and a range of food trucks stationed next to Open Field—AZ Canteen, A Cupcake Social, and Gastro Truck—provide fuel throughout the night.
Northern Spark is presented by Northern Lights.mn, a nonprofit arts organization whose mission is to transform our sense of what’s possible in public space.
Northern Spark at Open Field
Walker Art Center
June 14 – 15, 9 pm – 6 am
Free
Free Exhibitions
Experience a 24-hour screening of a tour de force cinematic work The Clock by Christian Marclay, and get a late-night glimpse of two of the Walker’s major exhibitions, featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture, installations, video, and more. Free gallery admission all night.
Christian Marclay: The Clock
Burnet Gallery
Saturday, 11 am – Sunday, 5 pm
The Clock is a major cinematic work by New York–based artist Christian Marclay. Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, The Clock samples thousands of excerpts from the history of film that indicate the passage of time—from clock towers to wristwatches to buzzing alarm clocks—that the artist has edited together to unfold on the screen in real time as a 24-hour montage.
Called “an abundant, magnificent work” (Financial Times) and “utterly transfixing” (Huffington Post), The Clock is Marclay’s most ambitious moving-image project to date, garnering rave reviews from critics and the public alike since its premiere in 2010, and subsequent presentations at a host of venues worldwide.
The work will be screened in the Burnet Gallery, in a space designed by the artist specifically for viewing the piece. Several 24-hour screenings will be organized during the course of the exhibition’s run at the Walker, June 14, 2014 – August 25.
Walker coordinating curators: Siri Engberg and Sheryl Mousley
Christian Marclay: The Clock courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
The Walker Art Center’s presentation is made possible by the Bentson Foundation. Additional support is generously provided by RBC Wealth Management and Elizabeth Redleaf.
Art Expanded, 1958–1978
Galleries 1, 2, 3, and Perlman Gallery
Saturday, 9 pm –12 midnight
Drawn from the Walker’s extensive collection of artworks, films, archival materials, and ephemera, this exhibition explores the many facets of the so-called “expanded arts” scene of the 1960s and ’70s, charting a transformational phase in the history of 20th-century art when artists around the world collectively began to challenge, critique, and upend traditional media and disciplines. The teachings of John Cage, the emergence of event scores and Happenings, the dissemina¬tion of Fluxus material and editions, and the embrace of conceptualism, performance, video, television, avant-garde film, and experimental music—all of these factors in the context of a rapidly changing world influenced artists and thinkers as they tested art’s evolving status as object, information, and experience.
The exhibition, on view June 14, 2014 – March 8, 2015, assembles some 300 works by more than 100 artists, filmmakers, and choreographers into thematic interdisciplinary groupings in the spirit of the time. Among the artists featured are Yoko Ono, Jasper Johns, John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, George Brecht, Yayoi Kusama, Yvonne Rainer, Dieter Roth, and Tony Conrad. Iconic pieces by these and many others in the Walker’s collection come together with recent acquisitions, rarely seen works, and newly conserved sculptures.
The Walker’s renowned collection of Fluxus works—consisting of hundreds of event scores, editioned multiples, and packaged oddities—serves as a through line across the overlapping themes of the exhibition, testifying to the period’s innovations and its unruly spirit of artistic reinvention.
Curators: Eric Crosby with Liz Glass
Major support for Art Expanded, 1958-1978 is provided by the Bentson Foundation. Additional support is generously provided by Mike and Elizabeth Sweeney.
Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process
Target and Friedman Galleries
Saturday, 9 pm – Sunday, 2 am
Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the drawings and creative process of Edward Hopper (1882–1967). More than anything else, Hopper’s drawings reveal the continually evolving relationship between observation and invention in the artist’s work, and his abiding interest in the spaces and motifs—the street, the movie theater, the office, the bedroom, the road—that he would return to throughout his career as an artist.
This exhibition, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, showcases drawings bequeathed to the museum by the artist’s widow Josephine Hopper, many of which have never before been exhibited or researched. The show surveys Hopper’s significant and underappreciated achievements as a draftsman, and will pair many of his greatest oil paintings—including Office at Night (1940), an important piece from the Walker Art Center’s collection—with their preparatory drawings and related works. The exhibition also features groundbreaking archival research into the buildings, spaces, and urban environments that inspired his work.
Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.
Additional support for the Walker’s presentation is generously provided by Miriam and Erwin Kelen, the Martin and Brown Foundation, and Robert and Rebecca Pohlad.
Northern Spark at Walker Art Center Activities
Old School Art School
Saturday, 9 pm – Sunday, 2 am
Cargill Lounge
Artists from the Atelier Studio Program of Fine Art bring American artist Edward Hopper’s painting Office at Night to life as they sketch from a tableau with live models.
Graffiti Angel in Sophronia/a Netprov
Saturday, 9 pm – Sunday, 6 am
Level 8 Terrace
In his novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes: “The city of Sophronia is made up of two half-cities, in one there is a great roller coaster with its steep humps, the carousel, the Ferris wheel, the death-ride with crouching motorcyclists, and the big top. The other half-city is of stone, with the bank, the factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary. …”
Inspired by Calvino’s imaginary cities, Graffiti Angel in Sophronia is an interactive multimedia work by Joellyn Rock, Kathy McTavish, and Rob Wittig that mixes video, images, music, and text to create a second Sophronia. Improvising on audience suggestions, a team of Netprov (networked improv narrative) writers weave in stories of the half-cities.
Visitors can contribute on Twitter at #sophroniatwo or learn more at sophroniatwo.com. Copresented with Northern Lights.MN.
Accordion with Dan Newton
Saturday, 10 –11 pm
Open Field
Dan Newton’s fresh approach to the much-maligned squeeze-box and his mind-boggling repertoire of both original and traditional material will change the mind of the most hardened accordion skeptic. Drawing influences from such sources as French musette, gypsy swing, Cajun, jug band, Tex-Mex, and cumbia, he calls this global gumbo “ethnoclectic” music.
Poetry Tarot
Saturday, 10 pm–Sunday, 2 am
Garden Terrace Room
Take a moment’s respite for a unique kind of poetry “reading.” A tribe of writers affiliated with the Minneapolis-based literary cohort Rain Taxi Review of Books will lay out cards containing themes, images, and questions (instead of the traditional Tarot), then will write—on the spot—a poem for you based on the results. You’ll emerge from this reverie with a personalized poetry fortune to take with you on the rest of your Northern Spark journey and beyond.
Drawing NIGHTclub
Saturday, 9 pm – Sunday, 2 am
Open Field
Join local artists for this nocturnal round of social art-making that explores collaborative drawing activities.
Glow Games
Saturday, 9 pm–Sunday, 4 am
Open Field
Get energized by a friendly round of glow-in-the dark volleyball.
