Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

Ballast, which screens here on October 29, opens in New York City today. This is a critical juncture for any filmmaker, but the pressure is extreme for those distributing films themselves, as director Lance Hammer is. Easing the pressure somewhat is the virtual consensus that Ballast is a true work of art - you can [...]

Mike Leigh is talking about his 10 feature films–from Bleak Moments (1971) to Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)–and the relationship among them.”As much as anything,” he says, “and not altogether consciously on my part, all of my films deal in one way or another with the whole question of parenting: having parents, having children, teaching, learning, the question [...]

Several months ago I blogged about about a call for new media art proposals for Art(ists) on the Verge, run by Northern Lights. The grant recipients have been announced: AOV Fellows Christopher Baker, Participation Overload - Reconsidering Participative Art Practices The core goal of the proposed project is to create an artistic installation that engages and questions the [...]

The Guardian has an excellent slideshow of work from the four shortlisted artists, as well as a video, taken from a group exhibition that has just gone on view at the Tate Britain. The British newspaper opines that year’s quartet is “the most obscure shortlist in the history of the prize,”established in 1984 by the Tate [...]

Step One: Gather lots of reused plastic bags (a great opportunity for a community collection.) Step Two: Trim off the bags’ handles, bottom, and sides to create two rectangle or square sheets. Step Three: Draw your favorite designs onto the shapes using permanent markers, then arrange them together on the ground. Step Four: Start taping your bags together, [...]

Last year around this time, Tomás Saraceno visited the Twin Cities to install his sculpture Flying Garden/Air-Port-City/32SW in the group exhibition Brave New Worlds. During his stay in Minneapolis we talked about some of his interests-a huge range that includes the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch by the [...]

I was very very excited to see A Journey That Wasn't (2005) by Pierre Huyghe, which is part of the Journeys to Nowhere exhibition in the Medtronic Gallery. We took O. and toddler J., and we all loved loved loved it. Parts were very dark and mysterious, with sudden flashes of light, but the [...]

The science of decay: Part Sally Mann’s What Remains, part Corpse Farm, our friends at the Science Museum of Minnesota are liveblogging the decomposition of a pig — all in the name of science. By Day 8, I’ve got to add: Gross-out alert! Kitundu on NPR: A few days ago, NPR interviewed MacArthur “genius” grant winner [...]

Paddy Johnson at the Brooklyn art blog Art Fag City reports that the Chelsea Art Museum has cancelled its November opening of The Aesthetics of Terror and its chief curator has resigned in protest. Museum president Dorothea Keeser reportedly felt the exhibition — which was to include artists like Jenny Holzer, Harun Farocki, Martha Rosler [...]

The dance community will come together tonight for the seemingly controversial 4th annual Sage Awards. I have had the pleasure of being a part of the Sages in many permutations. The first year, I wasn’t really paying attention. I was under a rock. The second year, I attended the festivities at the bidding of [...]

This article from the New York Times by Nicolai Ourousoff about the new California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, designed by Renzo Piano and across the park from Herzog & de Meuron’s deYoung, was just too beautiful not to share, particularly the opening and closing paragraphs. Ahh, I remember those African Hall dioramas [...]

When I met Walter Kitundu, shortly after I started working at the Walker in 1998, he was making music. And musical instruments. And intricate dollar-bill drawings. And god knows what else. Now, as of Monday, he’s a MacArthur Fellow, honored with a $500,000 grant to continue his inventions — and all of us at the [...]

Park(ing) Day last Friday was a resounding success in Minneapolis and nationally. According to local organizer Shanai Matteson, participation was good, but, better yet, the event gave her an opportunity to meet people and raise critical issues. In an email, she writes: I think the most interesting thing for me was that the park became [...]

Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore is hosting a AIGA Design Educators Conference this October. The focus of the conference is to address, “the social life of design.” I’ll be giving an expanded talk on the Designerless Office,™ but there will be a whole host of interesting presentations and keynotes on where the world of [...]

Thanks to help from those connoisseurs of often obscure but always excellent wordsmithing at Rain Taxi Review of Books, we’re welcoming a quartet of flarf poets at the Walker this Thursday night. Flarf, as you may have heard, exploits search engines, chat rooms, and other Internet nooks and crannies to create poetry that can be [...]

• Seeds of dissent: Minneapolis-based painter (and onetime Walker employee) Rich Barlow touches on a topic near and dear: political seed art — something I once dubbed “agit-crop” — at the Minnesota State Fair and how this year’s offerings, perhaps due to the Republican National Convention hosted just a few miles away, had a sharper [...]

  I'm still digesting the conversation that filled the art lab this past Tuesday night during Daniel Bergin's talk on Parents, Kids, and the Media. Dan's a TV producer at Twin Cities Public Television (TPT), media educator, independent filmmaker, father of two, and all-around nice guy known for making award-winning films like North Star: Minnesota's Black [...]

Maybe you’re an artist, or maybe you just consider yourself artistically inclined - in either case, there’s a plum opportunity for you to show your stuff and support the arts at the same time. Vote Yes Minnesota is accepting submissions for one more week in its Poster Design Contest (and a Walker Art Center membership [...]

Back in the fall of 2005, we presented a series of programs curated by Christian Marclay in conjunction with the Sound Unseen Film Festival. His program, Sound Art Cinema, took at the history of sound in film through everything from Walt Disney shorts to the incredible four-and-a-half hour Michael Snow film Rameau's Nephew by [...]

• Hamilton’s Heinz: Ann Hamilton (whose long history with the Walker most recently includes her June 2008 collaboration with Meredith Monk) has won a prestigious Heinz Award. Created by Teresa Heinz to “celebrate the accomplishments and spirit of [her late husband, Sen. John Heinz] by recognizing the extraordinary achievements of individuals in the areas of [...]