Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

There are murmurings of summer being over. Well, let's make it clear that summer is NOT over. We've got at least 3 weeks of warmth left, right? To prove that summer is still with us I took a walk through the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden this afternoon. The late August sun blanketed the sculptures and many [...]

The UnConvention is kicking into high gear this week and next. A lot of things have been happening and coming together. Here’s an update: Minneapolis-based ad agency Campbell Mithun put together an ad campaign for The UnConvention called “Make An Effort” (see video above). It’s a tongue in cheek effort, poking fun at Republican and Minnesotan [...]

Our friend Byran Kennedy posted some documentation of a project he’s been working on called Rain Table: Eventually the table will be part of an exhibit called Water: H20 = Life, which the Science Museum is working on with the American Museum of Natural History. Unlike some other tables we’ve profiled that seem to exist just [...]

I’m pretty excited to announce that out of the plethora of answers to the game I posted, nobody got all the answers right. I’m happy to report that this black and white interior picture (fig. 1) stumped everybody. I’m lucky to have found it; there aren’t many pictures available online of the interior [...]

Tuesday, September 2, 6:30PM, Free Minneapolis College of Art & Design, 2501 Stevens Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55404 (map) Artist Sharon Hayes stages protests, delivers speeches and organizes demonstrations as ongoing artistic investigations into the relations of history, politics and space. At both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions Hayes is mounting large-scale public performances titled Revolutionary Love [...]

Anna Shogren - LA BREA "...the animals might become trapped like a fly caught on flypaper...not likely to pass on a free meal, a pack of dire wolves or a sabertoothed cat would attack the mired animal... After an intense struggle over the helpless prey, some of the attacking predators would become trapped as well. [...]

When the Walker hired Herzog & de Meuron to design the expansion in 2000, the Swiss architectural firm wasn’t exactly anonymous. Having just finished the masterful Tate Modern makeover, they were then promptly awarded the Pritzker Prize, the highest honor in architecture. Several high profile projects followed, but on August 8, 2008, their highest profile [...]

Musician, artist, former garden rocker, and avid cyclist David Byrne, was not only a juror for a recent bike rack design competition in New York, but an entrant as well. The City has gone ahead and produced some of his site specific designs. You can read about them in the New York Times or take [...]

On a recent weekend afternoon Kyle Blue (former Walker Design Fellow) and I had a nice little iChat conversation about Dwell’s (somewhat) recent redesign. Here are the highlights: Chad: How many people are on the design team, and how did you become design director? Kyle: There are four designers including myself. I worked at Dwell for [...]

Anna Marie Shogren, like Eric Clapton, is God. And so inevitably in time, she’ll be — just like the Beatles — bigger than Jesus. 1. La Brea. Tar Pits: “home to over three million fossils from the last Ice Age.” 2. Death. Death. Death. 3. Living (or Trying To) In This Pisspot 4. I Am A Jerk It was killing me [...]

Transcribed below from an old-fashioned audiocassette, presumably without the knowledge of Vice President Dick Cheney (though one can never be sure these days), my recent marathon phone chat with Robb Moss–Boston-based co-director of Secrecy, screening four times at the Walker as part of the “Cinema of Urgency” series–began, in the interests of narrowing an almost [...]

Sharon Hayes, ‘In the Near Future, London, 2008′, Multiple-slide-projection installation, 3 actions, 3 projections; 243 slides, Courtesy Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin As some of you might know, the Walker Art Center is a local partner, with the Unconvention, in Creative Time's presentation of Sharon Hayes' participatory performance project, Revolutionary Love 2: I am your best [...]

Here’s a fun game I came up with as an introduction to the upcoming Eero Saarinen exhibition. To play: Guess if each image shows a) something designed by Saarinen or b) something in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. A little bit of introductory information: Eero Saarinen, known as a key modernist designer and architect in the 20th century. He often collaborated with [...]

With its tattered and sad looking manila envelope marked only by a hastily written exhibition description, this exhibition catalogue has a very unassuming appearance in the context of an entire shelf of fine, hardbound art catalogues. Expecting to open the envelope to find a fits-in-your-palm-sized catalogue, I was instead delighted to find the unexpected: 138 [...]

The Minnesota Independent has a video about the F30 Pedal Cloud, a bike powered by 11 people, part of The UnConvention: While the bike had made appearances at events from the May Day Parade to Pride, its inspiration is less… summery: Last winter, out on the ice of Medicine Lake, Forecast director Jack Becker encountered [...]

Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us

I try to keep my regurgutations of other blogs and news items relegated to my (ir)regular Shorts posts, but after reading this Observations on film art and FILM ART post, I find it necessary to give it a post of its own. In it, David Bordwell applies his mind’s analytical eye to an in depth [...]

Our final day began with an exciting talk by Dr. Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises and D-Rev. Dr. Polak is also the author of Out of Poverty, a book that inspired the exhibition Design for the Other 90%. After his talk, Dr. Polak was kind enough to sign copies of his [...]

Day 4 started off with an inspiring talk from Bryan Bell, the founder of Design Corps. Bryan describes himself as a “design advocate,” helping bring architectural services to under represented populations, such as migrant workers. The day continued with the teachers working hard on their Design for Necessity projects. Teachers are looking to find [...]

We’ve tabulated the results for My Yard Our Message and the 50 winning signs are posted. The wisdom of crowds looks like it has paid off, too: the winning designs really are the cream of the crop. The top vote-getter is “peace,” by teri_kwant, with 130 people saying they would put the sign in [...]