Held once every 10 years, “Foot in the Door” is an open exhibition for all Minnesota artists. This ever-popular exhibition celebrates the diversity and enthusiasm of Minnesota’s visual — and, new this year, audio/video — artists. It’s an important event for the arts community and a great opportunity for artists to display their work at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The sole curatorial criteria? Each submission must fit within one cubic foot.

Foot in the Door - Artist Detail.

Migration - Doug Aitken

From the press release:
In “Migration” the movements of wild North American migratory animals are transposed upon the ubiquitous space of modern roadside hotels and motels. As the wild birds and animals inhabit these mysteriously vacant and sterile interiors we’re taken on a haunting odyssey through the contemporary American landscape.

Clips of the movie can be viewed here.

Gage Gallery at Augsburg College Spring 2010

Current Works: Finkler - Holmgren - Laker

The Gage Family Art Gallery
First level, Oren Gateway Center
Augsburg College

April 12 - May 2, 2010

Artist reception: Friday, April 16, 4:30-6:30 p.m.

“Current Works” features artists John Finkler, Kristoffer Holmgren and James Laker, professors at Augsburg College. Showcasing their most recent artwork, the joint exhibit will be comprised of 2D works in gouache, pastel and spray paint. Finkler’s series of animal drawings is inspired by the Lascaux cave paintings and explores the iconic figure. Holmgren focuses on the connections between external environments and the interior space of thought and memory through his psychological landscapes. Laker investigates the dialogue between biological, botanical, and geological participants through splicing, grafting, and hybridization of imagined figures and the landscapes they inhabit.

All events are free and open to the public.

The Gage Family Art Gallery
22nd Ave. S. at Riverside Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55454
www.augsburg.edu/galleries

Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 8 a.m.–8 p.m.; Saturday & Sunday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.

Student Drawing of Guernica

For our final in-class project, I had the students each take a section of Picasso’s great 1937 painting, Guernica, and draw it using charcoal. We then put them all together to form the large reproduction of the masterpiece. Throughout the quarter, we investigated many artists and styles, including DeKooning, Dali, and Chuck Close to gain a better understanding of their styles and approaches to art making.

PRESS RELEASE
Although the MCKEE GALLERY has mounted many PHILIP GUSTON shows over the last 35 years, it has never exhibited the small oil panels together as a group. The early figurative acrylic panels were begun in 1968, but the date of the first smaller oils is undetermined. The dated oil panels begin in 1969 and the last ones in 1973. Many are undated.

Shoe (Untitled)

These small oils, ranging in size from 9 x 10 to 12 x 16 inches, have always been special. Their diminutive size does not diminish their pictorial strength, whether as complex compositions of hooded figures in conversation, studio interiors, still-lifes or as paintings of single objects, such as a green shade, a cup, a nail or an umbrella. They are not studies or fragments of larger works.

Guston painted these small oils for a period of 5 years, while going through the first hooded figure series and the Roma period, and then he stopped. They have a unity to them that belies the span of time during which they were done. The panels are all very painterly, not flat, and exude a care and intensity of focus that convey the painter’s passion in making them.

The exhibition will include 45 works, mostly loans, and will open Thursday, November 5, continuing on until December 31, 2009.

View the show

The Herd, 2009, Pastel and Spray paint.

I first saw this scene in the movie, ‘The New York School’. It was one of those movies I watched over and over again in the library screening rooms at Moorhead State. All of the artist banter and Abstract Expressionist one-liner’s are priceless. It was here that I first heard Pollock’s famous retort to Hans Hoffman, “I am Nature”.

The Sundance channel is running a marvelous documentary about the Frenchman, Philippe Petit, who, in 1974, walked across a wire between the World Trade Towers, in NYC. What an engaging meditation on so many things, beauty, dreams, risk, mystery…the Towers… Petit was immediately arrested after making 8 crossings on his walk, and people demanded to know WHY anyone (he) would do such a thing, he said, “there is no why”. He couldn’t understand such a reaction to what he described simply as a “beautiful and mysterious thing”.

Here’s the original news report on the event: Click here