Thirty years ago I was in the painting studio at school, an undergraduate art student, working away along with my fellow art students, while our teacher D.J. Hall walked through the studio and read from Tom Wolfe’s slim volume The Painted Word. D.J. made photorealist paintings (I especially liked her painting Thanks for the Memories) and in our class she had us try several different painting styles. In…

David Bowen’s Networked Bamboo and Pete Driessen’s White Fleet are among works in the MMAA’s 3D II biennial exhibition. You can drive by the Science Museum of Minnesota every day and be forgiven for overlooking the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the bastion of homegrown visual art that, until not long ago, shared walls with the jail in the Ramsey County Government Center. The MMAA’s Minnesota…

The paintings of Frida Kahlo come to life this month at the Walker thanks in part to a new component of the exhibition–the Antenna Audio XP-vision multimedia player. This new handheld device goes beyond the traditional audio tour by allowing visitors to access archival images and rare film footage as well as audio interpretation and video interviews. Highlighting works in the exhibition, the tour…

One hundred years ago today, Frida Kahlo was born. In Mexico, the occasion is being marked with the opening of the exhibition Treasures from the Blue House, Frida and Diego, featuring never-before-seen items locked away in trunks at Kahlo and husband Diego Rivera’s house, Casa Azul (now the Frida Kahlo Museum). The show includes 22,105 documents, 5,387 photos, 179 pieces of clothing and more than 6,000…

From Christo’s Gates to the Statue of Liberty, New York is a tough place to compete in the realm of public art. But one organization, Creative Time, has been doing it, boldly, for 33 years, bringing fantastic explosions to the skyline above Central Park, moving images of Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton to MoMA’s facade and a Chinese artist’s quiet intervention — delivered with a pot of water and a…

Producer Marya Morstad continues the “ Radio mnartists” series of podcasts and KFAI radio interviews with Minnesota artists. Head over to mnartists.org to listen to her interview with Doryun Chong, Assistant Curator of Visual Art at The Walker Art Center.