*Editor’s Note: This feature was originally published in July 2008. Interested readers should note that the annualCommunity Collaboration Hot Metal Pour at Franconia Sculpture is coming up August 1, 2009; in addition, the park’sAnnual Arts and Artists Celebration & Festival will be September 26. Visit the website for Franconia’s summer-long schedule of events. IT’S NOT TYPICAL METRO AREA MYOPIA TO…

WRITING FICTION TODAY IS TOO OFTEN A SUCKER’S GAME. In the novel-writing business, the publishers cutting the checks have become adept at hedging bets. Forget big advances, here’s how a typical book deal works:  Write your novel on your own (it may well take you years). A publisher might pay you for this work, but probably not. If so, that publisher will decide how much, and the amount you receive will…

WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU SEE BLACK LABEL MOVEMENT IS RISK. Breakneck take-offs, hurtling and sprawling bodies, the whump of impact with the floor or another dancer. And this isn’t just the carefully calibrated simulation of risk, either: these dancers are actively trying to leap higher than they can handle, to knock each other over, to get through. It’s a thrill to see such thrown momentum, but the thrill…

Kris Martinat the Walker Art Center’sThe Quick and the Dead, on view through September 27 Belgian Kris Martin, one of the myriad artists featured in the intellectually energetic exhibition The Quick and the Dead at the Walker Art Center, pursues epistemology like a scientist with a poet’s heart, distilling themes of entropy, time, and death into stirring sculptures and contemplative performance…

AS IS THE CASE WITH ANY GOOD FILM, THERE IS A LOT MORE GOING ON behind the scenes of Birthmarked for Death than appears onscreen. A lot more. The darkly comic short created for the 2008 Minnesota 48-Hour Film Fest is headed to the one-and-only Cannes Film Festival this month, which is a big deal for any group of aspiring filmmakers. But for the self-described “motley crew” behind Birthmarked, even the…

HARDY COLEMAN DOESN’T LIKE TO SAY THAT HE’S AWRITER. “It’s one of the things I do,” he says, smiling into the early spring sun in the courtyard of Minneapolis’ Seward Café. “I don’t wanna be seen as some special guy on a pedestal.” Indeed, in his stained punk rock T-shirt, beat-up leather jacket, and well-worn Fedora, Hardy looks about as down-to-earth as a person can get. “Part of the reason,” he explains, “is…

(This interview is reproduced for mnartists.org by permission of the makers of Butter City, which airs semi-regularly on TPT-17.) WANT TO SEE MORE? You can watch clips from a back episodes of BUTTER CITY online, onthe show’s website.

LAST SUMMER, CHRIS SCHLICHTING’S LOVE THINGS premiered in the Southern Theater and Walker Art Center’s 2008 Momentum, a showcase for emerging choreographers. love things was subsequently chosen for this year’s SCUBA, a dance exchange program in which audiences see works from other cities. This means Schlichting’s work will appear in Seattle in late May and in San Francisco in June; but our chance is…

BACK IN 2006, I WAS ASSIGNED SEVERAL ARTICLES on what we thought was a soon-to-open exhibition, Eduardo Kac’s Natural History of the Enigma: we were eagerly awaiting his unveiling of a new form of bio-art. Kac is a Chicago-based “bio-artist” known for his provocative and controversial fusions of biotechnology, art, and genetics. The two-part exhibition was to include both a transgenic petunia — meaning…