“The mailman has never harmed me or teased me or done anything to give me a reason to hurt him… Still, when I see him I want to rip out his throat. It’s the darndest thing.” -I Am Paul’s Dog SOME STORIES TAKE ON A LIFE OF THEIR OWN. Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children falls into this category. In fact, the current co-production by Workhouse Theatre and Hardcover Theater, which adapts three tales from the…

I GREW UP WITH THE PAINTINGS OF HOLLIS MACDONALD. Their soothing pastels and occasionally speckled, masonry-like surfaces contain sculptural and mysteriously theatrical landscapes. Some of his geometries evoke the grandeur of the Great Pyramid; others feel more like a heap of mute signs. I also grew up wearing his stern, bearded, balding, and moustachioed visage on a grey silk-screened sweatshirt…

 YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW WHAT PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY “JAZZ.” Since its inception, jazz has been bursting with paradox: you can find virtuosic players in dive bars, the racially marginalized become art idols, high-brow bourgeois society types mingle with bohemian artists. And the music itself couples highly disciplined structures of theory with the expectation that those rules will be transcended…

So this was London at last, and nothing gave me more pleasure than strolling around my new possession all day. London seemed like a house with five-thousand rooms, all different; the trick was to work out how they connected, and how to walk through all of them. BEFORE WE GET TO THE MAIN ATTRACTION, LET’S PEER BEHIND A FEW CLOSED DOORS for a moment. It’s only befitting for a piece like this that I…

GIVEN THE LOCAL ART-HYPE surrounding the Walker Art Center’s Elizabeth Peyton exhibition, Melba Price couldn’t have picked a worse time to show off her new body of work. Like Peyton, Price paints relatively small portraits of hipsters using a slightly washed out yet luminous color palette. However, Price, a relatively unknown artist, chooses anonymous subjects; while Peyton, known nationally as the…

IT’S BEEN LESS THAN THREE YEARS since the National Building Museum in Washington, D. C. opened its eco-exhibition, The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design. And already the seeds of both environmental activism and our collective inaction have borne new fruit. Eco-awareness came to unprecedented mainstream attention with the sleeper hit documentary, An Inconvenient Truth…

REBECCA MCDONALD HAS PHOTOGRAPHED KRS-ONE, MOS DEF, DJ Spinderella, Grandmaster Flash, Too $hort, Pharrell Williams, Method Man, Kurtis Blow, and Afrika Bambaataa—but her greatest regret involves, of all people, Celine Dion. “When I was given photo access to a Celine Dion show,” says McDonald, “I couldn’t pass it up. I mean, it’s Celine Dion! She’s a diva. But then I got to Target Center, and my camera was dead. I…

Detail from Sonja Peterson’s “Nothing more than a guided dream,” graphite, charcoal, gouache on paper, 2008 (in progress). “LINE AND LABOR,” AS A COLLEAGUE OF MINE SUGGESTED, would have been a more appropriate title for the current exhibition of “expanded drawings” in the MAEP Gallery at the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. Each of the four artists—Nick Conbere, Michelle Johnson, Jack Pavlik, and Sonja…

THE HISTORY OF MINNESOTA DANCE THEATRE IS RIFE with drama, from choreographic triumphs and larger-than-life personalities to firings, mergers, demise, and resurrection. We also know this: One afternoon in 1989, the building manager at the Hennepin Center for the Arts grew alarmed when people from the offices of Northwest Ballet (that’s what MDT and Pacific Northwest Ballet were called after their…