IN A STATE KNOWN TO SOME AS “THE LAND OF 10,000 GRANTS,” a McKnight Fellowship is one of the most desirable honors an artist can receive. While its $25,000 stipend is nothing to sneeze at, the one-year fellowship also supports outstanding midcareer artists with public recognition and professional development opportunities, culminating in an exhibition and catalogue. Last year, the McKnight Foundation…

DEBORAH STEIN: 5‘4”. Minneapolis-based playwright. Recipient of many awards including two Jerome Fellowships and the Bush Foundation Fellowship. Self-described as collaborative theater girl, loudly thoughtful and gently opinionated. Member of the Workhaus Playwrights Collective in Minneapolis. SOLVEIG HOLUM: Called Suli. 5‘2½”.  A theater artist (performer, writer, director), based in Brooklyn, New York who has…

UTE BERTOG WAS BORN IN A SMALL TOWN IN SOUTHWEST GERMANY and resettled in the United States in 1998. Though initially trained in business and economics, this move provided her the impetus to follow a life-long dream of becoming an artist. Infused with hidden texts, her paintings present themselves as a built-up process of working and reworking as a means of muddying lines of communication between…

MAKING AN INFORMED ASSESSMENT OF TARGET FIELD is a daunting undertaking. And it’s not just because of the local hoopla surrounding the ballpark’s opening, during which it suddenly seemed, around April 1 or so, that every eye in the state of Minnesota was fixed on the place. Nor is it because of the weight of the outpouring of praise for the stadium that has been offered up by all manner of local…

NEWS TO ME: ADVENTURES OF AN ACCIDENTAL JOURNALIST IS A CAREER MEMOIR BY Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel, mostly about her life at the Duluth News Tribune. It’s an amusing and enlightening window into a beautifully drawn, very particular world. The title’s a little misleading: it’s true that Hertzel didn’t go to J-school (journalism school, in the lingo-loving jargon of newspaper staff), but…

WHILE SIFTING THROUGH WORDS TO DESCRIBE STEFAN KAC (pronounced “cats”), I opened an email from trumpeter Dan Frankowski to find that he had already done the work for me. Frankowski called Kac “an intense, brooding, mercurial, funny, and passionate composer, tuba player, and thinker.” At 27, Kac has one foot in jazz and the other in classical music. In 2005, he was accepted to the Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead…

WHEN I FIRST STARTED WRITING ABOUT DANCE, everything was new and exciting. I saw every piece as one of a kind and wrote about each one as a universe unto to itself, with its own rules. Then, after a year or so, I started figuring things out. Then, the pieces I saw were no longer entirely new, but they were still exciting because they were links in a larger chain, pieces of the little world of dance here…

1964IS AN EXHIBITION COMPOSED OF ARTWORKS from the Walker Art Center’s permanent collection that were — for the most part — created in the year 1964, and the show features many of the “big” names associated with art at the time, working in Fluxus, Minimalism, Pop, and Arte Povera. The specific chronological motif that unites these works, although easy for audiences to comprehend, makes for a complex…

DURING THE INTERMISSION OF LAST FRIDAY’S PERFORMANCE of Ten Thousand Things’ (TTT) My Fair Lady, an audience member offered up an enthusiastic endorsement of the production’s intensity and emotional power. The odd part was that, after a bit of prodding, he admitted to never having seen a TTT show before. The lack of a set, the queasy fluorescent lighting: weren’t these elements jarring? His reply was a…