“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” IN OCTOBER, 2011 I WILL COMPLETE AN 18-MONTH COLLABORATIVE public art project — an ambitious, some might say crazy…

WHEN BAIN BOEHLKE WAS A YOUNG ACTOR, he was sure that he was going to have a chance to play Hamlet. He was blond, after all, and felt an affinity for the role; it was a part he felt he was meant to perform. He had a copy of the play with him when he was in Berlin, serving in the army from 1959-1961. He was in Germany when the Berlin wall went up. “The challenge of being an actor,” Boehlke says, “is that the…

EVEN THOUGH I’VE PRETTY CONSISTENTLY GOTTEN MY WORK, and fairly odd work it is, into the Minnesota State Fair over the last ten years, I was still a bit surprised to get the email inviting me to jury the photography “class” for this year’s Fine Arts exhibition. Readers of my reports on Art Basel Miami are well aware of my take-no-prisoners, paranoiac critical methods  — not the sort of acumen typically…

IT’S OVER. IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE MORE THAN 650,000 PEOPLE who experienced Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this summer, then you know the feeling of emerging, in a sort of delicious delirium, from the haunting, revelatory, exhilarating, fantastical show of fashion, performance art, and fetish objects by the late hero-artist Alexander McQueen. And if you weren’t, there are…

OUR NEW MINNESOTA POET LAUREATE, JOYCE SUTPHEN, was born and grew up on a working farm near St. Joseph in Stearns County. This rural background is something she shares with our first Laureate, Robert Bly. She is the eldest child in a large, talented, close-knit family. Sutphen’s latest book, First Words (Red Dragonfly Press, 2010) describes her family’s farm and her early years; it reads like a memoir in…

LUCAS RAYALA IS NOT A FILM GEEK, PER SE. By his own admission he’s more of an overall projects guy with a proclivity for seemingly impossible tasks, and someone who isn’t afraid to take on a little risk. After reading a 2009 roundtable in McSweeney’s San Francisco Panorama newspaper about the state of movie distribution, the Northern Wisconsin native  had what he calls “an a-ha moment” regarding the…

FROM A FEW BLOCKS AWAY, IT’S THUMPING BASS. Closer, you get unintelligible calls and the occasional flash of white tennies in the air. From a block away, you see shoes and crotches at strange angles, as if the stage were some new state fair ride. And you see how the action on stage sets everything in motion around it — the pigeon-breasted man crossing the street, even the windblown garbage. It’s hot, hot…

SO, WHAT EXACTLY IS ZONE 5? Those of us whose professional work and/or extracurricular proclivities lie at the intersections of art and architecture have been asking that very question, ever since something called The Department of Public Design (DoPD) began issuing missives on a project website and blog about its inaugural exhibition, Interim Report on the Excavation of Zone 5. Back in May, the DoPD…

THANKS TO MRS. FIELD, A GREAT TEACHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE at Normandale Community College, I spent my twenties reading most of the American canon — F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Mark Twain. Mrs. Field, being the solid sage she was, advised me to read slowly and without interpretation, to fall into each story as if I were talking with a friend. She wasn’t at all…