By anyone’s measure, the inaugural Northern Spark festival last June was a wild success. From dusk to dawn, people discovered the Twin Cities in a new light while making the rounds to some 100 projects by more than 200 artists. This year’s all-nighter, on June 9, features more projects, concentrated in downtown Minneapolis for easier navigation. Here are a few happenings that piqued our interest.

With Jim Hodges’ sculptural boulders—four mammoth, 400-million-year old stones clad in shiny steel—there’s more than meets the eye. In this slideshow, Hodges shares his inspiration for the work and his thinking about scale, materiality, light, and keeping such iconic works—now a permanent part of the Walker hillside—untitled.

Can the use of realism be seen as unconventional in the context of contemporary art? This core question of Lifelike can be addressed through many of the works on view. Here, artists Ai Weiwei, Vija Celmins, Susan Collis, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Kaz Oshiro, Peter Rostovsky, Paul Sietsema, and Mungo Thomson offer a glimpse into their work process and the notion of radical realism.

One day last May, five Magnum photographers and a writer piled into an RV dubbed “Uncle Jackson” in Austin, Texas, and embarked on a nearly 2,000-mile road trip to California. Their goal: to document both the Southwest and improvise ways to work collaboratively. Here’s a first look at the result, an editioned series of artworks collectively called Postcards from America.