The first literary artist to appear in the series, Paul Beatty is a New York-based writer hailed as the "premier bard of hip hop." His two books of poetry and debut novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996) draw from popular culture references ranging from hip-hop and jazz to comic books, kung-fu films, and basketball obsessions. The San Francisco Review says, "Beatty's syncopative, intravenous linguistic groove is a deceptive foil to his crisp sociological cynicism and nonstop nihilism . . . he lets the hot air out of any self-aggrandizing movement, personage, belief, institution, or sect . . ." In its volatile mixture of pathos and humor, Beatty's work has been compared to the biting prose of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut as he takes us for a fast ride through America's cultural mosaic.

Click here to listen to audio clips of the artist.

Wing Young Huie THE BRAID FACTORY, 1998: LAKE STREET PROJECT, 1996-1999 Courtesy the Artist

Minneapolis-based photographer Wing Young Huie uses his camera to document and analyze the changing urban landscape of the American city. For this exhibition, Huie presents his Lake Street Project, 1996-1999, the results of a three-year analysis of a single street in Minneapolis. Like the Frogtown neighborhood in St. Paul (the subject of his 1996 photographic project), the six-mile-long stretch of Lake Street encompasses a dizzying mixture of diverse socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural realities. As the world has become increasingly globalized, so has Minneapolis; Lake Street has become home to immigrant communities of Hmong, Cambodian, Somali, and Ethiopian peoples existing alongside more established Latino, African-American, Native-American, and European-American communities. Always humanist in his approach and sensibility, Huie's documents without distancing, analyzes without attacking, leaving enough analytical flexibility in his images for their meanings to remain open to interpretation.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Beatty lives and works in New York. He received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in psychology from Boston University. He is the author of two critically acclaimed collections of poetry, Big Bank Take Little Bank (1991) and Joker, Joker, Deuce (1994), and the novel The White Boy Shuffle (1996), published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc. He is currently completing his second novel.

Huie lives and works in Minneapolis and graduated with a B.A. in journalism from the University of Minnesota. His work has most recently been exhibited in Unfinished History at the Walker Art Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in fall 1998 and winter 1999. His book Frogtown: Photographs and Conversations in an Urban Neighborhood (1996) was published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.

MAY RELATED EVENTS

TEEN SPOKEN-WORD PERFORMANCE: FACT/FICTION
SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1 PM FREE
GALLERY 7
Come join us for the spoken-word performance Fact/Fiction, the result of a 10-week teen workshop held in conjunction with the Walker exhibitions Dialogues: Paul Beatty/Wing Young Huie and Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson. Led by Minneapolis-based spoken-word artist e.g. bailey, teens learned the dynamics of creative writing and spoken-word performance, and attended a two-day session with nationally known writer and Root Wy'man Theatre Company founding member Sharon Bridgforth.

MARCH RELATED EVENTS

OPENING-DAY PERFORMANCE AND GALLERY TALK
SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 3 PM
GALLERY 7
Paul Beatty presents a short spoken-word performance before joining Wing Young Huie in a dialogue about their work, moderated by exhibition curator Douglas Fogle. A reception follows.