The University of St. Thomas O'Shaughnessy Educational Center Gallery

A Season of Joy:
The Nativity in Global Perspective

This week, I decided to get in the spirit of the season and go to the gallery located at St. Thomas O'Shaughnessy Educational Center.
The exhibition on display is "A Season of Joy" The Nativity in Global Perspective." This exhibition features Christmas card designs by Timothy Trent Blade, in the woodcut and linocut styles, and countless créches from the Westminster Collection.
These are nativity scenes from around the world, made from every type of material imaginable.
Every set has a unique style of handcrafted artistry. The most wonderful part was how every different scene depicted the characters in the ethnicity of the people who created it.
Every different set was influenced by the culture, and often these cultures shined through in the details of the nativity scene.
A scene from Bolivia featured wise men riding llamas, and a scene from Haiti was set in front of a wood hut with a thatched roof. Some were minuscule, and others quite large. A nativity from Peru was made of a large piece of intricately embroidered cloth. One of the most astounding ones was from Cameroon, and was not like a traditional nativity scene, but rather a single large piece of hand-carved ebony in the shape of the Madonna holding her baby.
Many places around the world were represented, including India, Kenya, the Czech Republic, Germany, Peru, Haiti, El Salvador, Panama, Thailand, Columbia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and many others.
A vast array of materials were used, including straw, wool, hand carved wood, bent or hammered mental, clay, fabric, and more.
They were all very beautiful in their own way, and it was fantastic to see how every culture expresses the nativity scene differently.

Happy Holidays!

The Walker Art Center

As no foray into the art scene of the Twin Cities would be complete without a visit to the Walker, we did just that this week.

The Walker Art Center is heralded as the leading place for modern art in the Twin Cities, and ranks quite highly internationally as well.

The Walker has an endless amount of exhibitions and collections, so we're going to concentrate on a few, and you'll have to go explore the rest on your own!

One of the current exhibitions that has been generating a lot of interest lately is Benches & Binoculars. This exhibition centers around a different way of experiencing art. Rather than the traditional gallery setting, the galley of Benches & Binoculars is comprised of two main walls, that go up very high, and that are filled with paintings. All kinds and sizes of painting are jammed in, covering the walls, some huge and some tiny, some abstract and some landscapes. The effect is very powerful, as it is hard to take in such a riot of visual stimulation. In the center area of the gallery are benches positioned to look at the walls of art, with binoculars attached for everyone to use. It is a novel way of looking at art, as you can explore the detail of minuscule paintings located high up on the walls by viewing through the binoculars. The effect can be overwhelming at times, but I also felt that one could gain a new sense of paintings by seeing them in context among so many disparate types. I thought it was fascinating - even after spending a long time in the gallery, I was still coming upon pieces that I hadn't noticed previously.

Moving on to the gallery next to Benches & Binoculars, we came upon the exhibition Elemental, a study in Minimalism of art. From the information in the gallery, I learned that minimalism "sought to eliminate traditional notions of originality and create an abstract vision....minimalism centers on elemental forms...of paramount importance were the psychological impact of scale, materials, symmetry, repetition, and placement."
The Minimalist exhibition had some boxes and cubes of different colors and slightly reflective material, a large panel of evenly shredded canvas, and simple squares of thick wire mounted in the corners of the gallery. The artist Andre is quoted saying that "art excludes the unnecessary" in reference to Minimalism, but it honestly wasn't for me. I think it is a form that is very limiting, and in taking art down to the "bare essentials," one can end up losing many different forms of creativity and beauty. Essentially, I found it to be cold and flat, but you may have a different opinion.

A large exhibition found in the gallery tower is Event Horizon, taking up three connected gallery spaces. Event Horizon is a multi-disciplinary exhibition, featuring paintings, sculpture, video, photography, and performance. The result is fantastically eclectic. Basically, Event Horizon is said to feature "postwar art in the context of the events that produced them." It is a very broad theme that seems to be focused more on inclusion than exclusion. There is an immense amount of pieces featured in this exhibition, so we'll go over some highlights.
White Field is a piece by Günther Uecker. It consists of a large square piece of wood, into which are hammered countless nails, covering the surface and evenly spaced. The whole piece is painted white. The nails are not hammered straight down, but rather are angled and pitched in waves, curves, hills and valleys. It gives a sense of making something from hard and cold materials into something soft and organic. I really liked that sense.
Untitled by Raymond Hains is a very interesting piece, and part of a larger ouvre of Hains' method. He was known for going out on the streets of Paris and collecting old propaganda and advertising posters, pasted on walls and weathered by the city. His piece on display here is comprised of rusted metal panels that were salvaged from the streets of Paris, and covered with torn posters. I found the weathered look to be beautiful, and interesting in how different materials have different patterns of weathering. I also really liked the philosphy of Hains regarding his work, "as if in collaboration with the countless people from a vast array of backgrounds who had pasted, touched, or torn at the posters on the street."
Empty Room is a fun little gem by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. It is located underneath a short set of steps between galleries 2 and 3, and depicts a scene as if people working on painting and construction had left on a break and everything around them was frozen in time. The artists recreated countless items from polyurethane and paint, and created a vignette of paint brushes, buckets, cassette tapes, VHS tapes, boards, boxes, and vending coffee cups. The result is a lifelike snapshot of a place and time and situation. The artists created this piece around the French concept of "Trompe L'oeil," to decieve the eye.
In the final gallery was a piece by Olafur Eliasson, Konvex/Konkav (Convex/Concave). It consisted of a circular mirror surface, below which was a pneumatic pump system in a clear box, so all the workings of it can be seen. The system emits loud hisses and noises of pumping air, and the whole pump works to change the surface of the mirror. The circular mirror surface is large, and with the aid of the pump, slowly changes its curvature from convex to concave and back. Standing in front of the mirror, it had a disconcerting effect of you and your surroundings rushing towards the mirror, or shrinking away from it. It is a very involved way of impacting your viewpoints.

Many flights up in the Medtronic Gallery is the exhibit Haegue Yang" Integrity of the Insider. The center piece is an abstract installation work, made up of partitions of venetian blinds, heaters, fans, moving spotlights, and a drum kit. The effect is somewhat interesting and has some intriguing visual imagery, but I didn't appreciate it like I have other pieces of installation and conceptual art. In a large way, it feels overly pedantic and pretentious, as if so much effort went into concieving of an incredibly complex abstract idea that it is hard to translate or communicate to anyone else. Reading interviews with the artist compounds this feeling - if one puts so much effort into creating complex ideas around which to fashion their art, it becomes impossible to understand without an explanation, and farther away from the grasp of any but the artist.

The Walker has many other interesting things. In between the galleries of Benches & Binoculars and Elemental is Dolphin Oracle II, an interactive computer dolphin that generated a fair amount of press when it first came to the Walker a number of years ago, so I couldn't help but stop and converse with it for a bit, before relinquishing the keyboard to some children who were much more enthused than I. The Sculpture Garden has always been a favorite, and though the weather outside was frightful, I popped over there and explored for a little while. One of my favorite areas in the Sculpture Garden has many stone benches arranged in a square, with quotes about elements of life carved into the stone.

The Sculpture Garden is always fun, and as my friend Dan used to say, "the best free date in the cities!" A good tip to remember.

Dashing through the snow,
Catherine

The Goldstein Museum of Design

This week, we kept it on the right side of the river and explored a galley on the Saint Paul campus of University of Minnesota, the Goldstein Museum of Design.

The exhibition currently showing at the Goldstein is "Good Design: Stories From Herman Miller". Herman Miller is a renowned furniture company, specializing in ergonomic office furniture with style! Herman Miller was home to some of the greatest furniture designers of the 20th century.

One of Herman Miller's most prominent designers was the design team of Charles and Ray Eames. (I learned that Ray was a woman, and that they were married.) Their modern designs featured clean, smooth lines, minimal mass, and molded construction. One of their pieces that I really liked was a chair and footstool set of bent or molded wood. They also used their bent wood techniques to create splints for injured soldiers during WWII.

George Nelson was Herman Miller's Director of Design for a long time, in addition to being a top designer. One of the examples of his design was the Marshmallow Sofa, a sofa with a simple metal frame and a multitude of small circular cushions for the back and seat areas. Another example that I really liked was a modern design Roll top Desk. It was flat and slightly slanted down, with a wooden roll top that rolled 3 inches over the work area, with the idea being that work could be preserved just as it had been left, but the desk had a clean and tidy feeling with the rollers up. It also had a section for hanging files located at the far back of the desk, with the idea that there they could be out of the sight line, but easily accessible. I thought the desk, and the philosophy behind it, embodied a wonderful combination of functionality and incorporated design.

Herman Miller has an overall message of fantastic stylish modern design incorporated with human need. They place themselves as the source of authentic modern design, and make it clear that such design is relevant, stylish, cutting-edge, and hip as it was 50 years ago. Their ideas about "Good Design" circulate around meshing human needs and human tenancies (mental and physiological) into every step of the design process, from conception to packaging. A number of displays showed examples of this. One showcased how they repackaged individually sold chairs for a retail environment, reaching out to people outside of the office world who were not familiar with the brand. Another showed their efforts to change the public perception of their modern design furniture from something that is to be displayed rather than used, to pieces that incorporate fully into the everyday lives of hip young adults today. Yet another instance of their "Good Design" centered around "Place Expectations," how the ambiance of a room or building or surroundings can greatly influence one's emotions, behaviors, and actions, and how Herman Miller takes consideration of problems of place into their deliberations with architects, designers, and customers.

Some parts of the exhibition were great. One area showed an office setup from the 50s or 60s, and the considerations that went into its creation, and then showed a modern office setup, with the same information. It was interesting to compare the two, and also really fun to see retro office equipment. Another area focused on the design steps for current office chairs - complete with the chairs to sit in and test drive! I thought it was wonderful to have the ideas and science and information, and then to see and feel how it worked personally. Another section was about the creation of office spaces, especially the cubicle. Herman Miller basically invented the cubicle, which I did not know. It showed the psychological and productive considerations that went into designing such spaces for office workers. "A person in a totally open office plan tends to feel unprotected and insecure. Total enclosure, though, makes it hard to communicate and participate. One wall provides some psychological comfort; a second wall begins to offer some privacy. Three walls with a widened opening were recommended as the best solution, providing good definitions of territory, acceptable privacy, and constant access to and involvement in collective activity."

As for the exhibit itself, I thought it contained a lot of pieces, examples, information, and interaction, and that it did a good job at covering many decades of design. However, there was an overpowering sense of everything being too cramped together, that they tried to fit too much into the space. Some of the information and displays were hard to read because there wasn't enough space to comfortably stand in front of them. One section of displays ran facing the back wall of the space, with only about two feet of space to walk past and read it! At times the layout was just uncomfortable, as so much is crammed in to every part of a small space that it is hard to take it all in in a meaningful way. Somewhat ironic, considering Herman Miller's dedication to space ambiance.