Courtesy of Wing Young Huie and Public Art St. Paul

As I drove down University to catch one of the nightly screenings of photographs from Wing Young Huie's massive new public art installation, "The University Avenue Project," I didn't need to check the address to know I was approaching the Project(ion) Site. I could see Huie's flickering images, projected on a tall tower of stacked shipping containers, from nearly a mile away. 

In the Midway neighborhood, situated directly across from a big-box retail strip dominated by Wal-Mart, Cub and Borders stores, the Project(ion) Site, conceived by Steve Dietz of Northern Lights and designed by Meyer, Scherer and Rockcastle Ltd., is a community hub for the project.

The site, a vacant lot flanked by LEGO-like stacks of cargo containers, is industrial and no-nonsense, as is fitting for the area. And daily through October, the location will be home to public, twilight slide shows of Huie's distinctive photographs, projected onto the 40-foot screen at the center. In addition to the nightly slide show, visitors can come by the Project(ion) Site for regularly scheduled events, including "Wednesdays With Wing" community dialogue series and monthly cabarets with live performance by area musicians.

Courtesy of Wing Young Huie and Public Art St. Paul

"The University Avenue Project," like Huie's public art installation on Lake Street in 2000, is sprawling and ambitious. In the fall of 2007, Public Art St. Paul received a grant from the Joyce Foundation with which to commission a publicly displayed installation of Huie's photography documenting the diverse neighborhoods, businesses, and residents of University Avenue. According to the introductory essay in the project's companion book, such an endeavor documenting the neighborhood was deemed all the more important now, given the impending transformation of the avenue when the new light rail line comes in along the Cities' Central Corridor.

The "University Avenue Project" features about 450 photographs — a mix of black-and-white and color shots, some large-format, others quite small — which have been placed along a six-mile stretch of the urban thoroughfare, from the Capitol to the border between the Twin Cities (roughly near KSTP studios).

A handful of the photographs are candid, but many are carefully staged; all of them bear the distinctive mark of Huie's knack for capturing telling human details, his gift for composition.

The most striking of Huie's new portraits are those that feature a wide sampling of the avenue's residents holding chalkboards. Before he photographed them, he asked his subjects to answer a series of questions:

 What are you? How do you think others see you? What don't they see? What advice would you give a stranger? What is your favorite word? Describe an incident that changed you. How has race affected you?

Courtesy of Wing Young Huie and Public Art St. Paul

The answers to Huie's questions are written in each subject's own hand on a small chalkboard, which is held in front of them as they gaze, forthrightly, into the camera. And their responses, taken together, are revelatory — as diverse as the variety of populations who make University Avenue their home. These portraits, annotated by the subjects themselves, collectively tease a coherent, personal narrative from the woolly hodgepodge of mom-and-pop stores, derelict buildings, industrial and retail centers, up-and-coming condominiums, and close-knit neighborhoods that lie in this part of the city.

Tonight, with newly named Guggenheim fellow, artist Monica Haller, Wing Young Huie will discuss art-making as a collaborative process. This free event will take place at Open Book in Minneapolis, at 7:30 p.m. today.

The "University Avenue Project" will continue through October. There are slide show screenings nightly (weather permitting) at the Project(ion) Site; "Wednesdays With Wing" discussions occur each Wednesday at 8 p.m. The May Cabaret is scheduled for Saturday, May 29, and performances will begin at 7 p.m. See the full line-up of events associated with the project on the University Avenue Project website.