The Stroll, penned and drawn by
Andy Sturdevant, is a weekly look at the art, architecture, history, and visual culture of the Twin Cities — with each article focused on one geographic area, shown in a hand-drawn map. The Stroll draws readers’ attention not only to traditional works of visual art but also to architecture, street art, historic sites, public art, advertising, artists’ projects, and events on the streets and sidewalks around town.
Besides being quiet places where you can reflect on the oldest, weightiest issues of what it means to be a human, cemeteries also provide a direct and immediate link to the past.
The ads are so good the tourism bureau in Colorado, one state over, rolled out a series of ads this year that looked to me like complete knockoffs.
Other than a generalized good-naturedly smart-ass quality, there’s no unifying aesthetic to the store’s signs.
Where there is regional flavoring, it tends to be of the North Woods high kitsch variety, which makes for a somewhat jarring visual experience.
Anne Meyer and Domonique Venzant are rehabbing a Depression-era dairy barn into a community art and ceramics center.
You can find everything from original paintings and photographs to prints, drawings, murals and sculptures that run the gamut from tacky to irreplaceable.
Kara visits 18 locations every day to collect goods for Joseph’s Coat, a free store in downtown St. Paul that serves the homeless.
For my money the most profound meeting of public space and private lives is in our cemeteries.
The statue of Ole Bull was erected in Loring Park in 1897. Bull stands atop a pedestal, playing a violin, with a little line of music carved into the granite below him.
It’s one of the few neighborhoods that completely steps off the grid and throws off the alphabetical-numerical nomenclature of the rest of Minneapolis.
These two visual monuments dominate interstate travel through Minneapolis, and to me, have always seemed oddly of a piece.
The artists I met in Philadelphia had very different relationships with space from their colleagues in this part of the country.
As craft and folk traditions become less a part of everyday life, a class of devoted, rigorous artists have stepped up to preserve them.
Let it never be said that I am not a temperamentally populist admirer of all forms of creative activity.
There are not a lot of storefront spaces in town at this moment, which is a real shame, and what makes Suzy’s vision for the gallery so important.
On a summer evening right before a game, the area outside Target Field is a lively, exciting place to be. That is, within certain parameters.
West Seventh: It’s a road where much of the city’s sense of fame, influence, memory, power and history resides.
Here is a sampling of the folders in just a single row: cotton, country stores, cowboys, cowgirls, crate labels, Crete, Cretan antiquities, cricket, crime and criminals, Croatia, and cross-dressing.
We’ve seen everything from broken hearts to Emma Goldman to vacant storefronts on East Lake.
Old buildings, traditions, languages, artistic works and cultures are constantly in a state of flux, negotiating between the past and present.