Birdhouses from 2010. Photo Milestones Photography

The Museum’s signature ArtView program features local and regional artists in our second floor atrium galleries. ArtView is supported in part by The FUNd at Plains Art Museum.

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AOP was juried by Hesse McGraw, curator for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Neb. He is the former assistant director of Max Protetch gallery in New York City and former senior editor of Review, a Kansas City-based visual culture magazine. He was the founding director and curator of Paragraph, a contemporary art gallery operating under the non-profit Urban Culture Project in downtown Kansas City, Mo. He has curated exhibitions for FLEX Self Storage (Topeka, Kan.), The New Genres Festival (Tulsa), The Stray Show (Chicago), Guild and Greyshkul (NYC), -scopeMiami, RARE (NYC), Rocket gallery (London) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis).

Exhibition sponsored in part by Bremer Bank.

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Right now, in the recesses of your cupboard, resides a cup. This cup has been long forgotten and left to sit idle for too long. Why is it still in your cupboard?

With the “Missfit” Cup Liberation Project, artist Michael J. Strand has asked participant to bring their favorite rejected cups to the Museum, which he will then trade for a shiny, new hand-thrown cup to replace it. Their cups will then reside alongside 99 other rejected cups as a collection of the best of the worst, a collectively curated orphanage of castoff cups.

What sort of cups? You know the ones. That cup you made in the “paint your own pottery” class, the one with a lovingly hand-painted image of Kirby Puckett commemorating the 1991 World Series. The plastic collapsible camping cup that leaks everywhere. How about that plastic cactus-shaped cup? Who actually thought that was a good idea for a margarita? No matter what, Strand will retire them in style and expose the rich narratives that go along with them.

Morea Steinhauer, 'Untitled'

Plains Art Museum, in partnership with Hospice of the Red River Valley, presents the exhibition Witness to Life: A Photo Journal of Hospice Care October 14 – February 5 in the Xcel Energy and Serkland Law Galleries. Witness to Life features the work of three photographers affiliated with the Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM) documentary photography department and was overseen by MSUM professors Wayne Gudmundson and Regene Radniecki. Photographers Chris Franz, Heidi Shaffer, and Morea Steinhauer worked with individuals enrolled in hospice care and documented their day-to-day lives. The result is a rare glimpse into an aspect of life often hidden, one filled with a range of complex emotions. You can read more about this project by visiting horizonlines.org.

For the design ideas in Nefarious Hybrid, Miller responded to the site of the installation at Plains Art Museum (a former International Harvester showroom) by adapting images of tractor wheels and steering wheels as well as the monk thistle plant, an invasive species in North Dakota.

“I considered the complexities of food, in terms of growing, distribution, and consumption,” Miller wrote on her blog at lizmiller.com. “I thought about the history of food and how our relationship to it has changed. I considered the complexity of agriculture in relation to all aspects of food. I decided that I wanted the forms in the work to reference harmonious organic growth as well as more invasive organic growth.”

Her resulting work has transformed the Cafe into a sort of electrified jungle, a reminder that the forms of nature, and the food it provides, are a companion at each step in our lives. Come on by, have lunch, and see it for yourself.

Liz Miller teaches art at Minnesota State University-Mankato and lives in New Thunder, Minn. She is a 2011 McKnight Visual Art Fellow and has also received the Jerome Foundation Visual Art Fellowship. She has created installations for Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Franklin Artworks and museums and galleries across the U.S.

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On May 3, we got a new resident on our outdoor sculpture pad thanks to some talented artists … and a little elbow grease.

The sculpture, entitled Cultivating Truth, was designed by Concordia College student artist Kyle Meerkins and is the 2011 selection for our S.P.A.C.E. (Sculpture Pad Art Collaborative Experiment) series. Meerkins, who had help fabricating the piece from Duane and Dwight Mickelson, based the design for this sculpture on two different ideas. The black brackets on the side of the sculpture recall the design of the awning over the Museum’s entrance and acknowledge the present and future of the building. The red portion of the sculpture, an abstracted International Harvester cultivator shoe, acknowledges the past use of the Museum building and calls to mind the vital act of cultivation in both our local economy and our personal relationships.

Meerkins received his Bachelor’s in May and is preparing for a summer internship. Cultivating Truth will remain on the sculpture pad through spring. The next S.P.A.C.E. design will come to us from students at NDSU in 2012. Click here to view more images.

Dwight Mickelson (far left), Duane Mickelson (far right), Museum staff, artist Kyle Meekins (third from right), and friends helped to install the new sculpture.

The Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists (FMVA) will offer a tantalizing peek into artists’ studios throughout the FM area during the annual Studio Crawl, to be held October 1 and 2. The crawl is the ultimate way to survey the immense amount of artistic talent in the area and our preview serves as your quick reference guide, allowing you to see work by the 39 participating Crawl artists prior to the big event. For more information, visit fmva.us.

On Studio Crawl weekend stop by the Museum on Saturday, October 1 at 10 a.m. for coffee, pastries, and an informal chat with Megan Johnston, new PAM director of curatorial affairs and interpretation.

The Museum’s signature ArtView program enables local and regional artists to exhibit their work in the Museum’s perimeter galleries. ArtView is supported by a grant from The FUNd at Plains Art Museum.

Grady Carlson, Tribute to Jasper, 2010, oil, 11 x 14 in.

Birch Bark, Clay, Pixels, Paint showcases a variety of art in different media, including the first digital art in the Museum’s collection, MSUM Professor Henry Gwiazda’s video piece, Claudia & Paul, a doll’s house, consciousness. Viewers will marvel at the exquisite and innovative birch bark collage made by the father and son team, Pat and Gage Kruse of the Minnesota Mille Lacs Reservation, showing an abstract starburst design. Discover vivid still life paintings by Lorraine E. Berger, a former art teacher from this area who recently retired as Regents Professor of Art at the University of North Texas. See the inspiring ceramics of Brad Bachmeier, Ross Hilgers, and Richard Bresnahan, all noted artists and teachers from our region.

More treasures by artists from the region and nation make this exhibition a revealing showcase of the range and growth of the Museum’s collection, which now numbers over 3,500 works of art. Learn about the donors who have made possible many of these new acquistions.

Pat and Gage Kruse, My Brother’s Blanket #3, 2010, 38 x 36 in., birch-bark, red willow, deer sinew, Museum Purchase