Archive for the ‘Artists’ Category
Jeff Knight’s ‘Wishbones’
Stop in to the Museum in the next day or two to get one of these hand-carved, wooden wishbones created by Jeff Knight. Knight created these for PROJECT Flood Diversion, our series of interactive art works that pose questions, present ideas, and promote stronger community relationships around the topic of Red River flooding.
Knight created 150 wishbones and has been distributing them throughout the Fargo-Moorhead area, giving them to city workers and others who have fought flooding in the area over the past few years. A handful remain at our visitor’s services desk.
From the “Wishbone” custom packaging, also created by Knight:
The carved wishbone provides a challenge to the recipient while retaining its appeal as an emblematic art object. To satisfy the intent of the wishbone tradition (making a wish), one must break it, posing a dilemma that is in opposition of one’s desire to covet and protect a crafted object. Two people must engage in this activity, becoming active participants in the wishbone’s fate. I challenge those that take this wishbone to defy the social expectations and fulfill the wishbone’s destiny.
This year the people living in the Red River Valley are not distracted by the panic of preparing for an eminent flood. The flood will probably return in coming years and other natural misfortunes will occur, but this year the community has been given an opportunity to take a moment and reflect.
As the artist, I ask for your respone to the confrontation the wishbone provides. Think about community, and self, and how we interact in times of need and how we divide on issues of diversion. Maybe your wish isn’t flood related at all. Maybe you extend the wishbone as a gift for someone else to make a wish.
No matter what your wish, let us know the fate of your wishbone by sending a short response by completing and returning the enclosed card.
Fargo-Moorhead: we want to hear your flood stories
Krinke, second from left, is working with West Fargo High School students under the direction of Eric Syvertson, left.
Sandbagging lines. Rising basement water. Price gouging for drain plugs. Bailing out a worried neighbor. The horror of having a sump pump breakdown.
All of us in the Fargo-Moorhead area have these stories from the past few years of Red River Valley flooding. They are a significant part of our shared history and surround an issue that continues to push buttons to this day. They also connect us in a way unique from that of your average community, and many of these stories illustrate those connections.
These narratives are the focal point of artist Rebecca Krinke’s project Flood Stories. Krinke, who teaches landscape architecture at the University of Minnesota, is collecting these stories as part of our PROJECT Flood Diversion series, and they will be read and displayed during a walk and reception event on Saturday, April 28, at 1 p.m. The walk starts at Dike West and will make its way to the Museum.
Do you have a flood story you’d like to share? They can be any length, and feel free to include text, audio, video, or photos. You can leave them, here, in the comments, post them to our Facebook page, tag us in a tweet, or email them to Rebecca Krinke at rjkrinke@umn.edu. Then, come out for the walk on the 28th to hear the stories of others.
Andrea Stanislav and Dean Lozow’s “Reflect”
This past weekend, Andrea Stanislav and Dean Lozow presented the transactional walking performance piece Reflect throughout Fargo-Moorhead this past weekend. You’d know if you saw them: they were dressed head to toe in silver outfits covered with small mirror buttons. On Friday and Saturday, they walked through downtown Fargo, through the student unions, and in and out of bars and galleries. While walking, they distributed the buttons in exchange for a photo from the recipient and a story. In particular, they were listening to stories about the issue of flooding in the Red River Valley, taking note of the ways in which the issue has defined our community by strengthening relationships.
Andrea and Dean then took the photos they took and made new buttons, each with the face of a mirror button recipient. Then, they again walked through Fargo-Moorhead, distributing the photo buttons to create a large-scale, yet intimate, shared community portrait of Fargo-Moorhead.
You can see a video of Andrea and Dean explaining Reflect here.
Reflect is a part of PROJECT Flood Diversion, a series of art projects whose purpose is to inspire discussion and encourage contemplation on the phenomenon of flooding in the Red River Valley.
Stevie Famulari’s garden fashion
Artist and NDSU landscape architecture professor Stevie Famulari (left, with intern Courtney Valen) puts the finishing touches on a long coat with from living greenery. The coat is completely wearable, and it will continue to grow, flower, and reseed itself over the course of time. The coat is one of five pieces Famulari is creating for The Green Line Series, a collection of garments made with like materials. One is on display as of today, and the others will be added just prior to our Spring Gala on May 5. The complete collection will be on display until May 28.
Famulari and her green fashion was featured last night on WDAY; you can find that here.
“Dakota Horizons” by Jon Offutt
Yesterday, the bright morning sun was pouring through the windows by our alcove on the second floor. And it caught these works, new glass pieces by Jon Offutt, just right, filling them with light for an undeniably cool effect.
It’s perfectly fitting for these works, too. Created as a multi-work installation, an important element of this new series is Offutt’s channeling of light, transparency of atmosphere, and the creation of depth found on the distant horizon. To accomplish this effect, Offutt added layers of glass powders that are rolled on to the hot glass surface. He then added the rolling prairie as a separate component, then inflated and shaped the vessel. “This collection enables me to present the prairie landscapes on a larger scale — a scale suitable for the massive prairie landscape that surrounds us.”
The installation, entitled Dakota Horizons, will remain on display through August 19.
Lori Larusso’s ‘Pizza is a Vegetable’
Last November, Congress voted for a bill that allowed two tablespoons of processed tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable. The decision not only flew in the face of common sense, it also undermined efforts to create more nutritious school lunches, a move that could reduce childhood obesity and future healthcare costs.
Lori Larusso’s installation Pizza is a Vegetable is the newest in our ongoing Art = Food installation series comprised of site-specific works created for Cafe Muse. With her work, Larusso calls into question the various forces that contribute to a modern food culture that would allow pizza to be designated a vegetable, one that leans toward hypercapitalist interests and focuses less on our common health. Utilizing food imagery that calls to mind Michael Pollan’s concept of “pastoral fantasy,” Larusso points out the contradictions and complexities embedded in our food culture and illustrates how our expectation of fresh and healthy food is often exploited—primarily through advertising—to benefit the gargantuan food industry.
Lori Larusso currently holds the James Rosenquist Artist Residency at North Dakota State University. She was born in Massillon, Ohio, and graduated from the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and a minor in Women’s Studies. She earned an Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art’s graduate interdisciplinary program, the Mount Royal School of Art. Lori has worked in the community as an advocate and has also maintained a solid studio practice, continuing to show her artworks regionally, nationally and internationally.
Pizza is a Vegetable will hang in Cafe Muse through May.
A memorable night of misfit cups
On Friday evening, we had a capacity crowd for Michael J. Strand’s talk “The Space Between: Art and Humanity.” Despite a shortage of seating and some technical difficulties, Michael delivered a memorable talk highlighting his approach to socially engaged projects and expressing the delight in the stories and lives he has been able to share through those projects.
The evening also served as a kickoff for Michael’s newest endeavor, The Misfit Cup Liberation Project, which asked participants to bring in little-used “misfit” cups and trade them in for a cup hand-thrown by Michael, but only if participants left the cup’s story along with the cup. Everyone was intrigued and delighted by the process, and the stories provided with the cups documented a wide array of emotions, from humor to bittersweet loss.
Click the thumbnails to embiggen.
The Robert Kurkowski Ceramics Studio
We made a monumental announcement last week – a major gift and challenge grant from the Katherine Kilbourne Burgum Trust and the Burgum family that, once complete, will trigger an $800,000 matching grant from the Kresge Foundation and allow us to begin construction on the Katherine Kilbourne Burgum Center for Creativity.
But amid the hoopla and high spirits around the Museum, one person was sadly missing; Bob Kurkowski. After a long battle with cancer, Bob passed away just three days prior to the announcement. Given his dedication to arts education and the development of the arts in our community, his absence was notable. Bob was a fixture at the Creative Arts Studio at Clara Barton Elementary, a facility that set a standard for community involvement in the arts, was an inspiration to scores of students, and whose activities will move to the Center for Creativity. Bob also was co-founder of the Fargo Moorhead Visual Artists, an organization that continues to be a strong voice for area artists and for their interests.
We’ll be hosting the memorial service for Bob this afternoon at 4 p.m. and we welcome everyone touched by his legacy to join us in celebrating his life, his commitment to his craft, and his influence on our arts community.
Also, we’re pleased to announce that an anonymous donor has given $80,000 toward the $100,000 required for naming the Robert Kurkowski Ceramics Studio at the Center for Creativity. To make a contribution in honor of Bob, click over to our Razoo page here.
Rebecca Krinke maps out emotions
This evening, Rebecca Krinke will speak at Fargo City Hall as part of the Go2030 long-range planning initiative. The event will get under way at 7 p.m.
Krinke will give a talk, entitled The Emotional Landscape, on her recent work, notably the project Unseen/Seen: The Mapping of Joy and Pain. The project involved taking a large map of Minneapolis/St. Paul into public spaces and asking passersby to color in spots where they’ve felt joy and spots where they’ve felt pain. The participants (you can watch them at work in this video) worked different sides of their experiences, leveraging their spatial memories and physical history with their emotional memories and history. The resulting conversations are touching, funny, and revealing. The experience of working with The Mapping of Joy and Pain appeals to participants’ broader emotional sense (“How about that place in St. Paul where your car got stolen?”) and their love of details (“8:07, right there, which is the time that Todd proposed to me on King’s Hill.”).
Krinke teaches in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. We look forward to hearing more about The Mapping of Joy and Pain, along with her many other projects, from her this evening.
To learn more:
- Visit Rebecca Krinke’s website at rebeccakrinke.com
- Read more about The Mapping of Joy and Pain at her blog, Mapping Joy and Pain
- Watch a video of The Mapping of Joy and Pain process (YouTube)
Patrick Marold and public art
This Thursday, November 3, we’ll welcome artist Patrick Marold to the Museum for the first of three public art-related discussions happening this month. Marold will speak at 7 p.m., and his talk is free and open to the public.
Marold is a Denver native and sculptor whose work is influenced by the relationships between people and the environment:
I create sculpture to invite the viewer to realize spatial relationships and a perspective that grows and changes through my compulsive efforts to explore this world deeper. I draw from industry and our habitation creating works that continue to inform myself and those who experience them. I find that I am driven to create works that efficiently and honestly represent the relationships I am interested in. When I am working I am continually learning, and maintaining a sensitivity to that which I am responding, while communicating to others a sense of wonder and exploration (via www.patrickmarold.com).
All of Marold’s works are characterized by simple, pleasing lines and subtle concepts dependent on external phenomena, but with decidedly intentional results. This entails elegant, sweeping, suspended cables emphasizing the internal space of a building; dozens of small windmills installed into a hillside and glowing relative to the wind speed; or smooth, organic shapes influenced directly by the surrounding environment.
He will visit the Museum as a participant in the U.S. General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program. Art in Architecture commissions artists, working alongside architecture teams, to create major works of art for new federal building projects, a tradition dating back to the mid-1800s in the United States.
As the City of Fargo looks to build the arts into its ongoing 30-year plan, the interplay of government and art in our community has become an interesting talking point. To what degree should the city be involved in the creation of public art projects? What are some successes to the approach of government involvement in commissioning artists? When we welcome Marold to Plains Art Museum, we’ll also welcome the opportunity to learn more about this timely and important topic. We hope to see you at his talk on Thursday.
- Visit Patrick Marold’s website at patrickmarold.com where you can see his beautiful Windmill Project in action
- See a collaboration with Crooked Finger/Archers of Loaf member Eric Bachmann making music from trees
- Watch Marold at work on a piece entitled Intersecting Spheres
