November 16, 2018
Last night, WAM Collective left home base at the Weisman to attend opening night of the annual MCAD art sale to purchase new pieces for HOMEWORK, the Weisman’s student-only art rental collection. The Minneapolis College of Art and Design, aka MCAD, hosts an annual art sale featuring artwork from emerging student artists and alumni from…
November 12, 2018
Using a student driven format since its inception in 2011, the WAM Collective places student voices at the center of shaping and developing programming at the Weisman Art Museum. This hands on and fast paced program gives participants the opportunity to work with professional museum staff, artists, advocates, and community members on projects that reflect…
November 7, 2018
Art is often described as having soft power, or power that persuades through appeal and attraction, “using persuasion, attraction, or agenda setting,” rather than coercion or force.* Looking at how soft power functions in broader cultural contexts such as in television and radio programming, it is clear that art possesses this same power and with…
October 17, 2018
In conjunction with I Want To Make This Perfectly Clear, the exhibition of political protest posters from the 1960s, the WAM Collective is proud to present a selection of songs arranged to accompany the exhibition. (Listen to the playlist here) Just as the posters presented are each deeply and uniquely political in their call to…
October 1, 2018
Image: by Larry Bell. One interesting thing about being an artist now is that everything is a possibility. Which means you start out of the state of total chaos, and you have to assume the responsibility for every single thing you do or do not do. – Robert Irwin, from the film Drugs and Beyond, Extension…
September 28, 2018
The Sensory Loss and Art Symposium at the Weisman Art Museum (WAM) was the end result of my summer-long residency with the Center for Applied Translational Sensory Science (CATSS) at the University of Minnesota. All summer I met with scientists studying all facets of vision and hearing loss, and learned about their individual research interests….
September 19, 2018
Are you looking for some art to liven up your dorm room? Here are some WAM Collective favorites from the Weisman’s new HOMEWORK Art Rental Collection. Bonus, you can rent for only $15 a semester! White Castle, Minneapolis Will Agar’s black-and-white photograph of a White Castle in 1983 would tie together the…
September 13, 2018
Lisa and E. Gerald O’Brien in front of Douglas Argue’s oil canvas work, Untitled, affectionately known as the “chicken painting.” Jerry O’Brien was an undergraduate art history major at the University of Michigan when he got some thrilling news from Sotheby’s in New York City. The venerable auction house had awarded him one of its…
September 12, 2018
In a self-proclaimed fast-paced world, we are asked to do exactly the opposite of contemporary demands: slow down. The language of slowing down has become somewhat of a cure-all for the malaise of a late capitalist society, sending the message of protest by adopting a slower pace of production. With all of the anti-social media…
August 13, 2018
Many of the World War I posters included in the Fight or Buy Bonds exhibit address the challenges of mobilizing the American economy to meet the needs of the war and ask the public to accept the burdens. Even though American involvement in the war was much shorter than that of the European powers, the…