August 11, 2023
Essay by Meghan Considine Eugène Atget’s documentary photographs, mostly taken in Paris during the early 1920s, offer haunting, uncanny city scenes bereft of human actors. Often beginning his work before dawn, Atget would carry a bulky (and increasingly obsolescent) bellows camera while strolling the streets, endeavoring to capture a city on the brink of…
March 17, 2023
It’s a freezing cold day in December when I meet photographers Tom Arndt and Michael Dvorak at their shared studio space in downtown Minneapolis. Tom and Michael make coffee for all three of us, trading jokes as they move around the studio. Coffee in hand, Tom and I sit to chat while Michael…
July 27, 2022
Weisman Art Museum (WAM) is pleased to present Piotr Szyhalski: We Are Working All the Time!, on view August 20 — December 29, 2022. This major survey exhibition, curated by WAM Senior Curator Diane Mullin, features works in a variety of media across three decades of Szyhalski’s prolific and pioneering practice, including poster design,…
June 2, 2022
The Weisman Art Museum is pleased to present two new exhibitions opening in June: Capturing Change: The Urban Images of Berenice Abbott and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, opening June 3 in the Edith Carlson Gallery; and Bimiwetigweyaa — Tcubúhatceh (The Sound the River Makes Flowing Along / The Ripple and Roar of a Flowing Stream),…
March 21, 2022
Have you ever imagined what it would be like to be able to touch the art at a museum? Conservators and preparators get to do just this as they delicately move, care for, and arrange the pieces in the museum’s collection. The WAM Collective spoke to Reggie Spanier, Preparator at WAM, about what it’s…
October 7, 2021
New York City’s American Museum of Natural History is the stuff of wonders. Filled wall to wall with countless dioramas, statues, and artifacts that are sure to jog the imagination, it is no wonder that the museum attracts five million visitors a year. The vast majority of those visitors pass through the building’s Central…
November 25, 2020
At an accessions meeting at Weisman Art Museum (WAM) in December 2019, committee members voted to bring Cara Romero’s TV Indians into the permanent collection. With funds gifted by Russell Cowles, WAM purchased Romero’s striking photograph from the Bockley Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), where the work was on view for her solo exhibition, Jackrabbit &…
November 24, 2020
Upon entering Vesna Kittelson’s North Loop Minneapolis studio, you notice that her space is populated with the faces of Young Americans. The painted portraits, slightly larger than life, are unfettered by frames and hung directly on the wall, most of them at eye level or just above. You can’t help but meet their gazes;…
May 6, 2020
Real Colorful Creatures I’m reminded of the crisp new pages of my inexperienced youth, quickly turned into crumpled corners, faded lines, ripped edges. I’m reminded of the boundless possibilities that arise from a single plot. A plot that has a rise and a fall, with an ending that comes too soon. I’m reminded of Where…
May 6, 2020
Around Here “Time? What is time? We don’t have that around here,” she says. But how then, I thought, can I compare yourself to me? No number to make us seem similar, no skin wrinkle, hair color, or light amid your eyes. The balance of unbalanced strings lapping against bright plywood, yellow coated and a…