Arts & Culture

The Duluth Art Institute is turning up everywhere these days.

Do the leaves remember those from last year?In the heat of summer, the bright green shimmers of forever.Then the fall.The bitter cold.They show their true colors, these elders.They remind us of the passage into the next life.The commonest of them persistAnd they speak to me.They tell me I am one of them.

Bea Ojakangas' mother always said you could never go wrong ordering soup.

A little snow on the ground: not enough to play in but too much to ignore.

So we turn inward, perhaps, to books.

Friday (October 23) is the MCBA Prize Reveal and a Live Artist Talk at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, which you can attend in your sweats and with a snack, if you wish.

And if that whets your appetite, you can find out about their extensive offering of virtual workshops on their website.

Here's a much-needed silver lining in our new and challenging times: Dr. Linda LeGarde Grover says 112 people joined her for the Department of American Indian Studies' first Zoom presentation; many more, she says, than would ever have been able to attend in person.

Jeff Kalstrom's E.is the A. A.is the W. opened at The Nordic Center last week ...  you can visit it in person as long as you observe the customary keeping-each-other-safe protocols, or enjoy it virtually.

  I was almost to my hotel and a man was kneeling on the sidewalk pulling a trumpet out of its case. I was well past him and was about to cross the street when he started to play.  Jazz? Blues?

Author Peter Geye talks about his most recent novel, Northernmost, the challenges of writing about Scandinavians ("I'm drawn to characters who live quiet, introspective lives), the surprising ease of creating authentic voices for characters from the 1890s ("Go to Ingebretson's Market on Lake Street before Christmas and look at how the husbands and wives talk to each other") and the unexpected bonus - in the form of another new novel - born of a little more time at home.

When the subject of globalization comes up, it's frequently in the context of markets or economies, which can sometime be a little ... impenetrable to the average person.

But when you talk with Dr. David Syring, an anthropologist here at UMD, he's alight with excitement to talk about his discipline ("Anthopology brings the consciousness that there are many ways to be human in the world") and way the indigenous Saraguro people of southern Ecuador, for instance, respond to the idea of globalization through storytelling and art.

It's common knowledge that Louisa May Alcott's tale of a family's home life during the Civil War, Little Women, was loosely based on her own growing-up.

But thank heavens clever scholars followed up on the real-life counterparts of the book's heroines, because Abigail May Alcott Nieriker ("Amy" is an anagram of "May;" get it?) really did go to Paris and made a moderate success of herself as an artist and writer.

Local art come sroaring back this week with some live and virtual exhibitions:

First up, Jonathan Thunder and Robb Quisling open Aqua Vitae, Thursday October 8 at the Kruk Gallery on the UWS campus

KUMD's Chris Harwood talks with musician, songwriter, and producer BrownMark about his memoir, My Life in the Purple Kingdom, published 2020 by University of Minnesota Press.  Within a couple months in the summer of 1981, he went from being Mark Brown, a nineteen year-old 7-Eleven employee struggling to broaden the sound of his Minneapolis band Fantasy, to becoming BrownMark, playing bass with Prince and The Revolution in Los Angeles as the opening act for The Rolling Stones.

If you think a CSA box of vegetables is fun, imagine a box of art every few months!

For the first time in five years, Springboard for the Arts has brought back their CSA "Comfort, Care and Craft" art boxes, and they go out beginning this winter.

Which means they're in the "request for proposals" stage, looking for artists/creators.  You can get all the information here.

  You told me you didn’t feel you contributed anything to anyone anymore. My father, your brother, died when I was four years old. I have maybe three or four actual memories of him and some memories that are from stories someone else told me and I took them as my own memories. I didn’t get to see his smile except in old photographs. I didn’t get to hear his voice and I never had the chance to hear the advice he would have passed to me from his parents when he thought I needed to hear those things.