When Lisa Brimmer reads her poems on stage, she doesn’t just speak the words, she grooves – rhythm and meaning intertwined, delivered in apparently effortless alto cadences, punctuated by the occasional staccato of syncopated wordplay. Her spoken word performance style is already so musical, when you hear her read against the sounds created by her [...]
Since their opening just a couple of months ago, the folks at SubText bookstore in St. Paul’s Cathedral Hill neighborhood have hit the ground running, hosting a slew of events with some of the area’s most notable literary talent. Recent appearances include award-winning authors like Ed Bok Lee and Charles Baxter; fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes; [...]
By the time August rolls around, Twin Citians can pick and choose among an embarrassment of (often free) cultural riches. On any given night, there’s live music or dancing in some park or another; there are likely a few outdoor film screenings and a neighborhood festival or two as well. With so much going on, [...]
I’ve been seeing Edward Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans my whole life; we all have, I suspect. I’d be hard-pressed even to say when I first encountered them, so deeply embedded are his iconic portraits in the warp and weft of our nation’s story of itself – a grade school history text? the natural history [...]
We’ve just had one of those bittersweet, end-of-summer weekends in the Twin Cities. The seasons plainly pivoted in the last two days: not only did the air turn a little cooler, along the river I saw an early-turning tree, half ablaze with orange already, as if calling to his green-leaved fellows to get a move [...]
Five years ago today, on August 1, 2007, the 35W bridge in Minneapolis suddenly collapsed during the evening rush hour, sending everyone driving on it — all those people running end-of-day errands and singing along with the radio and thinking about what to fix for supper — plummeting into the Mississippi River below. Thirteen people were killed [...]
Toby Sisson moved from the Twin Cities to Massachusetts a few years ago, but she returned home this month, as Air Sweet Air‘s visiting artist, with a solo show of new encaustic paintings, “Into the Black,” now on view at the gallery. Encaustic, or “hot wax,” painting is a technique reaching back to antiquity – [...]
Did you happen to catch the flurry of articles in the past few weeks revisiting Richard Florida’s “creative class” theories? You may remember: Florida made his name in the early 2000s with a string of bestsellers (including “The Rise of the Creative Class,” “Cities and the Creative Class,” “The Flight of the Creative Class” and [...]
Earlier this month, I heard Diane Ragsdale speak at a Twin Cities metro-wide Arts Learning Xchange symposium for arts administrators, artists and arts advocates in Minneapolis’ scenic Nicollet Island Pavilion by the river. A writer and scholar with a background in both arts administration and funding, Ragsdale is best known for her public speaking and [...]
Reviewers just aren’t sure what to make of award-winning author Amy Leach. And she is hard to pin down; her wry, outrageously inventive nonfiction pieces have earned her comparisons with writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Thoreau. Reading her debut book, “Things That Are,” a collection of short essays on science, philosophy, cosmology [...]
