planting the Foraging Circle at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

…has continued gradually in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (commissioned by the Walker Art Center) over this week that started with snow and sleet and is ending with sunny summer weather – and though the wild plants, trees and shrubs (like asparagus, apple, mint, strawberry, rhubarb…) are little and struggling to occupy our mound of fertile soil, I’ve found that a few strategically placed – locally gathered – rocks, logs, branches, and leaves can suddenly evoke a landscape without anything even growing yet.

Visits to the nine most promising front lawn locations around the Twin Cities

…ends today with a road trip circling my hometown, visiting the nine most promising front lawns – of the almost 100 submitted with stories and photos – taking us to Apple Valley, Bloomington, Richfield, Edina, Hopkins, Saint Louis Park, Brooklyn Park, and St. Anthony…and in a few days I’ll post pictures here of the lawn where the last edition of Edible Estates will be planted – then many more pictures to come as the story of the first season of growth is presented at the Walker Art Center from Aug 8 – Nov 24.

breakfast with Michael at Birchwood

…one of my favorite local food places in Minneapolis-St. Paul, bringing my writer friend Michael Pollan and food/garden story hero (‘Second Nature‘ was an big inspiration in my early gardening days) for a taste of the city – and an interview to be published soon – while passing through on his book tour for ‘Cooked‘ the night after his mobbed talk with 1500 in the audience.

laying of the Foraging Circle slate pavers

…in the Walker Art Center’s Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (for ‘Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City‘), where we laid the massive local slate pavers, surrounded by seating logs, surrounded by an 8′ radius of mounded fertile soil, ready to be planted with wild native foragables next week.

Sisters Camelot feeding people in the garden

…surprised us hungry bikers – on my first night in town preparing for 2013 projects at the Walker Art Center – with a delicious organic meal prepared and served from their tricked out bus/kitchen parked in a beautiful wild community garden (with bees and and rain garden) occupying a previously vacant lot just south of downtown, stop #4 of the Common Room’s “Tour of Urban Monuments to Agriculture & Seminar in a Food Justice“ bike tour lead by Valentine Cadieux – which had us meeting up at the Soap Factory and making our way around town at dusk passing by the Mill City Complex, the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, the Minneapolis Farmers Market, and arriving at the Soo Line Garden most delightfully on the Midtown Greenway - an old rail line now a beautiful partially-submerged straight green super-freeway for traffic-free movement across the city on bike, foot, skate. (Sisters’ Camelot website)

Back in 1997, the founder of Sisters’ Camelot, Jeff Borowiak, needed a name for his project, and his partner was reading The Mists of Avalon, the 1979 novel by Marion Zimmer inspired by the land of Camelot and Arthurian myths. The plot focuses on Morgaine (often called Morgan Le Fay in other works), who is portrayed as a woman fighting for her matriarchal Celtic culture in a country where patriarchal Christianity threatens to destroy the Druidic way of life.  The book also describes the lives of Gwennhwyfar, Viviane, Morgause, and other women who are often marginalized in other Arthurian retellings.  King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are supporting, rather than main, characters.  The term “Sisters’ Camelot” refers to a land that truly belongs to these women, as opposed to the more traditional “King Arthur’s Camelot.” Today, we find it a very appropriate name for our collective as we continue to resist the dominant paradigm.  And no, we are not nuns.

Cunningham archives at the Walker

…seems tailor made for me, walking through the galleries, anticipating travel to NYC tomorrow, to see the finale New Years Eve performance of the company before it disbands. (Walker Art Center)

The extraordinary partnership between two legendary artists is the foundation for this installation of backdrops, props, and costumes created for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC). Merce Cunningham (1919–2009) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who repeatedly reshaped dance and visual art during their lengthy careers, collaborated on over 20 dance works between 1954 and 1964, a key period for both.Dance Works I features enormous curtains painted by Rauschenberg for one of Cunningham’s dance pieces that frame other rarely seen works he made for the stage, including large-scale sculptural objects that lend new perspective to his famous “combines” of the 1950s.  Over more than 60 years, Cunningham not only expanded the parameters of dance but also transformed the role of the visual arts within them. The choreographer developed relationships based on free-thinking experimentation and exchange with numerous leading artists, often bringing them into the sphere of dance for the first time. Dance Works Ishowcases one of the richest examples of this collaborative approach, inaugurating a series of exhibitions exploring Cunningham’s work with visual artists and drawing from the Walker’s 2011 acquisition of more than 150 works from the MCDC archive.

Cédric Andrieux in Jérôme Bel's 'Cédric Andrieux'

…Art Center in Minneapolis tonight is especially exciting and anticipated since it’s the first time I will see his work in person, seeming to be just missing performances of his work for years like ‘The Show Must Go On‘  and ‘Pichet Klunchun and Myself‘ whereever I go…and then the great pleasure of seeing dancer Cédric Andrieux arrive on an empty stage in warm-up clothes with a duffel bag over his shoulder to simply tell (and dance) the story of his life on stage and in the rehearsal studio felt so connected to my interest in dance – which is not about performance, but about practice, not the monumental display of perfection, but the daily ritual or repetition, of daily intentional movement towards something you will never arrive at, and then relaxing into that (like Sundown Schoolhouse movement projects like  ‘Dancing 9 to 5‘ and ‘Practicing Moving‘).

"Graphic Design: Now in Production" at the Walker Art Center

…is the impending show at the Walker Art Center which I had to read about in my London friend Alice Rawsthorn’s column in the Herald Tribune this morning, even though I am actually here in Minneapolis and visiting the museum today – though too bad I will have to wait until my next visit to see the show after it opens on October 22nd.

the central open kitchen at Minneapolis' Tao Foods

…the wood-lined, screen-doored, toybox-equiped, homey health food store and cafe dating from the early 1970′s on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis is often our place of choice for morning nephew meetings and this morning it is the divine simple vegetable rice plate made freshly in front of me in the sunny central open kitchen by nice guys in cool hats and white aprons.

Lake of the Isles

…is but one of many gorgeous urban lakes circling the city of Minneapolis – it’s greatest gift and constituting part of it’s “green necklace” of parks and parkways – where robust Minneapolitans can be found jogging, and canoeing, and swimming, and strolling, and roller-blading, and dog-walking, and even fishing and skating in the winter – but this is probably the most picturesque, and how amazing to discover an up-north-like-lake in the middle of the city.

downtown Minneapolis framed by the new and old Walker Art Center

…(the city where I grew up but never lived as an adult, though with frequent trips back I am slowly discovering what’s here) is becoming clear this afternoon as I realize that my recent regular treasured hang-outs which I would have been super delighted to find in Rome, or Los Angeles, or New York City – Yoga One (the welcoming non-corporate, non-profit community yoga center that even has plants and skylights in the studio), Ecopolitan (super raw cleansing vegan food served in the warm woody parlor of a typical old Lyndale Avenue house), Tao Foods (featuring an olden-timey screen door and bar where I hang out drinking chai with little nephews), The Wedge Community Coop, (where you go into food paralysis when you enter because you just want everything, everything, everything, and where my friend Gaby has a good story about stopping on a coast to coast road trip dying for a decent meal after so much highway junk, gathering up a cart full of favorite things like hummus and carrots, getting to the cash register only to have her credit card rejected, at which point the ‘Minnesota Nice‘ Wedge employee just pushed the bags her way, and told her to go on with her trip, but she went back to the car to make a mixed c.d. for him – which actually brought him to tears when she returned to present him with it), Yoga One (the welcoming non-corporate, non-profit community yoga center that even has plants and skylights in the studio), Ecopolitan (super raw cleansing vegan food served in the warm woody parlor of a typical old Lyndale Avenue house), Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (one of my favorite places in city for anything picnic-y, opened in 1992 and later featuring a Meg Webster sculpture that made an early impression on me, consisting of a terraced inverted garden cone full of flowering plants you could enter through cor-ten steel panels through berms of earth and lose yourself in), and The Walker Art Center (my cultural mecca where I was turned on to new art and architecture at an early age) – are all contained within a golden triangle where I would probably live most of my life were I to live here, mostly contained by Lyndale, Hennepin, and W. 22nd Street – plus since I was last here I see everyone riding around on these pretty bright lime green bikes – ‘NEAT’, as we say.

Emily Lacy performing in the Walker's glass corridor facing Hennepin Avenue

…was the happy surprise of the day – as I caught my folk-singing friend‘s last performance (involving layers of gorgeous vocals live and delayed echoing through the cold cavernous corridor of the 2005 Herzog & de Meuron designed addition, accompanied by a painted steamer trunk full of costumes such as pioneer bonnets and equipment like cassette recorders from the 1980′s) in a series of daily appearances throughout the public spaces of the museum as a part of the summer series of projects and events organized by my long-lost favorite community cultural center: L.A.’s Machine Project.

do you see the monkey?

…is one of my happiest coziest familiar feel-at-home-kind-of places in the city, which provides a warm green escape in the depths of Minnesota winter and an early glimpse of spring on a not-quite-spring May day like today. (website)

blur of bunnies running around a Minneapolis front yard

…are chasing each other around Minneapolis front yards reminding me of similar scenes from my childhood here – as I watch them publicly frolicking this afternoon, daring the earnest midwestern gardeners whose precious early spring plantings they are surely soon to decimate.

Saint Anthony Falls in downtown Minneapolis

…and spending time with family for a last day before my Italian departure in the morning.

Anywhere Anyplace Academy

…is something organized by Red76 and Sam Gould, whom I just visited on my last day in Minneapolis, at the Walker Art Center where they are staging the Anywhere Anyplace Academy for a few weeks this summer – call 1-888-339-4496 for their daily updates. (website)

Dan Graham sculpture at The Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis, established 1988

…a special place in the middle of the city that I grew up going to regularly, where I fell in love with an amazing garden installation (an inverted cone of flower plantings) by Meg Webster in the early ’90′s – is still my favorite place in Minneapolis – and on this late spring weekday afternoon there are plenty of people enjoying it as if it were their own outdoor living room and it’s making me think that all of our museums should be outdoors? (website)

About 75 years ago, the area the Garden now occupies was called the Armory Gardens, which featured a large brick National Guard building and formal gardens. The building was torn down in 1933, but the elaborate garden remained under the management of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. In the late 1960s, Interstate Highway 94 severed the connection between Loring Park and the garden, and eventually the acreage in front of the Walker Art Center became a playing field. In 1988 the Walker and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board collaborated to turn that playing field into the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. In 1992 it was expanded from 7.5 to 11 acres, making it the largest urban sculpture garden in the country at the time. There are more than 40 works on permanent view. Additional temporary installations keep the Garden experience continually fresh.

John Jasperse Company in front of floral backround with fog machine

…performed a new work, Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis last night – and I only found out about it at the last minute reading a story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune just before the show – also realizing that Kayvon Pourazar (one of the New York dancers that collaborated on the Animal Scores from the 2008 Whitney Biennial Animal Estates project) would be performing too – it was super.  (website)

Midway Contemporary Art Library in Minneapolis, Minnesota

…is worth a visit if you are in Minneapolis – and where I went today – with an extensive collection non-circulating books, periodicals, and videos open to the public, and just one part of this non-profit art center which also includes exhibitions, publications, events, and education – more information on their website…

About the Library: The Midway Contemporary Art Library serves to document, present, and preserve the recent history of contemporary visual art in a public context. Founded in 2007, its objectives are to research, collate, and catalog published material in an effort to provide the most comprehensive and accessible resource for research into contemporary art in the region. A non-circulating collection, the library contains thousands of titles from a wide range of publishers from around the world. While group exhibition catalogs and monographs form the core of the library’s collection, the library also contains reference material, a selection of artist books, DVD’s, and an extensive selection of periodicals and journals. We are currently subscribed to a number of monthly and quarterly publications.

Using the Collection: The library is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 am to 5 pm. If you wish to use the library outside of these hours, please contact us to make special arrangements. The library is maintained and run by a dedicated group of volunteers and interns who will be glad to assist you. It is a non-circulating facility; all library materials must stay in the library. The library’s holdings are organized according to two systems: Monographs are arranged by artist’s last name, and all other books are arranged by Library of Congress call numbers. You may come in and browse, or use our online search to find a specific volume.

Donate Books: We are always looking for new and exciting volumes to add to our library’s collection. We welcome book donations, but ask that you please contact us before donating books to see if they are what we currently need. We also encourage you to donate books through our amazon.com wish list.

Book Club: Midway has a book club, which meets every month to discuss fiction, art books, or anything else they choose. More about the book club…

Exchange Program: We welcome the opportunity to establish catalog exchanges with other publishing institutions. If you would like to set up a regular exchange, please contact the library. You can also see a list of institutions currently exchanging titles with Midway.

Headline from today's Star Tribune about new garden restrictions in Wayzata, MN

…a suburb of my hometown of Minneapolis, is considering an ordinance to limit vegetable, fruit, and herbs in the front yard to 10 square feet – as reported by master gardener Rhonda Fleming Hayes in the Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune – I’d love to post a list of other communities with similar restrictions – do you know of any?