BURNAWAY Magazine presents Road Trip, a four-part summer photo series covering critics Lilly Lampe’s and Alex Robins’s path as they make a circuitous journey from Atlanta to Brooklyn.
Our first stop was Minneapolis for our annual trip to the Walker Art Center. It’s the standard by which we judge all other regional art museums. The Walker hosts a fabulous sculpture garden….
which has a courtyard with 28 Jenny Holzer benches…
and of course, the iconic Claes Oldenberg Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985-1988).
One of the exhibitions on view was Mexican conceptualist Abraham Cruzvillegas’s The Autoconstrucción Suites, a multi-part installation using improvised construction techniques and culturally-referential materials to create objects rife with meaning.
These weren’t the only large wooden constructions we’d see that day! Our next stop was the Soap Factory, an artist-founded gallery dedicated to the work of emerging artists.
The exhibition on view was Resonating Bodies, curated by Shannon Stratton, founder of Three Walls in Chicago.
While we were there we ran into artist Sarah Black, who was working on a sound piece for the show.
She recorded visitors to the gallery singing a folk song. The recordings would then be played in rounds the final week of the exhibition. Guess who got roped into participating?
Alex and I are both laughably terrible singers, but Sarah assured us that she anticipates the end result will be somewhat discordant. We heard a preview and it sounds rather endearingly like an invisible amateur choir. In some ways, it’s the inverse of Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet which we saw at PS1 last year but would encounter again in a few weeks (but that’s getting ahead of ourselves).
After the Soap Factory we grabbed a quick banh mi and headed to the Guthrie Theater for a performance of Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park. The Guthrie lays claim to the best view of Minneapolis, which can be enjoyed without a ticket purchase.
Next stop: Chicago!
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