“Collaboration, solidarity, and supporting one another are important values, especially today in these times of uncertainty.” Visual Arts Curator Pavel Pyś introduces “Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s,” the newest volume in the Walker’s ongoing Living Collections Catalogue, which examines artists whose works were “highly collaborative, interdisciplinary, and often aligned with concurrent social movements.” He highlights a chapter by Ross Elfline that looks at a moment in 1971 when Viennese architecture collective Haus-Rucker-Co visited the Walker to create an edible scale model of Minneapolis, entitled Food City I, on land that now is home to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.
The metaphor of the table evokes images of folks coming together to break bread or discuss personal and political issues. For Seitu Jones and Theaster Gates, the table is more than a metaphor; it’s a medium. In the Twin Cities, their tables are provoking dialogue about systemic reform, in local foodways and cultural institutions. Can these conversations effect change? Or is the change the conversation itself?
Gardening Between Hope and Doom: Fritz Haeg on Edible Estates
Confronting a symbol of the American Dream, Fritz Haeg will visit Minnesota in May to plant a garden in an unlikely place. Situated between “simultaneous, equally valid points of doom and hope,” his Edible Estates will turn a suburban front lawn into a vegetable garden. His aim: to explore the “fantastic notion of what the city I want to live in looks like.”
