Visual Arts

When my mother told me that I didn’t understand a true Minnesota winter because it had been many years before my birth that a winter had been this long, it made me feel like I was on an episode of Game of Thrones—because seriously, who talks like that?

SENA’s Quality of Life Committee is sponsoring a Utility Box Project to commission original art on up to five utility boxes in the Standish and Ericsson neighborhoods. Selected artists will be compensated $1,000 for the design and creation of this art. Utility boxes—brown or gray metal boxes belonging to the City of Minneapolis and various utilities—are located along several major streets. They are drab and often attract graffiti. The project is intended to reduce graffiti, add beauty and aesthetic appeal, and feature local artists. It is financed by money for graffiti prevention from the Neighborhood Revitalization Program.

Vesna Kittelson paints bright, bold, optimistic portraits that defy the traditional rules of portraiture, but despite the cheer in her paintings, she has insights into the dark side of human nature generally and the dark side of immigration in the United States more specifically. Her view of immigration is not only dark, though—it is also lively and cheerful, as one can see in her Young Americans series of paintings, which appropriately includes the confident faces of ethnicities from all over the world. Her work is on display at Form + Content gallery along with sculpture that, in contrast with the bright color of her images, expresses her vision of a chaotic world.

Spanish artist Felix de la Concha was in the Twin Cities recently as a guest of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at the University of Minnesota, as part of his project of interviewing and painting Holocaust survivors.