The great American bebop bassist and composer Charles Mingus observed, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that’s creativity.” What has drawn me to write about Flower Vendors, of all 100 drawings in “Marks of Genius,” is the reverence it shows for human life by capturing and honoring a particularly inconspicuous, unspectacular  ...

What do you find when you peel back a gallery wall? This was a driving question for Minnesota artist James Holmberg and he needed to find the answer. In his most recent work, featured in the MAEP exhibition “Forever,” Holmberg works with architectural structures, like those in the gallery wall, zeroing in on commonplace objects  ...

Wherever people love one another something very sad remains. —Käthe Kollwitz During the waning years of World War II, my father was taken as a prisoner of war in Germany. He was 21 years old at the time of his capture—exactly the same age as my youngest son as I write this. My father told  ...

This week I will be in New Hampshire with my family on our annual summer trip to Little Lake Sunapee, where my husband’s family has vacationed every August for more than 60 years. Time stands still at “the Villa,” the New England resort we visit. We play shuffle board and bingo, go on mountain picnics, dance  ...

“An illuminated manuscript shows an attention to detail, a genius for decoration and ‘selective realism in pictorial details.’” — Susan Jones As a contemporary artist, I often reflect on what it is about an illuminated manuscript that captures my attention. The short answer is the work’s complete fusion of idea and image. Within a format that  ...

Miley Cyrus is purposefully provocative. But you generally don’t want to punch her. Her new pet pig, on the other hand, may make you want to tear through a wall. That’s not your fault or the pig’s. That’s aesthetics and the human mind’s reaction to it. Miley may be cute. But the pig is unbelievably  ...

Miley Cyrus is purposefully provocative. But you generally don’t want to punch her. Her new pet pig, on the other hand, may make you want to tear through a wall. That’s not your fault or the pig’s. That’s aesthetics and the human mind’s reaction to it. Miley may be cute. But the pig is unbelievably  ...

An artist with Guido Reni’s ego would be horrified to learn that a mass-market lithograph had snuck into an exhibition where his rapturous Madonna and Child was also hanging. Yet there it is in Target Gallery, a yellowed print of the marauding French infantry, issued by P. F. Collier & Son, New York. If you  ...

I came home recently to find, on the rocking chair that sits by our mail box, a large envelope enclosing Master Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the gorgeous and insightful catalogue accompanying the “Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings” exhibition currently on view. The MIA’s drawing collection includes everything from “…an artist’s sketch that  ...

Later in life, Édouard Vuillard was in great demand as a portraitist among the Parisian elite. We can imagine he sketched the wonderfully ad hoc bouquet in “Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings,” now on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, in some industrialist’s luxurious villa, between sittings. Locally, the artist old Minneapolis families  ...