Top: Our cat Beauey with a print typical of my tastes. Above: The print that gives me collecting cred: Red Grooms’s 1981 “Mid-Rats.”
Imagine having a yard full of creeping Charlie and inviting Gertrude Jekyll over for a garden party. That’s what it feels like to have the dealers from the annual Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair to my house for dinner.
Someone always hosts the dinner one evening during the fair, which runs this weekend, September 20 and 21, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The meal—this year, fish cakes and mashed potatoes—is a Midwestern sort of thing that dealers say sets our event apart from other national print fairs.
What to expect at this year’s fair (from the top): Markus Linnenbrink’s abstractions from Jim Stroud’s Center Street Studio; Katherine Bowling’s “Snowman VII” from Oehme Graphics; Josh Dorman’s “Shipwreck” from RYAN LEE.
The debonair German-born dealer Armin Kunz of C. G. Boerner handles Old Master prints with the frequency that you or I handle Kleenex. This year he is bringing works by Rembrandt, Dürer, and Whistler. Susan Oehme, whose specialty is watercolor monotypes, is showing a survey from her print studio in Steamboat Springs, Colo., including new riverscapes by Nancy Friese. Jeffrey Lee is treating us to the doughnut-obsessed Scott Teplin and quirky Josh Dorman.
For French prints there is lanky Bernard Derroitte of Armstrong Fine Art, who was born in Belgium, lives in Chicago, and is married to a gastroenterologist. Master printer Jim Stroud is bringing a landscape woodcut so new that he’s printing it this week before driving here from Massachusetts.
The art that the 12 dealers will see on my walls reflects the most pedestrian subjects imaginable. At last year’s fair, while MIA curator Rachel McGarry took home a highly wrought print by the contemporary German artist Anton Würth, I bought a 4×6-inch image of rabbits printed in red ink, my favorite color.
(For the MIA’s permanent collection, the Department of Prints and Drawings acquired the coveted series “Creation of the World,” engraved in 1589 after the virtuosic designs of Hendrick Goltzius.)
Personally I tend toward pictures of dead birds, living birds, and flowers. Looking around, I also have prints of birds’ nests, cats, fish, ducks, a monkey, and two kids playing with a kite. My bathroom has a framed eagle that is actually a child’s puzzle. My dining room has a 1961 lithograph of a rock by Minnesota artist Adolf Dehn titled Big Rock.
The only print these dealers will think even slightly interesting is a 1981 Red Grooms lithograph of a rodent sniffing cheese on a mousetrap, called Mid-Rats (for midnight rations). I bought it because it was printed at Vermillion Editions, here in Minneapolis, and I came across a Chicago dealer who was practically giving it away. It hangs in my kitchen.
Every artwork will be scrutinized as if my house were a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The dealers will be too polite to comment on my colloquial taste or my compromises—the WPA-era serigraph with a corner torn off, the cyclamen woodcut with faded colors, the 17th-century Stefano Della Bella cartouche of ducks and hunting dogs with a little wormhole that I bought at an earlier fair.
Three of Hendrick Goltzius’s Mannerist marvels, engraved by Jan Muller, which the MIA acquired from Armin Kunz at last year’s fair.
Because I’m feeding them, they’re also not going to comment on my framing: I like to put my prints in old frames I pick up at garage sales, and it’s rarely a perfect fit.
I’m hoping the tarragon wild rice–stuffed mushrooms will be a distraction. All I really want to find out, as I hand my guests another can of Surly beer, is whether they know who is selling birds and flowers at this year’s fair.
Twelve dealers show their wares at the Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair on Saturday and Sunday, September 20-21, on the second floor of the MIA’s Target Wing, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Free admission. For an early look, reserve tickets for the benefit preview on September 19 by calling 612.870.3000.