Music is at the center of WAMplified!, a new late-night series at WAM. Offered three times a year, WAMplified! presents a live performance by a band or musician with a thematic connection to the major exhibition in the galleries.

In conjunction with the WAM exhibition To Have It About You: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection, Mates of State--featuring husband-and-wife team Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner--headline the inaugural installment on December 12, 2009 (doors at 9 p.m.). Anders Ponders opens. The event also includes food, drink, a video game lounge, and a midnight tour of the exhibition led by curator Diane Mullin and artist Lisa Bradley. Tickets ($22; $18 students and Weisman members) available here or by calling 612-624-2345.

A portion of the Vogels' collection is now part of the Weisman Art Museum's permanent collection. Through a gift program designed by the National Gallery of Art, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, works by 50 different artists from the Vogels' collection found a new home at the Weisman this fall. See a slideshow and hear more about the art that came to the Weisman here.

The national gift program has distributed the Vogels' collection of contemporary art throughout the nation, with a hand-picked assortment going to a selected art institution in each of the fifty states. The Weisman was chosen as the Minnesota institution. Artists whose work came to the Weisman include Lisa Bradley, Mark Kostabi, Lucio Pozzi, Alan Shields, Edda Renouf, Richard Tuttle, and many others.

For their July event, Weisman Art Mob members were invited inside the home and immediately began to comment on its thoughtfully planned living spaces, constructed with a blend of traditional and innovative building materials. Warner is principal architect at Alchemy Architects and his house, known as the Goodrich House, was one of many custom architecture projects for the firm. Alchemy is best known for its weeHouse, a modern manufactured home that arrives on lots in prefabricated portions and is assembled in hours.

Warner and his wife Dawn De Kayser--also an architect--purchased the home despite its sagging floors, impractical room divisions, dark spaces, and an unfinished upstairs. He and Dawn wanted to create a practical and functional space for their family of four to thrive for years to come. Their strategy was to remove unnecessary walls and create room divisions through building storage elements and custom furniture. They installed skylights, translucent walls, and interior windows to keep the house naturally and efficiently illuminated, even into the twilight hours.

Outside, the Warners have created an expansive-feeling space within their standard city lot. With landscaping help from Phillips Garden, the yard is colorfully cast using a variety of materials including Ipe decking, copper, siding, rocks, and grasses. Twin garages nestled neatly near a tidy vegetable garden and connected by a weathered steel alley wall add a historical feel and lots of charm.

Warner (pictured above right), De Kayser, and Alchemy Architects operations manager Betsy Gabler carried on individual conversations with Art Mobbers throughout the night. Members left for the evening having experienced a home that is balanced between ornate and functional, sensible and lush, and traditional and modern.

The next learning adventure for Art Mob members takes place in September; a walking tour of the U of M's public art collection. Learn more about Art Mob membership and view a full calendar of events.

Thirteen crew members from both museums collaborated on the installation, conditioning the print, installing plexiglass sheets and hoisting the print on four lifts to hang it on the wall.

Thanks for making this past year remarkable through your engagement and support.

A genetically-modified petunia is the centerpiece of Eduardo Kac: Natural History of the Enigma, a new exhibition opening April 17 at the Weisman Art Museum. The exhibition runs through June 21, 2009. The public is invited to meet the artist at an opening reception from 6:00 to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, April 17 at the Weisman.

The exhibition is the result of a three-year collaboration between artist Eduardo Kac and University of Minnesota scientist Neil Olszewski. Kac and Olszewski have created and propagated a new life form—a transgenic petunia—by fusing proteins from both a plant and from Kac himself. Kac’s DNA is expressed only in the flower’s red veins. The Weisman exhibition features the transgenic plant and prints based on the seeds produced for the project.

"The result of this molecular manipulation is a bloom that creates the living image of human blood rushing through the veins of a flower," Kac said. "This piece is a reflection on the contiguity of life between different species. It uses the redness of blood and the redness of the plant's veins as a marker of our shared heritage in the wider spectrum of life."

“Eduardo Kac is a groundbreaking artist in terms of the intersections of technology and art,” said Weisman curator Diane Mullin. “His work with genetics and biological material is innovative. With this project, he worked with University faculty and scientists and so we’re especially happy to show the work at the Weisman.”

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and bio-art. His work uses biotechnology and genetics to create provocative works that both explore and critique established scientific theories. He is arguably best known for his work Alba, in which he implanted a rabbit with a GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) gene from a jellyfish. Kac is professor of art and technology studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has published and lectured worldwide about art, science, and culture. His work is represented in museum collections all over the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Holography Museum, Chicago; and the Modern Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro. In 2003 he was asked to exhibit his work at the internationally known Sao Paulo Biennial.

Neil Olszewski, professor of plant biology at the University of Minnesota, coordinated the fabrication of the transgenic plant. In doing so, he also sourced the protein that determined the public artwork’s form.

Milton Avery’s Still Life is not a window through which we look to find a perfectly realistic scene, and if it were—oh, what a Technicolor world we’d live in! Instead, Avery (1885–1965) composed Still Life with bold blocks of deeply saturated colors that flatten the picture plane, simplify forms, and ultimately create a harmonious, dynamic composition.

A contemporary of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and mentor to Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, Avery worked tirelessly to instill an appreciation of color and form in American art. As art historian Alfred Jensen noted, “Milton Avery brought color to America.” Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Avery developed a style that used broad washes of bright color. He treated each shape as a single color area, flattening and abstracting his images.

Although very similar in style to Henri Matisse—both used color to create ambiguous pictorial space—Avery was less interested in his subject matter. Instead, the subject matter was always secondary to color and form. Through his color choices, he created interplay between recognizable shapes and abstract images. This, in particular, contributed to the early ambivalence of many critics to his work. Avery worked in strict opposition to the prevailing American social realist scenes of the time. Through the promotion of his work by galleries supporting modernist ideals, Avery finally gained recognition.

—Katie Johnson

Phuong M. Do:
The self portrait work was a seven year process. While a sense of disconnect from my relatives doesn’t really go away, I have come to accept it for what it is...and that I will probably not ever feel familiar with them or they with me. Having known something about my family history—though fragmented—provides me context so that I can form own sense of self.

The "abandoned photographs" project [involving secondhand shop image collections] is an extension of the self portrait work in that the personal family photographs are lost and disconnected from their “family.�? They also provide visual snippets of narratives about peoples’ lives in a time and place that are part of the larger historical and cultural puzzle for not only Vietnamese in diasporas but for those living in Vietnam. They are also displaced by war. I haven’t had much time to work on the images but I have been thinking about ways to make the images accessible to people and perhaps become identified. I think the webspace is a great place for that but I need to conceptualize how they will be presented and if they are identified by their owners, how to integrate that into the narrative.

I brought some of my new, lacquered photographs to show at Sunday’s talk because the projected image does not really show the physical sensibility of the work. The lacquer work is more conceptual in terms of my feelings about a sense of place and space. It also integrates a process that is specific to Vietnam. Lacquer’s preservation qualities...can be likened to the photographic medium and process.

Weisman Art Museum:
Thank you, Phuong, we look forward to seeing and hearing more this Sunday at 2pm in your dialogue with Changing Identity curator Nora Taylor!

As the only artist on the museum’s inaugural blog team, I’m sure the folks at the Weisman were hoping I’d write a bit more about art. However, my allotted blog-time encompassed the ground-breaking 2008 election, the national economic melt-down, the Franken-Coleman senate recount, and the annual bitter-sweetness of the holiday season. My heart was in the street, not the studio.

What’s happening now in our country and communities is a paradigm shift of monumental proportions. This shift will bring changes and challenges that require our care and attention. No armchair quarterbacking. We’ve got to get in the game. Which underscores the premise I’d planned to make when I accepted this blogging gig last summer: that the personal is political, and that life – the personal – can be a work of art when approached with intention and creativity.

Though I am primarily an interdisciplinary and public artist, I also paint. Painting in the studio is, for me, a form of visual journaling and highly meditative. For ten years I have worked on various bodies of work but most of my paintings share one thing in common: the ongoing study of the horizon line as visual metaphor.

Night Seeds, Camille J. Gage, 2003

Readers of my earlier posts know that I lost my mother unexpectedly 27 years ago. This early loss inspired an ongoing interest in the dualities that form the core of our existence: life and death, day and night, good and evil, darkness and light. It is the tension, the shimmering place where these realities intersect, that compels me. Such sweet mystery!

The Uruguayan writer and social philosopher, Eduardo Galeano, once commented that art-making is our attempt to make sense of the inevitability of death and that its pursuit must never be reduced to a specialized practice exercised only by a handful of ‘experts.’ Like Thoreau, Galeano believed that we all have the ability – and perhaps even the responsibility – to make art of our very lives. It’s a utopian vision, but then what IS so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?

“Utopia lies at the horizon.
When I draw nearer by two steps,
it retreats two steps.
If I proceed ten steps forward, it
swiftly slips ten steps ahead.
No matter how far I go, I can never reach it.
What, then, is the purpose of utopia?
It is to cause us to advance.�?

Eduardo Galeano

Happy new year to all,
Camille