The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

This is a drawing of a root pulled from the ground. Unsigned but every bit the signature of its creator, it was done in oil crayon by an artist who was once my closest friend. A reckless vitality courses all along its length. The energy tensed in it reminds me of these lines by Dylan Thomas:
     "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

On a blustery Saturday night in January, one of the year’s most anticipated gallery shows opened in New York City. As winds off the Hudson River barreled eastward down the charmless streets of Chelsea, the haute monde of Manhattan and the wider world streamed in from the west, down to Gagosian, at the very end of Twenty-Fourth Street. They came to see Niagara, the new series of photographs by Alec Soth, who lives in Minneapolis and works in a studio just over the border in St. Paul.

Minnesota boasts no defining fine artist, no painter of universal renown. Alexis Fournier, Seth Eastman, Nicholas Brewer, Wanda Gag, Dewey Albinson, George Morrison—any of these names may ring a distant bell. But Minnesotans have no Albert Bierstadt or Winslow Homer, no Grant Wood, Georgia O’Keefe or Frederic Remington to lionize. The central Minnesota town of Aitkin, however, has made a bid to raise the profile of its most famous son, Francis Lee Jaques.

In America today, Jesus is pop culture’s King of Kings, a force in politics, film, music, and books. In the world of contemporary art, though, his presence is less established. While modern curators always seems to make room for dung-smeared Madonnas and crucifixes in urine, where are the works of genuine, unironic reverence? Not in Manhattan’s most influential galleries. Not in Artforum.

“A photo is all I have left of her,” Chris Lang, the boyfriend of murdered college student Dru Sjodin, told a Judiciary Policy and Finance Committee at the Minnesota House of Representatives. His testimony culminated with a heated statement about Level Three sex offenders: “They’re not like normal people. I think they’re wired wrong. They’re like animals. They need to be treated like animals, and animals are kept in cages.” The committee, including freshman legislator Cy Thao, remained impassive.

Fucci is the nom de plume of Peter Bue, whose signature paintings can be found inside and outside stores, coffee haunts, and restaurants all over the Twin Cities, with the highest count in Uptown and Lyn-Lake. That painting of Pee-Wee on his cruiser outside Penn Cycle? That’s a Fucci. Woody Allen moping on the side of Specs, the glasses shop at 22nd and Hennepin? Fucci. The party scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s on Via’s Vintage Wear?

Thirty-three years ago, Richard Lack started his atelier for classical realism. The modernists laughed, groaned, and went back to their wine. Decades later, the arts movement that found a happy home in Minneapolis may be the most exciting thing happening in the nation.