I've been negotiating with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for quite some time, trying to get them to add some of my work to their collection. My curriculum vitae is fairly impressive, if I do say so myself, and I'm not sure why they've been dragging their feet.
- When I was five I grew a picture of a clown with a conical hat and sent it in to Highlights Magazine. Month after month, when the new issue arrived, I would turn immediately to the page with the crossword puzzle, the cryptogram, and the drawings, hoping to see my work in print at last. After a few months of such anticipation, invariably followed by ill-concealed disappointment, my mom, a talented painter in oils herself, felt it best to interject a bit of friendly criticism: "Well, it wasn't one of your better drawings."
- In third grade, a drawing of mine—a full-color rendering Crayola of a flying egret—was included in a exhibition held in the basement of a deconsecrated church in White Bear Lake, several miles from the town where I grew up. One dark night after supper my dad drove me around the lake to see it. Meh. For some reason I felt rather more embarrassed than proud to see my "work" exhibited in the midst of so many more vivid and arresting pieces.
- Yet I did somehow develop a reputation as an artist, at least to the extent that I was recruited, along with a friend of mine, to make the plaster statues for a high school production of Antigone. You can see the results here. (It's clear that at this stage in my career, I hadn't shaken Rodin's influence entirely.)
- After performing dismally on a pre-entry math test at the University of Minnesota—our small-town high school didn't offer anything remotely resembling calculus—I dropped that subject and became a studio arts major. I must confess that I wasn't seriously considering art as a career, but you never know, and the designation made it much easier to enroll in art classes. Which I did. Tom Egerman was the most memorable of the professors I "studied" with. His work was fresh, loose, and often funny, and so was he.
After years spent in aesthetic oblivion, my career got a reboot at the art shows we used to hold after hours at the Bookmen, a warehouse where I worked for quite a few years. I organized one or two of the shows myself. There were lots of talented individuals on the staff, keeping body and soul together while they waited for their big break. We had everything on display from Gothic chainmail to farm aprons to installation art. At one of the shows I entered a couple of hand-made album covers.
When the warehouse operation folded, I applied for all sorts of jobs, in the classic bohemian style, but before long I became involved in editing and designing books. As I honed my "style" in a serious way, I began to contemplate the next big step: the state fair art show. Trouble was, this thought would occur to me only when I was AT the state fair art show. Always too late.
So you can imagine how pleased I was when I got an email from the MIA soliciting my work for its "Foot in the Door" show. I hope you realize I wasn't the ONLY one to receive such an invitation; anyone who sends in a piece will be accepted, as long as the artwork is one foot square. And you might complain that I didn't give my entry as much thought as I should have, considering how long I'd been waiting: I sent in the screen-saver from my computer monitor. But what's done is done, and I've learned over the years that the first impulse is often the best one.
The MIA holds a foot-in-the-door event every five years, and I've been to most of them as an appreciative art-lover on the lookout for people I know, both in the crowd and up on the wall. The new digital event doesn't have the same buzz, but it does have its advantages. For one thing, you can see the art better, because each piece is right in front of you rather than ten feet above your head. Also, presuming you have a nice 30-inch screen like mine, the pieces have that wonderful digital luminescence that enhances many, if not all, works of art. On the other hand, the webpage loads only twenty or thirty pieces at a time, and when you ask it to load more, it just slips a few more rows onto the bottom of the array. And once you click on a work to examine it more closely, it seems to disappear from the array entirely.
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