• Green Day refuses to sell its new album at Wal-Mart, because the retailer asked for a family-friendly version. "They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there," says frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. "We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something."
• Ten Philadelphia recycling trucks have been wrapped with graphics inspired by the textile collection at The Design Center at Philadelphia University to launch the city's new single-stream recycling program.
• David Lynch's Interview Project launches June 1: "A 20,000-mile road trip over 70 days across and back the United States. The team found people driving along the roads, going into bars... The people told their stories."
• Vessel for Safekeeping (Survivalism), by New York-based artist Susan Graham, includes "a hand-sculpted and hand-glazed porcelain lacy box containing miniature scissors and a credit card. The box is glazed a smoky white, and the scissors and credit card have pewter and blue glazes."
• Pompeii graffiti: "Celadus, heartthrob of the girls." "Atimetus got me pregnant."
• Photos that changed the world.
Ritz Theater, Minneapolis
26 bands, 3 days, 20 bucks
Featuring:
Gay Witch Abortion
Vampire Hands
Knife World
Skoal Kodiak
White Map
Tender Meat
and others
A beautiful moment of quiet activism in the program for yesterday's wedding between my friends Penelope Freeh and Jack Dant:
As we symbolize and affirm our commitment to each other through this marriage ceremony we wish to recognize our family and friends among us who, due to their love for another of the same gender, are not afforded this right. We feel that love is love and no law should dictate the terms. We stand for their right to join together as we are doing today.
• Having just seen Zack Bent's scouting-inspired mixed-media exhibition in Seattle, I'm floored that Regina Hackett can't move past her fixation with the evils of the Boy Scouts to actually examine Bent's art; while her critiques of the Boy Scouts are fair (if over-emphasized), she ignores some of the most poetic pieces (I'll be interviewing Bent next week). A counterpoint: "How different is teaching children to learn the positive lessons embedded in the loaded framework of scouting from teaching them to function in American society (which is, well, fundamentally war-mongering, greedy, and all the rest)?"
• San Francisco's Asian Art Museum has a new blog.
• The Walker's been on a "photo-acquiring mini-spree," reports Tyler Green, picking up works by Andreas Gursky, Tetsumi Kudo, Ana Mendieta and others.
• Oddly, a credit reform bill that passed the House and Senate includes a provision to allow concealed handguns in national parks, but it also includes a requirement for setting the fine print in credit communiques in 12 point or larger type.
• EMI won't release Danger Mouse's new CD for fear of copyright litigation, so the artist is releasing 5,000 disks independently: each edition of Dark Night of the Soul is hand-numbered and includes a book featuring David Lynch's photos. "The kicker: The enclosed CD is blank. DM fans are encouraged to populate it with the missing tracks 'by whatever means.'" The album is streaming here.
• Call for entries: Minneapolis' Soap Factory is looking for submissions for the annual 10-Second Film Festival. (I always wanted to do a 10-second film of me trying on a wallet: "Does this make my ass look big?") Check out past entries.
• Alphabeth, an animation of Dia's press releases, by Dorit Magreiter. Via FAD.
• A birthday mashup of Malcolm X speeches, by Davey D.
• How the soldier in the pink boxers got on the front page of the New York Times.
Illuminating Thorp: New media art outfit Northern Lights (led by curator Steve Dietz) offers a range of projects, including Friday-night projection performances by Minneapolis Art on Wheels members, plus a presentation by Andrea Steudel of her Mobile Shadow Projections on the exterior of the Thorp Building.
Who Made Who: The tiny Northeast design studio -- showing limited edition silkscreens, prints and original art by owner Amy Jo, Dale "TOOTH" Flattum, and Lonny Unitus -- is open all weekend, but get there before 7:00 tonight for their $5 poster sale.
Broken Crow/Overunder Mural: Just across the street, see Minneapolis-based Broken Crow and guest artist OverUnder (Erik Burke) as they install what might, unofficially at least, be the country's largest stencil-based mural on the exterior of Shuga Records (formerly MCP). The wall's primed and the stencils are going up (the porcupine is nearly done). They'll be taking a break to put in three hours at the Walker Art Center Teen Art Council's "Don't Sleep On It" 24-hour art marathon.
Lordy, Lordy: Maybe it was the flask of whisky we were passing, but in past years, biking between orthodox churches that are showing Byzantine icons was truly remarkable. Check out the iconography demonstrations at St. Mary's Orthodox Cathedral. To get your church on a bit more: Chillon Leach in the Casket Arts Building is having a sale on hand-painted liturgical stoles.
AAW@331: Live free music by Skoal Kodiak, Daughters of the Sun, The Roe Family Singers, Lookbook, All the Pretty Horses and others, Friday and Saturday night at 331, 13th and University. Via L'etoile.
Minneapolis-based writer, artist and man about town Andy Sturdevant of South 12th graciously offers his expert picks for Art-a-Whirl 2009.
Creative Electric was a beloved Northeast studio that brought in both talented locals (Chris Larson) and oddball national artists (Negativland) until it closed up shop a few years. However, its owners miraculously came into possession of some prime Mississippi riverfront and an honest-to-god houseboat last year, so they have made great use of both by retrofitting the vessel with wall-size mirrors and a bevy of film projectors, turning it into a floating cinematic funhouse for guests to interact with. White hazmat suits will apparently be provided. Oh, yeah – there’ll be bands playing on floating pontoons on the goddamned river, too. Anchors aweigh! 
Three artists (at least two of whom moonlight as arts writers) will be launching a new conceptual and small work-focused space they’re calling Sellout this weekend in the Northrup King Building. Ruben Nusz, Scott Stulen and John Fleischer will be showing new mixed-media work, and they also promises to have a well-stocked, carefully curated flat file of affordably-priced new work by your favorite local emerging and mid-career artists available for sale.
Fox Tax is a uniquely Minneapolis institution that nicely reconciles our city’s bottomless love of the arts with our profound appreciation for order and responsibility: an accounting firm that deals solely with artists and creatives, with a gallery inside (full disclosure: yes, they do my taxes). For Art-A-Whirl, their house curator Emma Berg has brought together five artists who primarily work as painters, including Tynan Kerr, whose impromptu installations can often be found on telephone poles and empty buildings around town, and Alex Kuno, whose fantastical oil paintings of childhood narratives strikes the right notes of whimsy and dread. 
The teens at the Walker Arts Center’s Teen Arts Council have commandeered a section of the California Building, and with the help of some local luminaries like Hardland/Heartland, Burlesque Design, Andy Ducett and John Grider, turned it into a 24-hour interactive artmaking marathon, with each group of artists working in three-hour sections. This promises to be an exciting mashup of Warhol’s Factory, Village of the Damned, Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party and the films of John Hughes, which is almost the greatest thing I can think of. 
Gastro Non Grata is an ongoing quarterly event that has collaboratively paired the two drunkest types of people you know -- musicians and professional cooks -- with exciting results. They’ll be camping out at the Modern Café on 13th Avenue, which is quickly becoming one of the most interesting stretches of road in the city. A pig will be roasted, baklava will be served, several bands will play all day on Sunday, and Minneapolis’ most beloved podcast, Flak Radio, will be kicking things off at 11am. Two Brothers Beer will provide the drinks.
• Audio: Marcel Duchamp explains the readymade (via PS1's ArtonAir.org).
• Filmmaker Kim Longinotto on why she chooses the subjects for her films: "The people who have a lot of power and influence are usually not as interesting as the people that don't."
• Former Walker curator, Laundromat Project backer and Creative Capitol grant guru Kemi Ilesanmi is guest-blogging this week at Art:21.
• Adrian Piper has been collecting and bottling her hair and fingernail clippings since 1985. The work will be complete when the ashes from her eventual cremation fill the final bottle.
• Architect David Burney says if Bush was the MBA president, Obama is the design president: Obama "possesses a genuine understanding of design and open source thinking. He is a gifted communicator who aligns perfectly the form/media of his messages with the content he’s delivering. His principles, words and actions are in sync."
• Eugenio Merino is back with PRETTY MURAKAMI, a sculptural caricature of the famed Japanese artist in a Julia Roberts Pretty Woman get-up.
• Mp3s of 1980s performances by artist Mike Kelley with Sonic Youth and others.
• Found art: "Signaltheorist took a long exposure photo of a Roomba vacuuming his room in the dark." Via @plntprpgnda
In a world exclusive we’re happy to reveal the first full look at LANCE ARMSTRONG’s newly completed Supertouch-curated TREK art bikes designed for his run in the upcoming GIRO D’ITALIA by artists SHEPARD FAIREY and KENNY SCHARF.Scharf's design above; Fairey's below (click to enlarge).
On April 25th, 2009, Jordan Seiler and PublicAdCampaign.com organized a massive takeover of these [unregistered, illegal] billboards called NYSAT (New York Street Advertising Takeover): 126 billboards throughout the city were white washed by dozens of volunteers. Then, over 80 artists transformed the advertising space into their personal pieces of art. Here's what I made.
• Issue 56 of Visionaire, the editioned art and fashion publication, is "solar": it "uses photo-sensitive printing wizardry that instantly transforms black-and-white artwork—by contributing artists that include Yoko Ono, M/M Paris, Alex Katz, John Baldessari, and Ryan McGinley—into vibrant color when exposed to direct sunlight.""Usually, one does not feel any real emotions in front of something really scandalous: the Crucifixion.
"If Jesus had been sentenced today, he would have to reckon with the electric chair or other barbaric methods of execution. Scandalous is therefore not Jesus in the electric chair, but the indifference to his crucifixion."
