Monday, August 25, 2008

Viva Scott Seekins

Black and white bumpersticker on a black car. It says START SEEING followed by a drawing of a bespectacled man with a funny hairdo
While at the Farmers' Market yesterday, I was amused by this bumpersticker I saw in the parking lot. Does everyone in the Twin Cities know about Scott Seekins?

I guess I should fill in those of you who are not from around here.

Scott Seekins in his black suit, with wavy hair dangling over his headband and dark, round horn-rimmed glasses
Scott Seekins (above) is an artist who is best known for wearing the same two suits all the time -- a white one in the summer and a black one in the winter. His hair is always done up as shown here (with a white headband to go with the white suit, of course). He's been doing this for about 30 years.

He has turned his very existence into a work of performance art, and many people who don't know him are quite fond of him (such as Alex Starace, writing on the Twin Cities Daily Planet). As Starace says:

He is Waldo in Minneapolis’s metaphorical game of Where’s Waldo -- he’s in the scenes we all walk through. And so when we find him, we find ourselves: a person, living, strange, full of yearnings and ideas, heavily influenced by pop culture, and surprisingly private (he has no Web site or blog and the jocularity in his paintings hold the viewer at arm’s length). He is, then, no different from the rest of us, except in that he’s devoted a good portion of his life to showing us as much.
I get a warm feeling, just knowing that Scott Seekins exists. Not totally sure why. But he's one of the things I like best about Minneapolis.

1 comment:

Femanon said...

The worst part about people posting these bumper stickers is that none of them manage to get the fine print in focus. I've discerned from other photos that at the end of it there is a ".org" so I can only assume that it is a link to purchase more.