I went to the Minnesota State Fair yesterday. As you may have heard, our crop art has been getting more and more popular. Last year we waited about 20 minutes before the building opened to get inside. This year, news had spread that the waits even before were an hour, and through the day they were worse.
As expected, there's a high percentage of imagery related to ICE, immigration, and Metro Surge. Many of the pieces can be seen in this PDF posted on cropart.com or in this wonderful BlueSky thread (with alt tags, and it also gives background on crop art generally).
Unlike some other years, I didn't take many general Fair photos that are worth sharing: just ones from Crop Art, Creative Activities, and the Art Show. So I thought I would do two posts: today is resistance day, and tomorrow will cover everything else.
As always, click on any image to see it larger.
First, the Guernica crop art by Jennifer Nelson that has gotten a lot of attention:
This is a beautiful piece with many details to appreciate, but the one I had completely missed before was the use of wild rice on the loon's wings:
(If you haven't already heard, the markings in the triangular word balloons coming out of Alex Pretti and Renee Good's mouths are their last words rendered in Morse code.)
Other Metro Surge crop art that I hadn't seen talked about online before going to the Fair much or at all:
Just beautiful craft on this one. The green peas (?) around the edge just an extra special touch.
These three were together, very high on the wall.
This George Morrison-like piece is made out of pieces of birch bark.
There were so many creative ways of covering up the "F" in FUCK ICE. (Crop art has only one rule: it has to be family-friendly.) This one says "Free to be nice."
Resistance images in the Art Show have gotten less coverage than the crop art. The ones that have are the grid of STOP ICE stop sign photos and a dramatic black and white tear gas photo. Both are great, but here are a couple that are less in your face.
Faye Passow is a well-known Minnesota lithographer. Her small print, Worry and Wonder, captures the feeling of the time.
The sculpture It was Time to Blow the Whistles by Barbara Bridges serves as a memorial.
The Creative Activities building had its share of Metro Surge as well:
A weaving of the Burlesque of North of America screen print that was everywhere. (For those not from here, their screen print is based on the Minneapolis snow emergency signs.)
Knitting and crocheting, and other craft work by many people, all on surge themes.
Doll clothes of the resistance, ICE, and Greg Bovino's Nazi coat.
Each year, Creative Activities invites themed one-panel "quilts on a stick." This year the theme was "250 years," for obvious reasons.
Many of the ones submitted didn't turn out as the planning committee might have anticipated:
Yes, that is a dumpster fire on the right.
And then there are all of the versions of bathrobe woman, Sam Stroozas, a Minnesota Public Radio producer photographed in her green bathrobe in February as she filmed ICE crashing and then chasing a man in Saint Paul. She was in all three areas.
She appears in crop art:
Ceramics:
Painting:
Crochet:
And I hear she was knitted, but I didn't see that one.
No comments:
Post a Comment