The Wake

The sleek new Regis Center for Art opened for classes in September, replacing the leaky, mouse-infested temporary building that housed the art department for the past 38 years. The new $41.5 million building, located at the southernmost tip of the West Bank, has an angular white and brick exterior and exposed concrete interior with lots of spare metal fixtures, giving it a blank-canvas look inside and out.

Along with painting, drawing, digital and printmaking studios, some of the more impressive features of the building are its foundry (a studio for casting sculpture from molten metal), 23 kilns, a woodshop, plaster shop, and a much-improved Katherine Nash Gallery. The building is split into two halves joined by a skyway that spans 21st Avenue. The west is dedicated to two-dimensional work and the east to sculpture.

I wondered how all of these amenities were helping artists create, so I snooped around the building a bit. Angela Mehr, a junior in the art department, stood mixing a small bowl of glaze at a low worktable in the ceramics studio. “The ventilation is better and there’s a lot more light in the building. It’s kind of sad that we still don’t have everything set up, but we’re slowly getting there. It’s a long process, but I think it will be worth it considering what we were in before.” She seemed to have a sentimental attachment to the old building, “I miss a lot of the cool chairs. They’re gone now and we just have these stools. It had its faults, you know, but it had its uniqueness. It was kind of all worn in. Like an old pair of jeans—it’s got holes in it. I’m sure we’ll get used to this building.”

Instructor Joyce Lyon agreed that ventilation and safety are vastly improved. There are several spray booths throughout the building that suck up the toxins when students use propellants.

Both structures are designed not only for learning and creating, but also for exhibition. The hallways and stairwells on the west side hold graduate student artwork, some two stories high, and the new Nash Gallery is currently holding a faculty show, “Art Moves,” that includes some cool moving sculptures.

The building completes the West Bank Arts Quarter, a ten-acre district that holds the theatre, dance, music and visual art departments.

Architect Garth Rockcastle, who has taught at the University of Minnesota’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for the past 25 years, designed the building, which is a gem among the depressing brick and concrete blocks that populate the rest of the West Bank. “It is widely felt that the architecture and campus spaces of the West Bank area are less humane and memorable than those of the more traditional East Bank,” Rockcastle said, “so it was important to lessen this disparity with the new art building.”

The old art building stands empty down by the river, an embodiment of that “less humane” West Bank of the past.

In 1965, the University of Minnesota purchased for one dollar a 1914 billboard factory as a temporary home for the art department. Over the years, the cramped, handicapped-inaccessible building accrued $10 million worth of code violations. Hundreds of rodents and birds will lose their homes when it is demolished this fall.

About three years ago, former governor Jesse Ventura denied funding for a new art facility. Students and faculty, inspired by College of Liberal Arts Dean Steven Rosenstone, rallied for funding and raised $15 million from the university, $18.5 million from the state, and $8 million in private donations. “The dean would start speaking and put fire into people,” said Arts Quarter Collective organizer Nikki Schultz, “He’d say, ‘We need a new facility. We need this quarter where people can come together.’ A lot of students were really responsive to the idea that, if we’re going to get a new facility, it should mean a new way of thinking.”

The Arts Quarter Collective is a group that grew out of those rallies, said Schultz. Dean Rosenstone, in his vision for the Arts Quarter, dedicated CLA funds to this group of students, who act as a catalyst for the interdisciplinary collaborations that are the goal of the Arts Quarter.

“The University of Minnesota is a research university.” Kelly O’Brien, Arts Quarter Collective coordinator said. “Why don’t people assume that that extends into the arts? Isn’t this a place where the boundaries of what the individual disciplines are should be challenged?” The Arts Quarter is a safe place for people to work across disciplines and do things that are challenging and risky. The students in the Arts Quarter Collective are a manifestation of this vision, O’Brien said.

We will be able to see just what those collaborations look like on the evening of Friday, October tenth at Scribble This!, the Arts Quarter Collective’s exhibition of music, dance, theatre and visual arts.

Artists will be performing in Rarig Center, the Barker Center for Dance, the new Regis Center for Art and along 21st Avenue. On the program is Jordan Gray, a musician and member of the band Colon Pipe Krew, who makes electronic music with Game Boys.

In a video and dance collaboration by Abinadi Meza and Emily Cox, video will be projected on the human body.

Visual artist Cheryl Wilgren Clyne will present a project examining the social and political aspects of landscape that she and another artist are completing. “We’re each doing three panels, five by five [feet], and we’re not going to look at each other’s work, so we’re both going to be really surprised at the end of it.”

“Genesis/Exodus,” a performance piece by David Hamlow and Liz Miller, will feature spaceships inspired by “Battlestar Galactica.” The ships are like big and small lanterns made from post-consumer waste — Hamlow has been saving up plastic packaging since 1991 — and will be maneuvered by dancers. The event will happen in the evening, and the ships will be lit internally by glow sticks.

Witches from the upcoming University Theatre and Dance Department’s production of MacBeth will be roaming the area, casting spells and chanting incantations at passers-by.

I am most looking forward to a piece by graduate sculpture student Allen Peterson, in which molten iron will be poured into molds shaped like giant bees. The still-glowing sculptures will be attached to long poles and handed off to dancers in protective gear who will make the bright bees fly through the night air between the art and dance buildings.

“If I had to use two words to describe the event,” organizer Nikki Schultz said, “They would be ‘sensory explosion.’”

I asked the artists and organizers what they hoped for themselves and viewers to take from the event. “To get immediate reception from people our own age who are of like mind and like experience,” Schultz said, “In addition to feeling like we’re part of a community and not just four or five or six or 30 different huge buildings. This is our way of saying, ‘I don’t care what side of the campus you’re on. Right now, you’re here. And look at all of these things that we’ve accomplished together.’”

Wilgren Clyne will be filming the event. “I’m just seeing all these amazing visuals and I’m really excited just to see that. The part that I enjoy most about art is the other people. Truly the interaction with humans is the only reason I do it, other than the voices in my head.”

“I’d like to see our sense of community expand,” Peterson said. “I’m hoping that a viewer comes out of this experience with a sense of the possibilities of what the definition of art, or dance, or music could be. I’d love to see a student viewer connect in their mind the possibilities and come back with their own projects next year. Connecting with the students who have the ideas is what I’d like to see happen.”