Foot in the Door

I was talking to my son today and he was suggesting that I do something new.

He asked, “Do you like stained glass?”

I told him that I paint to do something new. I said, “I started doing it to be creative with something I don’t have to be good at.” He laughed liked crazy.

“I like that,” he said. He went back to laughing about it several times in the next few minutes. I eventually laughed too, saying, “I never thought of it as funny.”

The front page photo of the Weekend Life section of my daily paper had approximately 152 of the 5000 pieces of art that were just submitted for an exhibit of work by Minnesota artists – “no matter how famous, no matter how obscure.” The once-every-ten-year event is called “Foot in the Door.” This one is “Foot in the Door4.”

Chris Atkins, coordinator of the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Minnesota Artist Exhibition Program, said this about the art that hangs in floor-to-ceiling salon style:

“If you can imagine seeing a crowd and seeing every voice in the crowd – it’s kind of like that. You have all these things swirling around, but you can see the voices. And you can go up to each one and look at them with their different accents or their different languages or their different dialects. It gets you from all sides – it’s a pretty amazing experience."

Now, I can’t tell you exactly why I love that quote so much, and if you love it, you might not know why either, and shoot, most of the time, I can’t tell you why I love a piece of art for that matter. But I do love the quote, and the photos of the art, and the whole thought of all the voices getting a chance to be seen and heard and the way the whole thing shouts.

There are so many ways to have a conversation.

Check it out. artsmia.org, then hit the “more” button and the “artworks” tile on the next page.

Quote from St. Paul Pioneer Press, “Look, Ma, I’m in the MIA!” Amy Carlson Gustafson, p. 5, 2-19-10.