This seems like a good opportunity to use Tumblr’s nice new photo layout. Here is the documentation for Potboiler, a one-night show I had at the Dressing Room in Minneapolis in April. Viewers were invited to take one of each of these screen-printed portraits, depicting eight artists that appeared in The Potboiler in the early 1960s, that were lined up in piles of about eighty.
There was also a document that had a guide to the artists on one side, and this essay on the other:
Between 1959 and 1967, the Kilbride-Bradley Gallery -– located in “the parking lot district” of downtown Minneapolis -– published a monthly newsletter called The Potboiler. It contained previews of upcoming exhibitions and artists’ profiles, as well as quizzes, charmingly crude photo illustrations, complaints about the Twins and the culture of early ‘60s Minnesota, and general “sex, filth, exposé, orgies and games.” Painter Robert Kilbride wrote most of it.
I came across The Potboiler on the recommendation of ARP! editor Tiff Hockin while researching Minneapolis art history (either for a piece I was working on for them, or for fun –- I don’t remember exactly). The full run is hidden away in the periodical stacks on the fourth floor of the Minneapolis Central Library, available for browsing to anyone who cares to do so. Spending a little time with the newsletter, I instantly felt a kinship with its creators. It felt like the work of colleagues, of peers, of people whose sensibilities I understood. I thought I recognized a specifically Minneapolitan quality to the writing and the humor – a certain wry, deadpan urbanity that’s hard to put your finger on, but that you know right away when you come across it.
One aspect of the newsletter I loved in particular was the halftone artists’ portraits accompanying the exhibition previews. I scanned as many as I could from The Potboiler’s full run –- about 30 portraits in all. These images seem like perfect expressions of what it meant to be an artist in the Upper Midwest in the early 1960s. Or look like one, perhaps. There’s the novelty of the affectations, of course — the pipes, the plastic framed glasses, the thoughtful poses, the corny humor. But I also love how serious and determined they all seem to be. These people are really are forerunners of the artists practicing here today, of you and me. These people built up a lively, progressive art scene when Minneapolis was still a deeply provincial outpost. Moreover, it all still seems strangely familiar somehow, like seeing an old photo of your grandparents at your age, and realizing how closely you resemble them.
Aase May is still living and working in town. Barbara Loken (née Orfield) is a potter living in Maine. William Dietrichson lives in the veterans’ retirement home in South Minneapolis and has a retrospective opening this September at the Hennepin History Museum. I’m not sure about Earl Potvin, Byron Bradley or Austen Erickson. Bob Kilbride died the year I graduated from high school; Alonzo Hauser a decade before that. George Runge has been dead for almost a half-century. But at least a few of them are still around. I wondered if I should have invited some of them to attend tonight. I wonder what they would make of the Dressing Room. I look at the list of artists that have shown at the Dressing Room in 2011 – Brennan Vance, Matt Bakkom, Jennifer Danos, Anna Tsantir, me – and I wonder if someone not yet born will wonder what we were like fifty years from now. I wonder if they will feel a kinship with us looking back on the photos on the Dressing Room’s website (however websites might be archived by the Minneapolis Central Library in fifty years – an exciting challenge for librarians not yet born).
With the assistance of printmaker Joshua Norton and Kick Stand Press in North Minneapolis, I screen-printed eight of my favorite portraits onto large sheets of newsprint. I then cut each individual portrait out of the larger sheet with a utility knife, as you might have cut a photo you liked out of an issue of The Potboiler. My hope is that you will take these ephemeral objects with you tonight, and put them in a prominent place in your studio or apartment or house. I hope it will remind you of continuity – there were artists working here long before you, and there will be long after you. Your life’s work, and the myths you have created about it (and about yourself), are part of a longer story that takes place here in Minneapolis, a longer story that you appear somewhere in the middle of. I think you can look at Earl Potvin or Aase May, as they appeared in their time, and believe that they understood that, too.
There was also a note included instructing viewers to tape or pin the portraits up their houses or studios, and then send me documentation. A few did, and the documentation is here: http://potboilermpls.tumblr.com.
Photos by David Petersen.
