From MPR News, Art Hounds are members of the Minnesota arts community who look beyond their own work to highlight what’s exciting in local art. Their recommendations are lightly edited from the audio heard in the player above. 

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Art Hounds podcast series
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Space cowboys and stolen moon

Maria Ghassemlou of Minneapolis is a longtime Minnesota Fringe house manager, and that’s where she saw the play “Moonwatchers” in 2022.

The two-person show won the Best in Venue and Underdog awards that year. Now, she’s delighted to share that the show is back at Open Eye Theatre in Minneapolis. The show is created and performed by Corey Farrell and Nigel Berkeley, who attended the University of Minnesota / Guthrie Theater BFA Actor Training program together. The show opens tonight and runs through Sept 22.  

Maria says: “Moonwatchers” is a show where there's two office workers, and their job just happens to be watching the moon and making sure that things happen on time — just a normal office job — but something goes awry when somebody steals the moon. Now they have to go on an adventure to go find it.

This is a two-person show where they play multiple characters. There’s Space Cowboys, there’s aliens, cows, space Jane Austin and space grass. It’s just a lot of silly and fun.

— Maria Ghassemlou

Cloudland celebrates DIY spirit

Phil Schwarz of Minneapolis volunteers at Extreme Noise Records, and he wants people to know about Cloudland Theater, a 150-seat music venue on East Lake Street that celebrates its first anniversary this fall.

He describes Cloudland as filling a need for a small venue for DIY musicians (read: artist book gigs themselves) outside of a traditional bar setting. 

Phil says: There’s not a lot of smaller venues in town. And when venues came back [after pandemic closures], there was an explosion of new bands and stuff, and a lot of these venues were a lot harder to book shows in, so Cloudland came along at a perfect time. The shows are very intimate: you can converse with the musicians and stuff like that, and it’s very kind of communal.  

I’m super excited for Feast of Lanterns, which features Alan Sparhawk of the band Low and also Pete Biasi, who used to be in a great post-punk band from here called Signal to Trust. It’s kind of different than what Alan’s done with Low: I would say noise punk and more abrasive. They will be playing Saturday, September 21 at Cloudland.

— Phil Schwarz

Portraits of fame on display

Gabi Marmet is a senior at The Blake School in Minneapolis, where she works on the student journal, Spectrum. She had a chance to interview Blake alum Thea Traff, who has photographed portraits of President Joe Biden, the Rolling Stones, Rachel Weisz, Sofia Coppola and Jessica Chastain, among a host of other entertainers and newsmakers, for such publications as The New Yorker and New York Times Magazines.

A selection of her mostly black and white photography is on display at the Bennett Gallery at the Blake School, open to the public through early October. 

Gabi was struck by how Thea got her start as a Blake student taking photographs, and how her current schedule means sometimes she’ll get a call and have 48 hours to show up and photograph a subject.  

Gabi says: They’re all very different styles, depending on the person. The Rolling Stones looked like they were having such a fun time in their photo shoot; they were just like laughing or like smiling really big.

(Most impressive photography subject, in Gabi’s opinion? Actor and singer Ben Platt — Gabi’s a fan.) 

— Gabi Marmet