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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Ojibwe art and teachings at Tettegouche State Park

Eric Klepinger, an artist north of Duluth, recommends checking out the monthly artists’ shows and the artist-in-residence work at Tettegouche State Park. 

Featured in August is prolific Ojibwe artist Sam Zimmerman of Duluth, whose work will be on view until September. His boldly colored work often features animal forms, and Klepinger says these works were inspired by animals he saw at Tettegouche. 

Zimmerman is also, separately, the Artist-in-Residence at Tettegouche. For this role, he created seven signs, printed on weather-proof aluminum, about the seven Grandfather Teachings of the Ojibwe, which will be installed next spring at the Nature Play Area. 

See all the artists at Artists-in-Residence programs at State Parks across the state here.  

Watercolor artist and naturalist Chris Dillon is the featured artist next month, and there will be an artist’s reception for her Sept. 5. in the Tettegouche Visitor Center starting at 7 p.m.

Arab American women’s stories in silk and animation

Sandra Brick, a teaching artist at the Textile Center, appreciates Hend Al-Mansour's exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Mihrabs: Portraits of Arab American Women” is an immersive exhibit of four installations of brightly colored, silk-screened fabric, which are paired with a short animation.

Brick appreciates that visitors enter each pillar to experience the objects, sights, and sounds of the lives of four Minnesota women whose heritages trace to Syria, Morocco, Palestine and Saudi Arabia. “You feel like you’re visiting these women,” Brick says. 

There is an artist talk on Sunday, Sept. 7 at 2 p.m. The exhibit runs through Oct. 26. 

Punk rock meets Gorky in interdisciplinary theater

Actor Kenzi Allen of St. Paul is looking forward to seeing “The Mother: A Punk Rock Musical” next weekend, Sept. 4-7, at Sokol Hall in St. Paul.

Inspired by Maxim Gorky’s novel, the show is a collaboration between Luverne Seifert and Darcey Engen of Sod House Theater and Carl Flink of Black Label Movement, featuring music by Annie Enneking of Annie and the Bang Bang.  

Allen, who was involved in an early workshop of the show last year, is excited by the way it brings acting, dance and music together.

“I think I personally crave a whole lot more work that has this kind of overlap and interdisciplinary focus. So I hope this show kind of shows how much fun and how much vibrancy each of us artists have to give to each other's disciplines,” Allen says.

“The show is about a mother and a son who are living in poverty in Russia, and the son gets involved in what becomes the Bolshevik Revolution. The story follows how the mother is also brought into that whole uprising.

“I think now is a good time to be telling this story, because we're looking back at history in this time and seeing what has happened in the past and kind of reflecting on have we moved past this, or is it possible for things like this to happen again? The show is being performed in St. Paul, and St. Paul has such a rich, rich history of union workers coming together and fighting against oppression.”