Last weekend was a winner in many respects, not the least being a Minnesota Opera production at The Ordway. The rest of my twenty-four hours in the Twin Cities (the part that didn’t involve sleep) included lots of great conversation, excellent food and drink with fine company. I chanced to mention our next Agincourt exhibit and the gastric reflux that visits each night between midnight and 2:00 a.m. while I strategize the show.
That topic came up during my annual evaluation two weeks ago in a context I can’t broach here. Suffice to say the scale of the exhibit is daunting, but so is the question of a mechanism for its evaluation. So the advice I brought back from the Cities was simply this: seek help. But first things first.
AR371 and LA272
About this time last semester, I approached the landscape faculty about an Agincourt-related studio, one that would attack all those large-scale planning issues that I’m unqualified to undertake. [When has that stopped me before, you ask.] And it was Dominic Fisher who took on the challenge. Dominic brought a gentle discipline to the task and the nine-student section completed their Iowa projects just before Spring Break. Once we settle on a plan for the three rooms available for the show, I’ll ask them to reformat their schemes for a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mosaic of treatments of private homes, cemeteries, fairgrounds, parks and whole subdivisions. You’ll enjoy their contributions to the project. That takes care of one wall out of twelve.
“Landscapes & Livestock,” the show-within-the-show lending exhibition from Agincourt’s community art collection overfills four walls (the Gustavian or west gallery on the Rourke’s second floor), which brings it down to seven roughly equivalent walls.
The east or Burgum Gallery—centerpiece of our spatial sequence—will house several vignettes, clusters of objects and panels that tell short stories about people or institutions in the community (or do I mean people as institutions?): Rose Kavana, for example, a grade school principal; Father Emile Farber, priest at Christ the King; Hansa House, the German-American Insurance Company; “Little Ones,” the community’s first kindergarten; and of course the studio of Anson Tennant, the community’s first resident architect. [Do I seriously think I can get all that done?] That reduces it to three—contents as yet unknown, though some of it will come from the Spring Semester AR371 studio, which produced some remarkable projects.
Ultimately, I’m going to need some help from people who have far greater graphic skills than I. And, given the internet, that help needn’t be in Moorhead-Fargo. So, should any of you have abilities with Photoshop® or InDesign® and inclinations to help with posters and other graphic pieces, don’t be shy.
The real bottom line, I suppose, is that the hope some of you will attend the exhibit, especially the official closing on Sunday, 25 October 2015—the actual 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt! See you there.