Friday #1: June 3, 2016

One of the things I’ve missed in my new job is the opportunity to get away for a quick round of golf with my partner Drew. So some Friday afternoons will definitely be spent doing that. In fact, this first Friday we planned a date with another couple we enjoy golfing with, Diane and Alan. However, the day dawned rainy and cold, so we cancelled our tee time foursome and took a rain check for another week. But it was Summer Hours! My first Friday! I was not to be deterred or disheartened. 

The day for Randy’s first adventure in The Saturdays was also cold and wet, but she wasn’t deterred either. “My it’s a nice day, she thought. Nobody else would have thought so.” As an aspiring young painter, Randy chose to visit an art gallery. That seemed like exactly the right thing for me as well. 

Art and Memories at The Museum of Russian Art 

Considering our options, Drew and I decided that The Museum of Russian Art would be just the thing for a rainy afternoon date. TMORA is one of my favorite art spots in Minneapolis. It is kind of a hidden treasure that not everyone knows about, although it sits prominently at the busy confluence of 35W and Diamond Lake Road in south Minneapolis. The little jewel box of a building was built in 1925 in the Spanish Colonial style as the Mayflower Congregational Church, and today houses a beautiful collection of paintings along with special exhibitions that never disappoint.

The Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis

Today the main gallery was showing Masterpieces of the 20th Century: Russian Realist Tradition. This show featured some of the museum’s permanent collection, which is heavily weighted toward the Russian Realism movement, along with other masterpieces of the era that I hadn’t seen before. According to the exhibition introduction, “In the spirit of the Soviet epoch, these paintings were designed to appeal to the masses. Universally understood themes, detailed storytelling, and masterful execution were designed to be accessible to all Soviet citizens regardless of their educational level. However, the thematic straightforwardness of these works conceals a sophisticated artistic process and a complex cultural code.” 

Here’s one of my favorite paintings from the collection: Milkmaids Novella by Nicolai Nikolaevich Baskakov. The joy of these women taking a break from milking the cows and laughing over a joke is positively palpable. As Randy marveled in The Saturdays when she was looking at an old painting that captured her entirely, “A day had come and gone, years ago, and still it was alive.” 

Milkmaids Novella (1962), Nicolai Nikolaevich Baskakov

The special exhibition gallery downstairs at TMORA featured a retrospective of the work of late local artist Olexa Bulavitsky: Immigrant Experiences and Ukrainian-American Art. The catalog described the exhibition as unfolding the story of an immigrant artist, spanning pre-WWII years in his native Ukraine, wartime tribulations, immigration to the U.S., and a successful professional career in Minneapolis. 

We found it to be an incredible span of work from a fierce talent, with strengths in impressionistic landscapes and everyday scenes, as well as powerful portraiture. From war-torn city streets of Bratislava to the displaced persons camp in Germany where Bulavitsky and his young growing family took refuge for several years, to the wintery backyard view from his home studio in Minneapolis – an iconic representation of our local neighborhoods which will seem familiar to 

anyone in the Midwest:

View from Studio Window, Minneapolis (1970s)
Olexa Bulavitsky

Bulavitsky's work and his life story brought to my mind another Ukrainian artist, Nicholas Britsky, who was my father-in-law for a nanosecond when I was briefly and disastrously married for the first time in my early 20s. Britsky was born in 1913 in the small village of Veldizh in southwestern Ukraine. He emigrated to the United States and studied fine arts at Yale, the Cranbrook Academy of Arts, and the University of Syracuse. During WWII he worked as an instructor of camouflage at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. He was a professor of art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1945 to 1978, specializing in religious art. I came to know him in 1987, and last saw him some years later at the tragically small funeral of his son Nick, my flickering husband of 15 months who drank himself to death in the intervening years since I had seen the writing on that particular wall and walked away from it rather than into it. All that relived in a short stroll through a quiet art gallery on a rainy day. 

St. Patrick's Church in Urbana, Illinois, featuring the icon triptych
that Nicholas Britsky considered one of his life's greatest works

Wise Acre Eatery with my Wisecracking Sweetie

Just around the corner from The Museum of Russian Art is Wise Acre Eatery, one of the best of the farm-to-fork restaurants in Minneapolis, with a unique business model that integrates it with the neighborhood’s beloved Tangletown Gardens. It was our first visit, but it won’t be our last. We sat at a table by the large windowed bay of what used to be a shiny white-tiled gas station, and watched the rain fall. Drew ordered an iced-tea with his “bacon steak” salad and I enjoyed a glass of 2013 Magician’s Assistant Cabernet Franc Rosé by Sleight of Hand Cellars. We were delighted to discover the bottle on the menu, because the winemaker Trey Busch is a friend of Drew’s from his work in the wine business in Walla Walla.

Wine!

And bacon!

Uptown Night 

Thanks in part to the midday glass of wine, we retired home for a brief nap before heading out again to extend our adventure into the evening. The Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis is always good for some fun or another, and we started by seeing “The Lobster” at the Lagoon Cinema. No spoiler alerts, but I will say that we were pretty much gobsmacked by the movie and talked about it for days. An evening in Uptown wouldn’t be complete without a browse at Magers & Quinn, the Twin Cities largest independent bookstore. We bought a book of NY Times crosswords, a book about the Mississippi River, and a German novel published locally by Graywolf Press, called Almost Everything Very Fast, by Christopher Kloeble. With our heads and our mouths full of movies and paintings and books, we ended our evening with a nightcap at the classic Lucia’s Restaurant and Wine Bar. 

Summer Hours indeed! Until next Friday…