-
Sculptor Of The North: The Evolution of a Soul
Price range: $3.99 through $8.99It was the summer of 1973, and the Vietnam War was casting its insidious shadow over the world. Caught in a riot that began as an anti-war protest, I found myself running for my life from club-swinging cops and being teargassed from pepper fogging guns at the University of Minnesota. The protest was a result of American airplanes bombing neighboring Cambodia. It was soon after the deadly shootings at Kent State University where four students were gunned down. Many students gathered at Coffman Memorial Union watching television monitors broadcasting that day’s protest-turned-riot.
It was announced that the Minnesota National Guard had been called in. Oh-oh, here we go again. Were they going to open fire on us too? I was a senior at the university and had been accepted at the University of San Diego Law School. That day’s events changed my life. No way was I going to be a part of a money-crazed system as a lawyer, so I began my journey as an artist/sculptor.
Five years later, I found myself living in a tent in the woods near Ely. After two years of tent life, I moved to an old hunting shack filled with spiders, mice, and snakes on the property I bought. It was a roof over my head. After seven laborious years of remodeling with popular logs that I fitted into a log hut around the shack, the structure burnt to the ground during the blue moon on New Year’s Eve 1990. It was minus 40 degrees. I sat in the firetruck with then chief Klun after racing to my nearest neighbor’s house, logger Buster Nicholson, where I burst through his door yelling, “My house is on fire!”
“Use the phone,” he hollered, and I did. The Ely Fire Department met me at the beginning of Mud Creek Road, and I escorted them six miles down the road and into my remote haven in the woods. It was too late. Fire was consuming everything. Glass and ammunition were exploding, and the hoses on the truck were frozen. A night to remember for sure, but if anything is going to get the motivational juices flowing, it was that.
I created a monumental sculpture 31 years later of this resolute and powerful Viking, which is now the second-tallest cement statue in the state. It was a year-long project that stands nine feet tall and weighs about 3,500 pounds. Located in Tower behind the football field, he stands with his sword rammed into the ground looking skyward for a sign from the heavens, just like I did in 1973 and on New Year’s Eve during the blue moon.
-
Peculiar Affinity: The World the Slave Owners and Their Female Slaves Made
Price range: $3.99 through $11.99The theory of peculiar affinity implies that Black people and White people in the 21st-century United States are connected by family, kinship, surnames, and genes. Peculiar affinity is profoundly implicated with racism in the United States. Peculiar affinity remained after the demise of slavery, but it transformed and adapted to the system of separate but equal. Peculiar Affinity: The World the Slave Owners and Their Female Slaves Made presents the discovery of a vital socioeconomic interconnection and interrelationship between White slave owners and enslaved Black women of the antebellum South during the second slave era of the 19th century, the domestic slave era. This interconnection and interrelationship consisted of a very strange dialectic of sex, which led to the reproduction of the bodies of the slave owners and their female slaves.
On a grand scale, and implemented on a consistent basis, this dialectic of sex transformed to a nexus of sex and reproduction of human bodies as commodities. The visual aspects appeared as a kind of veil that obscured actual family and kinship relations. In the antebellum South, the slave owner was the father, and the female slave and his wife were the mothers. The children from the slave owner’s female slave and the children from the slave owner’s wife were real and objective brothers and sisters with the same biological father.
-
Old Ways, New Hope
Price range: $3.99 through $18.99This is the story of a freelance translator who is invited on an archaeological search because of a strange language. His travels take him around the world, and he becomes the leader in the search after the death of a close friend. He falls into the greatest discovery of mankind that leads him toward the origins of man and a great many inventions. How he deals with the discovery will lead him into outer space and the old ones. Then he has many choices with what to do to change the world.
-
