G l en H a n s o n G a l l er y Th en a n d N ow
Bruce Anderson Richard Cooper
Harmony Hammond Glen Hanson
Steve Hartman Philip Larson
Mike Manzavrakos John Marshall
Stuart Nielsen Tom Rose
T.L. Solien Steve Sorman
artorg
The Glen Hanson Gallery existed for a few short years but continues to leave an imprint. Most connected with the gallery still make art today while retaining the drive and passion. I hope frankly that some of that fairy dust rubs off on us. Thanks to the artists of the Glen Hanson Gallery for entrusting us with this important exhibition. Dave Machacek ArtOrg Executive Director
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Glen
H an so n
The story of my gallery really begins at Daytons Gallery 12. A bold experiment for a department store, Gallery 12, along with other galleries opening in the Midwest at this time, made contemporary American art available outside of New York City for the first time ever, and provided a training ground for me in learning how a professional art gallery functioned. Given the opportunity to meet with artists and dealers, national and international, was a real education. Robert Rauschenberg, Joesph Beuys, Arakawa, Jackie Ferrara, Bob Irwin, dealers like Leo Castelli, Ronald Feldman, Marion Goodman all pasted through Gallery 12. It was an exciting time to be involved in the visual arts. When Gallery 12 was closed in 1974, I began dealing privately out of my home. I had begun to meet local artists whose work stood up to anything being done at that time. I believed in them, and they believed in me. One day I had Russell Cowles over for lunch. He was an active and sophisticated collector, and out of our relationship came the Hanson-Cowles Gallery opened in 1976 in the Minneapolis warehouse district. Because my only knowledge of how a gallery operated came from Daytons Gallery 12, my inventory control systems were based on Dayton’s advertising was part of overhead just like rent, so we had
monthly ads in Artforum (a first for a local gallery), and rather than just taking work on consignment from many artists, we represented at most a dozen artists and promoted their work here and nationally. Russell and I parted ways, and in 1978 I opened as the Glen Hanson Gallery with an exhibition of paintings by Stuart Nielsen. Things were really tight, and I remember the painting I sold in order to buy wine for my grand opening, but we had so much fun. In the New French CafÊ Bar, collectors and artists got to know one another and many lasting relationships were formed. Following the lead of General Mills, many local businesses began collecting art, the local print media covered the visual arts like never before, and foundations began structured programs for artist. It was an amazing time of maturation for the local scene, and I am still proud to have been part of this unique moment in our history. What we had then was a gift, a real community, a shared vision of what could be, and we were in it together. What a powerful feeling that was, and as our lives continued on, whether we were successful or not, it felt fragmented, and I will continue forever to seek that elusive yet so real feeling of community, of not being alone. I would like to thank Dave Machacek and Kari Alberg, Stephen Hartman, and Richard Cooper and all the artists involved for this wonderful experience. And I would also like to remember two people who were so important to this era, but have since passed, Robert Thomson, who was both friend and landlord, and Gus Gustafson who was the most open-hearted person I’ve ever known.
Bruce
untitled, 1978 untitled, 1988
An derso n
Don
M c N ei l
I first met Glen Hanson in 1976, when I started working with the General Mills Art Collection. He was about to open a new gallery in Minneapolis with Russell Cowles. While I was familiar with a number of artists in the area, Glen introduced me to many more and, more importantly, he taught me how to look at art, appreciate its wonderfulness and behave professionally. I learned my job by immersing myself in the local arts scene and Glen was very much at its center. A few years later, when the Glen Hanson Gallery opened, my education continued by going to Glen’s openings and meeting the wide range of artists he showed. Not only did these early associations provide me with a greater understanding of art and what it is, it also provided me with a large group of people who are still among my best friends. In fact, it was at Glen’s first opening – for Stuart Nielsen – where I first spoke to the woman with whom I’ve now shared my life for some 30 years, Emily Galusha. For a variety of reasons, it is very easy to say that Glen was instrumental in forming my life both professionally and personally. Those years will always be well-remembered and cherished.
Richard Cooper Exhibit
Eleanor
Hea r tn ey
“You are way over qualified, but if you want the job, you can have it.” I was fresh from Chicago with a master’s degree in art history and a desire to work in the arts, when Glen Hanson made me this job offer in 1981. Thus began my short but crucial introduction to the world of contemporary art. Though my academic specialty had been Modern, at the University of Chicago that period ended with Jackson Pollock, after which stretched the blank, uncertain terrain of Art Today. The course curriculum might as well have said, “There be dragons”. At Glen Hanson Gallery, I met real live artists, talked with them about their art works and began to understand the issues fueling the art of the 1980s. Expressionism, conceptualism, installation, and performance became meaningful to me in a way that images in slides and art magazines never could be. Glen, gallery director Richard Cooper and I shared a love of art, an anti-establishment streak and a perplexity about the mechanics of art sales. In an otherwise complimentary article about the gallery, critic Mary Abbe remarked, “An offer to buy brings surprise”. We had to agree. I worked at the Glen Hanson Gallery as bookkeeper, receptionist, bottle washer, and general Girl Friday for a year and a half before economic realities forced the gallery to close. That period remains special to me because it opened up a whole new world and set me off on a lifelong
engagement with the issues surrounding contemporary art. It also introduced me to the wonderful cast of characters represented in this reunion. I look back on my gallery days with fondness and gratitude. There may still be dragons out there, but thanks to my induction at the Glen Hanson Gallery, they don’t frighten me.
Harmony Hammond Exhibit
Steve Sorman Exhibit
Glen
H an so n
Snow on the Water (Day), 2002 Snow on the Water (Night), 2002
Harmony
Ha mmo n d
Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Vermillion Archival Collection, Gift of funds from The Northern Star Foundation and The Hersey Foundation.
Fan Lady Meets Cactus Lady, 1981 A Queer Reader, 2010
ArtŠHarmonyHammond/Licensed by VAGA, NYC. Courtesy Dwight Hackett projects, Santa Fe.
John
Marshall
Brick Works, 2011 Manhole, 1980
Lynne
Al p e r t
From the moment The New French Café opened in November, 1977 we knew that there would be a special relationship between the Café and the artists in the neighborhood. Many had helped us “construct” the Café and many worked there at one time or another. In fact, Steve Hartman, alias Lester or Les Fromages, was well-known in the kitchen and as a bartender. Many of those same artists became featured players at Glen Hanson’s Gallery and there was definitely a symbiotic relationship that developed between the Gallery and The New French Bar. We became a comfortable place for them to talk and drink and be seen. This trajectory for the Bar was not planned, it just happened, but would not have happened without the Glen Hanson Gallery next door.
Philip Larson Exhibit
Mary
Ab be
In the late 1970s when Glen Hanson Gallery flourished in the Minneapolis warehouse district, a sunny optimism suffused that neighborhood, making everything seem possible. WARM Gallery, a women’s cooperative, and FORECAST, a public-art organization, ran spaces nearby. There were dozens of artists living and working in cavernous lofts around the corner, and everyone seemed to believe that a new day had dawned. Fresh-out-of-college artists believed they could launch careers in the Midwest and conquer the art world from the banks of the Mississippi rather having to decamp for the distant shores of the Hudson River. The New French Café was serving stylish breakfasts and lunch in a bare-bones white-brick room across the hall from the gallery, and the scent of fresh croissants drifted through the building in the early morning. The annual Bastille Day celebration shut down the street while bands played and good wine flowed. The young turks in Hanson’s stable, mostly recent grads from the University of Minnesota’s art department, were an eclectic lot of sculptors, painters, printmakers and photographers who injected personal motifs into the familiar tropes of waning abstractionism. Each was giving voice to his (and the core were all guys) own vision -- Philip Larson’s gilded architectural history; Steve Sorman’s elegant arabesques; Tom Rose’s elusive drawings; Mike Manzavrakos’ sketchy photos of sun-bleached
Greece; T. L. Solien’s brooding narratives; Steve Hartman’s abstracted landscapes. The list goes on. To an aspiring art writer fresh from Chicago, it was a seductive scene ripe with promise and ambition. There were no parking lots or freeways blocking the view, just an open vista with glorious sunsets and wide-open skies filled with promise. But we were all young then and given to wild dreams. 26 July 2011.
Steve Beyer Exhibit
Mason
R i ddl e
Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away there was the Minneapolis Warehouse District. It was an area of looming, and often-beautiful industrial brick and stone warehouse buildings, proud markers of the waning manufacturing businesses that once monopolized this industrial area. By the mid-1970s, artists and creative entrepreneurs were eyeing these increasingly vacant spaces for studios, lofts, cafés and galleries. But let’s back up a bit. For the uninitiated, the Warehouse district of the mid-1970s and early 1980s was nothing like it is today. Nothing. There were no sports bars, nightclubs (excepting First Avenue), or traffic jams. Rather, produce sheds still inhabited 2nd Avenue North and there was not a freeway or concrete parking ramp to be found. There were not even streetlights on the cross streets. Parking on the street was easy. It was quiet. Friendly. Looking back it all seems rather idyllic. Architecturally less flashy, and not even given historic designation, was a smallish, two-story, white-glazed brick building on the northeast corner of 4th Street and 2nd Avenue North. By 1975 artists were living in this building, and in 1976 Glen Hanson and Russell Cowles opened a sleek gallery in the 1st and 2nd floor corner spaces. The partnership ended in 1978 with the creation of the Glen Hanson Gallery on the street corner. Also making the building a destination point was the New French Café, which opened its doors in the building in November of 1977 followed by the New French Bar in 1979.
It could be argued that the Glen Hanson Gallery, with its artists Steven Beyer, Richard Cooper, Harmony Hammond, Stephen Hartman, Phillip Larson, Michael Manzavrakos, John Marshall, Stuart Nielsen, Thomas Rose, T. L. Solien, and Steven Sorman anchored the burgeoning scene. That the New French Café and the New French Bar physically flanked the gallery didn’t hurt. The area’s music scene also began to cook. First Avenue came into its own and there was Prince, of course. On a smaller scale there were upstart music/performance art events by visual artists– like Glen Hanson and Michael Manzavrakos playing the Blues in the nearby Harmony Building. In 1982, Hanson passed his gallery baton on to Bob Thomson, who went on to show the same core group of artists. Art fever was spreading due to Hanson’s early efforts. In September 1984, the first coordinated gallery openings of art, food and wine, hosted by Bockley Gallery, M.C. Anderson Gallery, Thomas Barry Fine Arts and WARM in the Wyman Building and Thompson Gallery. The every 6th week drill had begun. Unexpectedly, after a lot of hard work and visionary thinking, all planets seemed to be in alignment. The art buzz also inspired a much-needed rise in critical and informed writing. WARM published its own journal and Lynn Ball and Remo Campopiano started Artpaper in 1981/82 – a 4-page paper that was a glorified press release for shows and art happenings. But we liked it. Artpaper soon grew into more than 20 pages and by 1985 it
was anticipated each month by all. David Skarjune published Vinyl and the weeklies – City Pages and the Reader - featured more art reviews and articles. In 1984 the Star Tribune hired their first, full-time art critic, Mary Abbe Martin. Inspired by the activity, in 1982 Chicago’s New Art Examiner published my first review. I went on to contribute to the Star Tribune, The Saint Paul Pioneer Press, City Pages, The Reader, Artforum, Arts Magazine (NYC) and High Performance. Not coincidentally, I can still connect the dots between the Glen Hanson Gallery and my professional writing career. It was a fertile time. It was a privileged time. It certainly was not always a love-fest, but it was exciting and we were all maturing at the same time. There was an indelible sense of accomplishing something. And we were. There was dialogue, interchange and visibility. It was a scene. An idiosyncratic tribe of many had been born and we cultivated each other. For all of the glory of the late 1980s, many of us still remember the protoart gallery scene of more than a decade earlier - trudging off on a frosty winter night to a darkened street, seeing the bright lights and animated crowd inside the steamed windows of the buzzing Glen Hanson Gallery.
Mike
M anz av ra ko s
Horizon Panel #47B, 2010 Vectors, 1974
Philip
The Three Troughes (The Three Train Sheds), 1981 Apollo and Daphne in the Forest of Many Hands, 2011 Three Attic Trophies with Ether of Athena, 2011
Larson
Richard
Audubon, Â 2009
Co o p e r
Richard
Co o per
“So this is SOHO!” exclaimed New York conceptual artist Richard Pettibone, the day he walked in through the door of the Glen Hanson Gallery, circa 1979. In character as the gallery’s front room Associate Director, my snappy response was, “Yes, Minneapolis has ONE of Everything.” True enough, with the earliest urbane colonizers of the “North Loop Warehouse District” (later nomenclature). The “big four” were Glen Hanson Gallery, WARM (Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota) Gallery, and Twin Cities pioneers of Vietnamese and Nouvelle French cuisines, Matin Restaurant and The New French Café. All four were clustered within one city block. Glen Hanson not only nurtured my ideas as a “represented” artist, but he also introduced me to the intricacies of managing a vital contemporary retail art gallery. It was a joy to help promote the sales of art by great artists, while at the same time having an elegant white space to try out some of my own ideas. Naturally, Glen’s own conceptual adventures have since led to the need for his own hand-making of intimate yet powerful visual art and some “dang good” country music.
Nighttime in Duluth, 1981
Steve
H a r tma n
To a young aspiring artist, a sense of community is essential. The Glen Hanson Gallery was a large part of the community I belonged to. Glen has a knack for bringing like minds together for the benefit of all. Through him and the gallery, I met people to talk art with and learn from. We had critiques, fishing trips, ball games, dinners, parties, and fights. Lifelong friendships were formed. Glen’s friendship, influence and support, have been essential to my development as a painter. Thanks Glen. Another person who was essential to the gallery and the New French. was Robert (Bob) Thomson. Bob had taken a lease on two small buildings on north Fourth St. with the intention of making legal living/studio spaces for creative people. He did it. He filled the building with architects. artists, designers, photographers, theater people, a restaraunt, and a damn fine bar. Bob passed away in 2005, but without his vision and determination we might not be singing this song. Thanks Bob. Thanks also to ArtOrg for making this exhibition possible. To Dave and Kari and all the people connected to ArtOrg. Thanks too, to The New French Cafe, and all the people connected to it. And thanks to those two little buildings where I lived, worked, painted, ate and drank through those wonderful years.
Steve
H a r t ma n
untitled, 1979  Rattle, 2011
Steve
S or ma n
The Letter to Matisse, 1978 Which by Itself, 2011
Stuart
Wintercrest, 1976 - 77 untitled, 2010
Nielsen
Thomas
R o se
Cuttlefish, 1978 circa Pace #8, 2010
T.L.
Solien
Terrorist-Entertainer, 1980 Claim Shack, 2007
Todd
B o ck l ey
A gallery can be many things to many people and in this respect the Glen Hanson Gallery was exemplar. It was a nexus for art-loving people. For the artists, it was the unique opportunity to have their work presented in a legitimate venue. For the collectors, especially those who didn’t see themselves as collectors, it was a site for experiential education. Writers were provided with quality source material, a reason to practice their craft. For the folks making the scene, it was a hell of a party, and place to make good, lasting friendships. I was fortunate to grow up in a house filled with art. My mother was an art lover. She didn’t think of herself as a collector, but she did purchase work, enough to cover most every wall in the house. In fact, she covered 3 windows in our den to hang a 6 x 11 foot Bruce Anderson painting, a work she bought at the Glen Hanson Gallery. As a teenager, a common weekend activity would be to go with my mother and brothers to visit the gallery and see the latest show. I bought by first art at the gallery with money I had saved from mowing lawns. It was a T.L. Solien painting, it had a vibrant green background with two shocking red glyph-like forms on un-stretched canvas. I remember Richard Cooper unrolling them out on the floor, so that we could view them. I liked that he put them directly on the floor and practically climbed around on them.
Everyone needs a role model and for me, in many ways, it was Glen Hanson. I’m grateful to him and all of the wonderful artists that showed with him for inspiring me to join up in the ranks of fellow motley creative types. It was at his gallery, where the seed got planted — thank you.
photography : Jerry Mathiason, Tom Roster graphic design: Kari Alberg additional thanks to: Tony Zaccardi
Š 2011 ArtOrg P.O. Box 2 Northfield, Minnesota 55057 www.artorg.info
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