Before we say goodbye to 2024, here’s a look at some of this year’s prettiest and informational coffee table books by local authors.
(Courtesy of PJ Penguin Publishing)
“Gallery Days: Memories from the Artists’ Quarter in Historic Downtown Minneapolis”: by Judith C. Stern (PJ Penguin Publishing, no price listed)
This interesting book, packed with illustrations, tells part of the story of the life of the author, owner of the Judith Stern Gallery.
“This is the story about one woman’s failures and triumphs during an exciting, brief window of time when the Warehouse District in downtown Minneapolis woke up after a long slumber and became a vibrant artists quarter drawing visitors from afar and artists from the country,” beginning in 1977, the author writes. She places the center of the mecca that drew artists, galleries, filmmakers, tourist and coffee lovers within the area from First Avenue to Second Avenue South and Third Street to Sixth Street North, with the New French Cafe being the center. The demise began about 1983 with the building of the Metrodome.
Stern opened her first art gallery in the Kickernick Building in 1978. A believer in honoring the old, she undertook eight building-renovation projects, plus saving an antique horse-drawn fire pumper. Her book is divided geographically, discussing artists who inhabited the Renaissance space, including Meridel LeSueur, Fred Manfred, Waring Jones and Garrison Keillor, along with many more.
A native of Robbinsdale, Minn., Stern has been a fashion designer and a storyteller with Maren Hinderlie at the Guthrie Theater. She taught American Indian Spirituality through the Science Museum of Minnesota and American Indian Art at the University of St. Thomas, and owned JvonStern Store in Marine on St. Croix, selling her clothing and furniture she designed. She has independently published eight books.
“Gallery Days” is packed with lively anecdotes and artwork ranging from paintings to newspaper stories. It’s an important contribution to the history of the Twin Cities literary community. (For information, contact jsternmotherearth@aol.com)
(Courtesy of Goathaunt Publishing)
“Glacier’s Reds: The Quest to Save the Park’s Historic Buses”: by Ray Djuff (Goathaunt, $29.95)
“They are lumbering and seemingly old, but as prized a sight as any grizzly bear or mountain goat when spotted in Glacier National Park, Mont. They are the park’s renowned red buses,” Ray Djuff writes in this 168-page oversized paperback that will interest all the college kids who worked at the park during summers as well as tourists who rode the old vehicles to see the spectacular scenery or check into one of the park’s hotels.
The 33 1930s-era red buses, overhauled several times, is one of the oldest fleets in the world and was threatened numerous times with being taken off the roads. Those of us who were maids, gift shop clerks and entertainers during the late 1950s called the bus drivers “gearjammers” and they were the kings of the staff, carrying visitors along the 51-mile Sun road.
Djurr, whose previous writing about the park includes “Glacier’s Historic Hotels & Chalets,” traces the buses’ history, including three major upgrades in the 1960s, 1989-90 and 2001-03, making them hybrids of old and new technology. He writes of the men and women behind the bus company, offers memories of the park’s pioneer drivers, Ford’s coming to the rescue in the late 1990s, and a timeline showing the buses’ evolution beginning in 1914 when Louis Hill’s Great Northern Railway signed a deal with the White Motor Co. to operate buses in Glacier alongside horse-drawn stages. (The Great Northern was touting Glacier as a vacation spot to drive business to the company’s trains.)
“Glacier’s Reds” has something for everyone. Those devoted to the park will enjoy this history while others will have fun looking at the lavish illustrations, including maps, old photos and colorful advertisements for the park.
Pauline Kruger Hamilton was a Minneapolis photographer who documented the last days of the empires in Europe. (Courtesy of JNK Art Partners)
“Pauline Kruger Hamilton: The End of an Era”: photographs by Pauline Kruger Hamilton: 1908-1918, written, edited and published by James Gerlich (JNK Art Partners, $85)
What a story this book documents, a story of a courageous and influential photographer and her pictures from the end of the era of empires in Europe. Eventually, she was forgotten too.
Hamilton was a successful portrait painter in Minneapolis when the 41-year-old widow left in 1908 for Vienna, carrying a camera she got from Minneapolis artist Louis Sweet. Within 10 years she had mastered the mechanics of photography and was appointed in 1910 to the position of royal and imperial Photographer of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. She died at 51 in 1918, unaware that she had photographed the end of an era. Her trunk arrived in the Minneapolis home of her sister, Norma Kruger Libbey, where it stayed for 70 years.
Hamilton’s photos in this graceful book recall the days of women in furs and lavish gowns as well as royals such as Infanta Maria Theresa of Portugal and a stern-looking Bavarian princess. Her picture of an orphan taken during World War I was selected in 1919 by the International Red Cross as their fundraising poster.
(Courtesy of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum)
“A Nation Takes Place: Navigating Race and Water in Contemporary Art”: edited by Ta-Simone Gardner, Shana M. Griffin (Minnesota Marine Art Museum, $39.95)
This catalog for the Winona-based Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s A Nation Takes Place exhibit uses archival images, artworks and text to show ways seafaring images are tethered to the technology of enslavement, colonialism, genocide, dispossession and extraction. This is a physically beautiful oversized paperback encased in a slip cover with full-color, full-page artwork. Between the pages are unbound poems on see-through paper. The exhibit at the Marine Art Museum will be on display until March 2, 2025.
“Still: The Art of Noticing”: by Mary Jo Hoffman (Monacelli, $60)
If there was an award for the most beautiful book of 2024, “Still” would be a top contender. Hoffman, who lives on Turtle Lake in Shoreview, decided on Jan. 1, 2012, to photograph something found in nature every day. Now Hoffman, an aeronautical engineer, has collected 275 of her most striking images for “Still,” which is also the name of her blog.
“What dailiness did was keep me, more often and more consistently than ever before in my life, in a state of noticing,” she writes. “… I scanned the roadsides between Shoreview, Minnesota, and the east side of Saint Paul, noticing that the swamp thistles along the highway were fading, but the asters were in bloom, that the maple tree on Hodgson Road had just begun to turn from a scarab-bright mix of green, yellow, orange, and scarlet streaks into a torch of red flame.”
Hoffman’s exquisite full-color, full-page photos range from unopened milkweed pods to beetles and butterflies, a pinecone and two crossed black and white bird feathers. Each section of the book opens with a thematic essay addressing a topic that the project had encouraged Hoffman to consider. In “Seventy-Two Microseasons of the North,” Hoffman adapts an ancient Japanese approach to seasonality (which divides the year into 72 five-day bursts), to her own native Great Lakes region.
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