On the outskirts of Red Wing a pair of crusty old oven mitts have found themselves presented in a gallery. On each white mitt is a pair of black dots drawn on for eyes, giving them the appearances of a couple of dopey waving ghosts.

“I have so many favorites in the show, but what I think is just hysterical are the two oven mitts,” says curator Neal Cuthbert. 

“It’s just the most simple thing where you take two things, you draw an eye on it, and you have it move a certain way, and all of a sudden you have a character that’s sharing a story,” Stephanie Rogers adds. 

Rogers is the executive and artistic director for the Anderson Center at Tower View, an arts organization. Together, Rogers and Cuthbert have been working on an exhibition for a year. “Puppetry! In Minnesota!!” showcases the puppet artistry cultivated in the state from the 1970s to today.

The Anderson Center will host a free public artist reception 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 22.

“Whatever you think you know about the puppetry community in Minnesota, it is deeper, broader and more weird than you are imagining,” Rogers says. “This show is only the tip of the iceberg, and we hope it will encourage people to want to go deeper, to learn more, to check out what the artists are doing now, and where you can see their work, whether it’s a public parade in Duluth or a show at Open Eye Theater in south Minneapolis.”

On the gallery shelf joining the oven mitts (by Minneapolis artist Mark Safford) are other small handmade creatures — a calico kitty in shirt and pants (by Minneapolis puppeteer Erica Warren) sitting next to a shaggy wide-eyed dog creature (by Puppet Lab co-director Oanh Vu) and a tiny Befana, the Italian Strega Nona-looking folk witch, riding a bicycle (by artist Sandy Spieler).

The exhibition spans two galleries with puppets from the miniature to the colossal, from the refined to the dumpster-dived. There are stick and rod puppets, shadow and stop–motion figures and marionettes. There are giant snakes and a series of Mr. Rogers, an accordion puppet, a tiger, a dragonfly and even a puppet of a puppeteer operating a puppet.

“One of the things you see in the show is the incredible range of puppetry, from little, tiny, delicate hand pieces to wooly mammoths that are lifesize,” Cuthbert says.

The wooly mammoth in question is actually a mastodon by Minneapolis artists Alison Heimstead and Chris Lutter-Gardella. The beast’s tusked head is mounted on the gallery wall.

“How many puppeteers does it take to bring this to life, Neal?” Rogers asks.

“Three or four? A 100?” Cuthbert says, laughing.

Cuthbert and Rogers say the exhibition is historic. Never before has there been a broad-ranging exhibition of Minnesota puppetry from across the state, which is one of the nation’s hubs for the art form. (The only exhibition to come close, Cuthbert says, was the 1999 “Theatre of Wonder: Twenty-Five Years In the Heart of the Beast” at Weisman Art Museum, which focused solely on the Minneapolis theater.)

“The people bringing puppetry to life in Minnesota are unbelievable sculptors, unbelievable painters. They are playwrights,” Rogers says.

“It’s an amazingly deep and diverse community,” Cuthbert says.

The field is fabulous

Rogers and Cuthbert and many puppeteers MPR News spoke to cite a couple reasons for Minnesota’s rich puppet community.  At the top of that list are In the Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theatre and the MayDay Parade and Festival, which have been cultural mainstays in south Minneapolis since the ‘70s. Rogers and Cuthbert say these two institutions have cultivated generations of puppeteers. 

Today, Minnesota is home to many puppet-forward outfits like Barebones Puppets, Open Eye Theatre and Puppet Lab, Monkeybear Harmolodic Workshop, Z Puppets Rosenschnoz, the Magic Smelt Puppet Troupe and the Good Harbor Hill Players.

“We have this really amazing community of people who have taken things that they learned at Heart of the Beast and in other places as well, and from their own inventions, and now the field is fabulous,” says artist Sandy Spieler, who was the artistic director of In the Heart of the Beast for half a century.

Spieler has a gaggle of her storied befana puppets in the exhibition, ranging from a mouse-sized one riding a bike to larger-than-life figures. The befanas were used in dozens of performances at In the Heart of the Beast over the decades.

“I chose to give those particular puppets to Neal because many people who come, especially older people, will recognize the story that they came to see and that inspired them, in fact, to do puppets,” Spieler says.

Cuthbert points to another cultural touchstone that inspired the local creative community: puppetry at the Walker Art Center.

This includes “Adventures in New Puppetry,” a series that ran in 1999-2000 and 2010-2011, and the 1998 Walker commission “A Prelude to Faust,” a puppet performance created by Michael Sommers, the Twin Cities theater artist and co-founder of Open Eye Theatre. Philip Bither, who has been the Walker’s senior curator of performing arts since 1997, organized both.

“I saw a movement of contemporary visual art and performance art embracing and finding inspiration in a very ancient form of performing arts, which is puppetry,” Bither says. “If we could frame it as a thread of serious contemporary performance that just happened to involve puppets, it would shed a different light on it, and maybe gain the art form greater respect.”

Bither says puppetry programming has been popular, and it continues to this day. In January, the Walker hosted the puppet-forward “Boney Vanilli” as part of its annual Out There experimental performance series.

“It surprised me how many people turned out for these things. Most of the houses were full,” Bither says.

More adventures in new puppetry

Rogers, at the Anderson Center, says they designed the exhibition to shine a light on the next generation of puppeteers coming up in Minnesota.

“There’s also a generational shift happening. A lot of the artistic directors and big names who really lit the fuse that exploded into this richness of creativity in the 1970s into the ‘80s and ‘90s, have retired from, in many cases, the theaters they helped found,” Rogers says.

“They’re still around, the things they made and the knowledge that they hold are still here, and so we’re at a moment where we can both feature the work of that generation and shine a spotlight on the up-and-coming talent.”

Rogers says she’s excited by the work of Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop and Puppet Lab at Open Eye Theatre in Minneapolis.

Artist Chamindika Wanduragala founded Monkeybear in 2016. The workshop provides training and funding to artists of color in creating puppet theater and films.

Wanduragala says that the Twin Cities and the state have a “large puppetry community, but it’s predominantly white, so I really wanted to see Native, Black and POC stories told by Native, Black and POC folks.” She adds, “And I just love the form. It’s such an amazing art form.”

Wanduragala has one puppet in the show, a creature created from organic materials and wire cables.

“Those are all from a walk with my dog — the wood, the face, the black walnuts are from the tree in my backyard, and the root bulbs are from daylilies that I dug up from our garden,” Wanduragala says

There are many puppets on view at the Anderson center by Monkeybear and Puppet Lab artists. Atim Opoka, a Minneapolis Monkeybear artist, has a mother-and-daughter puppet. Opoka says her exposure to puppetry before Monkeylab was mostly “Eurocentric.”

So, she created the pair to help tell the creation story of the Luo and Acholi people of Eastern Africa. Opoka is originally from Uganda.

“My family, we immigrated here in the ‘90s, and it was a way for me to continue connecting with my culture, with the Acholi people,” Opoka says.

“I’m excited for the fact that puppetry is one of the oldest art forms and so, so many cultures have kept their stories or their culture alive through puppetry, and surviving a lot of hard times through government changes or changes within the landscape.”

Opoka’s mother and daughter share a wall with red-cardiganed Mr. Rogers puppets by Bart Buch. 

“Puppetry! In Minnesota!!” is on view at the Anderson Center at Tower View through April 26.

Collected from Minnesota Public Radio News. View original source here.