the artist's bookshelf: raymond carver's cathedral - Walker Art Center

Raymond Carver
Photo: Marion Ettlinger
Press Contact: Karen Gysin 612.375.7651 karen.gysin@walkerart.org
THE ARTIST’S BOOKSHELF: RAYMOND CARVER’S
CATHEDRAL
WALKER BOOK CLUB CONCLUDES FOR THE SEASON WITH A SELECTION BY AUTHOR
HARUKI MURAKAMI
Minneapolis, August 6, 2004—The conclusion of this season’s The
Artist’s Bookshelf, a book club presented by the Walker Art Center
and the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library, takes place at
6:30 pm on Wednesday, September 1, at Walker Community
Library, 2880 Hennepin Avenue South, Minneapolis. Author Haruki
Murakami makes the final selection in this summer’s reading list:
Cathedral by Raymond Carver. Published in 1983, this collection of
short stories depicts a brighter side of American life than Carver’s
earlier work as characters stumble through isolation into
epiphanies revealed by day-to-day activities. Notorious Twin Cities
portrait artist Frank Gaard leads a discussion of these tales and the
connections between portraiture and literature. Admission is free.
Raymond Carver revitalized the short story form in the United
States during the 1970s and 1980s. Born and raised in the Pacific
Northwest, he moved to California and took up writing in the
early 1960s. His 1974 collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
established his reputation and featured some of his trademarks:
alcohol, poverty, and ordinary people in ordinary but desperate
situations. Carver, who also taught writing and wrote poetry, has
been called a "minimalist" because of his spare and realistic fiction,
and has been compared to Ernest Hemingway and Anton
Chekhov. In the late 1970s Carver was hospitalized four times for
acute alcoholism. By the mid-1980s, he was sober, writing fulltime,
and married to the poet Tess Gallagher (it was his second
marriage). He died at the age of 50 from lung cancer, and his last
collection of stories, Where I'm Calling From, was published
posthumously in 1989. His collections of poetry include Where
Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) and Ultramarine
(1986).
ARTIST’S BOOKSHELF: RAYMOND CARVER’S CATHEDRAL NO. 76 1

Frank Gaard
Photo: Cameron Wittig for Walker Art Center
Haruki Murakami, whose books The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and
After the Quake were selected for the two previous installments of
The Artist’s Bookshelf, is widely regarded as the most influential
Japanese writer of his generation. The son of a literature teacher,
Murakami learned English in school and grew up with American
fiction. His first novel was published in 1970. He graduated from
Waseda University in 1973, with a degree in drama, after which he
managed a jazz and coffee shop. With the publication of his novel
Norwegian Wood, Murakami became a cult phenomenon in Japan.
He has lived all over the world, including Rome, Athens, and a
Greek island, as well as spending four years at Princeton as a
visiting fellow, where he wrote The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.
Murakami's books are set in Japan, but they are infused with the
urban, eclectic, Western culture he has absorbed all his life.
Frank Gaard was born and raised in Chicago. He moved to
Minneapolis in 1969 and was a professor of fine arts at the
Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1969 until 1987. He
was the creator and publisher of the legendary underground ’zine
Artpolice (1974–1994), in which he blended cutting social criticism
with a brutish drawing style often compared to that of comic
artist R. Crumb. An information addict with a diagnostician’s
exactitude for the pulses of politics and culture, Gaard draws from
sources as varied as the entertainment industry, art history, and
popular media, collapsing them into a fascinating jumble that
exposes the dysfunctional ills of the world in which we live. Since
the mid-1980s, he mainly has been creating portraits of family
members, artist friends, and fictional characters. The Walker
presented the Viewpoints exhibition Frank Gaard: Painting in 1980,
and has several works by the artist in its permanent collection.
Gaard’s billboard design Billboard Spectacle (In Memory of Guy
Debord), part of the Walker’s ongoing Billboard Project, was on
display in downtown Minneapolis May 15-July 14.
For discussion questions and an online forum on the book, visit
www.walkerart.org.
The Artist’s Bookshelf is presented in partnership with the Friends
of the Minneapolis Public Library.
Walker without Walls is made possible by generous support from
Target.
The Walker Art Center is located at 725 Vineland Place, at Lyndale
Avenue South, Minneapolis, one block off Highway I-94.
For public information, call 612.375.7622, or visit:
http://www.walkerart.org
ARTIST’S BOOKSHELF: RAYMOND CARVER’S CATHEDRAL NO. 76 2