Exhibition ‘Puppetry! In Minnesota!’ features puppets from the 1970s to today

A life-size red-head David Bowie stands in a corner opposite a star-gazing magical Prince. Across from them, a gnarly possum named Roadkill Joey sits eating pink cake. Elsewhere, a stony masked face looks down at its 10 fingers, which are attached to its eyes with strings.

There’s something haunting about assembling a bunch of puppets together.

“You’re not getting scared, are you?” said Neal Cuthbert, a south Minneapolis-based artist and curator.

The puppets are temporarily living in two galleries at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, but there are no puppeteers present, no show scheduled.

Cuthbert, who formerly worked for the McKnight Foundation, curated “Puppetry! In Minnesota!” The exhibition provides a peek into the world of puppetry in Minnesota from the 1970s to the present day through more than 80 puppets by 30 puppet artists and several videos of puppet shows.

“There’s something about puppets that is really deep in the human animal to express itself, and there’s some kind of magic that happens when you see a representation of ourselves, of people or things in the world, that we know is not real but comes to life and tells a story,” he said.

He moves toward a two-person puppet with a tiger head and a decorated cloth for a body. A single, ominous fang juts out of its mouth.

“There’s this alchemy and this magic,” he said. “It freaks some people out.”

Hand puppets, head puppets, head-and-body puppets, full-body puppets (like Bowie and Prince), rod puppets, table puppets, “cranky” puppets (a scroll used to tell a story), suitcase shows (rod puppets and a set inside a suitcase), and many more are in the show.

The artists in this show hail from Grand Marais, Winona and everywhere in between. They are puppet theater giants like Mary Plaster, Jim Ouray and Sandy Spieler. They are the founders of In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, Open Eye Theatre, Monkeybear Harmolodic Workshop (a puppetry theater that “supports Native, Black and IPOC,” according to its website), among others.

The Twin Cities have always had deep ties to puppetry.

“The National Organization of Puppeteers [now known as Puppeteers of America] was founded in the late 1930s and by 1940 there was an official group in the Twin Cities of puppeteers who wanted to come together,” said Kurt Hunter, who has worked with HOBT and has marionette-style puppets in the show.

In 1975, puppeteer Jeanne Abell had some of her puppets in the Minnesota State Fair’s Fine Arts Exhibition, and in 1990, the Minnesota State Fair had a puppetmaking demonstration in the Creative Activities Building.

Imagine seeing Kermit the Frog silent, or the Cookie Monster not gobbling up cookies. The puppets in this show are oddly motionless, casting them more as actors waiting in line or sculptures in an art gallery.

Oanh Vu, a Twin Cities-based puppeteer and co-artistic director of Puppet Lab, has two puppets in the show. One is a beige dog named Bao from her show, “A World Without a Need for Police,” and the other Twee, a young woman with half-black half-green hair that was in her first full-length puppet show “Phantom Loss.”

After trying out many different art forms, Vu fell in love with the technical, creative and community aspects of puppetry. After helping a friend with their show at Monkeybear, she applied and got into the 2018 training program. She calls her puppet shows “tragicomedy,” since they use humor to deal with serious topics such as immigration, deportation, intergenerational trauma and connections to ancestral heritage.

“This is storytelling, and it’s low-tech, and it’s super magical,” Vu said. “When you make inanimate objects move, it’s like when we were kids, all of us when we played with toys and tried to make them come to life … it’s tapping into something deeper, a sense of play.”

Mexican theater artist Sofia Padilla happened upon puppetry after feeling frustrated with acting back in Mexico City. On a whim, she auditioned for a Cuban puppetry company, was hired and worked and traveled with them for seven years. She taught herself how to make puppets. She has worked with Sesame Street in Mexico City and Bread & Puppet Theater in Glover, Vt., and is a co-founder with U.S.-born Davey T. Steinman of performing arts company Paradox Teatro. She moved to the Twin Cities during the pandemic and felt welcomed into the local puppetry community.

She has two puppets in the show: Lili, the first puppet she ever made, in part an homage to her grandmother, and Ruben, created in honor of Mexican photojournalist Rubén Espinosa who was murdered in 2015.

Ruben’s glassy eyes look like they’re glowing, and he wears a camera around his neck. He is a hybrid puppet and doesn’t have legs but has a face, torso and one hand. When the puppeteer activates him, they become one, filling in a hand and legs.

Padilla noticed the ways that people related differently to puppets than actors in the show "Migraciones/Migrations,“ about increasing barriers between the U.S. and Mexico.

“If they see a puppet going through a thing there’s somehow a different emotional relationship with the puppet,” she said. “And this is such a big relief ― so people are more open emotionally to whatever this story is trying to tell them, and I think that’s part of the magic.”

When: Ends April 26

Where: Anderson Center at Tower View, 163 Tower View Drive, Red Wing

Cost: Free

Info: andersoncenter.org or 651-388-2009