Photographer Wing Young Huie's latest documentary effort, "The University Avenue Project," is on display not only in enlargements hung in shop windows but also in a nightly slideshow projected on a 40-foot screen. MinnPost reports that the Project(ion) Site was specially designed and built to host the show along with live performance and dialogues with Huie.
"'The University Avenue Project,' like Huie's public art installation on Lake Street in 2000, is sprawling and ambitious. In the fall of 2007, Public Art St. Paul received a grant from the Joyce Foundation with which to commission a publicly displayed installation of Huie's photography documenting the diverse neighborhoods, businesses, and residents of University Avenue. According to the introductory essay in the project's
companion book, such an endeavor documenting the neighborhood was deemed all the more important now, given the impending transformation of the avenue when the new light rail line comes in along the Cities' Central Corridor.
"'The University Avenue Project' features about 450 photographs--a mix of black-and-white and color shots, some large-format, others quite small--which have been placed along a six-mile stretch of the urban thoroughfare, from the Capitol to the border between the Twin Cities (roughly near KSTP studios).
"A handful of the photographs are candid, but many are carefully staged; all of them bear the distinctive mark of Huie's knack for capturing telling human details, his gift for composition."
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