The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

“It was like two philosophical trains running past each other on parallel tracks,” said Brad Shinkle, describing Russian and American art during the twentieth century. “Each had little or no awareness of the other—what it consisted of, or its rationale.” Shinkle is president and director of the Museum of Russian Art, the only institution in the U.S. dedicated to Russian art. For fifty-plus years during the Cold War, he pointed out, the Russians weren’t worried just about American nukes.

“Can I pick those up tomorrow?” Frank Stone stands at the bottom of a thirty-foot mountain of stainless steel scrap metal and points to its peak—a bouquet of four-foot-long, auger-like spirals, salvaged from crop sprayers, flailing in the chilly wind. Employees at the American Iron scrapyard in North Minneapolis are well acquainted with Stone, who is perpetually on the hunt for metal that he can weld, bend, and hammer into furniture and decorative artworks, such as the fence surrounding the Surdyk’s parking lot in Northeast Minneapolis.