Press

Walker Art Center Online

Garden Stories: Aaron Spangler — Bog Walker, Walker Art Center, 2017. [ Watch ]

Artist Talk

Sung, Victora. Artist Talk: Kinji Akagawa and Aaron Spangler, Walker Art Center, August 21, 2017. [ Watch ]

Art in America

“The Minnesota-based sculptor works primarily in wood, and his Bog Walker (2017)—a rippling, ruggedly lumpy abstraction slightly larger than human size, inscribed with runic lines and patterns—is his first bronze. It stands in a nook beside the museum, where the scattered geometry of the 2005 Herzog & de Meuron addition meets the brick monolith of the 1971 building designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes.” – Droitcour, Brian. “Out of the Woods: In Conversation with Aaron Spangler,” Art in America, June 7, 2017. [ Read ]

Huff Post

“Aaron Spangler lives and works in Park Rapids, Minnesota, near the headwaters of the Mississippi River. An intimacy with this vast northern landscape helps define his practice…” – Kari Adelaide, “Artist Interview: Aaron Spangler.” Huff Post, February 2, 2014. [ Read ]

Exhibition Catalogue

"Spangler's use of historical relief carving fuses medieval gravitas with a folk vernacular, 'as though,' in the words of critic Ken Johnson, 'its author were a backwoods prophet carving his own Book of Revelations.'" – Steven Matijcio, "American Gothic: Aaron Spangler and Alison Elizabeth Taylor," Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, April 21 - August 21, 2011.

Time Out New York

"Aaron Spangler’s three blocky black wood carvings on metal stands pile up images and motifs, just like the ancient Romans heaped up captured armor and weapons as trophies. And Spangler’ s subjects similarly suggest the spoils of war…Spangler whittles with folksy charm, and like outsider art, his sculptures teem with hermetic meaning. But far from triumphal monuments, his works hint at some dark remembrance of imperial adventures." – Joseph R. Wolin, "Aaron Spangler, 'Government Whore'," Time Out New York, May 10, 2010.

PBS

Aaron Spangler, Common Ground, February 18, 2010 (First Air Date) [ Watch ]

Exhibition Catalogue

"I was thinking about how and why young Americans turned to the woods in search of a more meaningful, self-directed life and how that was mirrored in the movement of the early pioneers." – Aaron Spangler, "The Spectacular of Vernacular," Walker Art Center, 2010.

Exhibition Catalogue

"Aaron Spangler's large-scale wooden reliefs and sculptures offer a critical look into a specific American mythology firmly rooted in the middle and upper Midwest - the ideal of the peaceful, agrarian Heartland." – Charles Esche, "Heartland," Smart Museum of Art and Van Abbemuseum, 2008-2009.

Artforum

"Spangler…searches beyond--or, more accurately, before--the built environment, but as a native son of the prairie, he not only appears to have a more sympathetic eye for what remains in the wake of the region's industrial decline, but has resisted the conventions of wood carving by transforming a marginalized craft typically associated with bearded, plaid-shirted gentlemen of a certain age into a conduit for the mythology of the Midwest without diminishing its tactility or symbolic richness. The prairie, despite pioneering, settlement, and its eventual degeneration, asserts itself as a distinct element of the work." – Eugenia Bell, "Aaron Spangler," Artforum, January 2008. [ Read ]

The New York Times

"You don't see much wood carving in elite Chelsea galleries. An antiquated craft with little relevance to modern technologies of communication or to a competitive, fast-paced contemporary art market, it is too hard to learn and takes too much time to do well. So it is exciting to come upon the large, intricate reliefs carved from broad, three-inch slabs of maple and painted black by Aaron Spangler." – Ken Johnson, "AARON SPANGLER," The New York Times, February 18, 2005. [ Read ]

Flash Art

"On Aaron Spangler's studio wall hangs a photograph of a long-haired young man grasping a megaphone and shouting for all he's worth. The picture depicts a younger Spangler and the occasion is his war, that is, one that he planned and staged with a friend at college. Since he was a child, the Brooklyn-based Minnesota native has been fascinated by war's devastation and its potential as a metaphor for psychological conflict. However, while the U.S. is obsessed with terrorism in its cities and abroad, Spangler focuses on anarchy in rural America in large wood-carvings of battle ravaged landscapes." – Merrily Kerr, "Recuperating Revolt," Flash Art, May – June, 2004. [ Read ]

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