Weekend Best Bets: August 3-5

Your Twin Cities to-do list this weekend includes the metro’s most luxurious homes, a taco crawl, Miranda Sings, and the Uptown Art Fair

Friday, August 3

The Most Beautiful Homes

What: Midwest Home Luxury Home Tour
When: Noon-6 p.m.
Where: Various Twin Cities metro locations
Eight metro houses open their doors the first three weekends of August to show visitors what million-dollar works of art look like when the best builders, designers, and contractors come together to build an abode. In Orono, you’ll find a modern mountain retreat; in Linden Hills, an urban cottage; and in Lake Elmo, homes that look out over the Royal Club Championship Golf Course. Other locations include Afton and the Twin Cities. Take a few ideas, or many. Learn more.

Uptown Funk

What: Uptown Art Fair
When: Friday, noon-8 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sunday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Where: Uptown, Minneapolis
As the second-most attended event in Minnesota (after the State Fair, of course), the Uptown Art Fair brings in about 375,000 visitors and features some 340 fine artists from local neighborhoods and around the world. Running from Hennepin Avenue to the Mall, the 55th annual fair features sculpture, drawing, glass, paintings, jewelry, wood, ceramics, photography, and mixed media. It’s a great place to buy something compulsively that you hope ties a room together. Don’t miss the beer garden and the tons and tons of food trucks. Read more and check out another art fair (in Powderhorn) this weekend here.


Saturday, August 4

Creatures and Coloring Books

What: SooVAC Opening Reception: Out of My Book and A Monster Anthology
When: 6-9 p.m.
Where: 2909 Bryant Ave. S., Minneapolis
The Soo Visual Arts Center, in southwest Minneapolis, keeps at its mission—to bring under-represented artists into the light—with two new exhibits this weekend: In Out of My BookIsraeli artist Yael Ben-Simon has cracked open a 17th-century tome of classic iconography, taken eight pages—depicting allegorical personifications of Melancholy, Lust, Sincerity, Study, Inspiration, Will, and Imitation—and colored over them as if they were torn from a coloring book. Ben-Simon is interested in how one thing can come to symbolize an idea, and how those symbols carry into theater and politics. In A Monster Anthology, Minneapolis artist Christopher Harrison uses paintings, sculptures, and printed works to track the evolution of an imaginary, colorful species—its development mirroring humankind’s. To create these creatures, Harrison drew from science fiction, abstract painting, and indigenous aesthetics. Learn more.


Sunday, August 5

Taco Crawl on Lake Street

What: Taco Tour on Lake Street
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
Where: Start point at 10 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis
Lake Street, in south Minneapolis, has a stretch of great Latin restaurants. Nine of them offer up their take on tacos. The $2 fee gets you two tickets, two tacos (the other seven going for full price), plus access to vans shuttling people along the tour route, if you opt out of walking or biking. Look out for indigenous music and dance as you stop by El Nuevo Miramar, El Nuevo Rodeo, La Mexicana Supermercado, Salsa a la Salsa, Sonora Grill, Taco Taxi, Taqueria La Hacienda, Taqueria & Tortilleria La Poblanita, and Taqueria Los Ocampo. Last year, this bash brought out more than 3,500 people. Learn more.

 

Your YouTube Fix: Miranda Sings

What: Miranda Sings Live…No Offense
When: 7:30 p.m.
Where: Orpheum Theater, 910 Hennepin Ave., Minneapolis
If you don’t know who this is, your kids surely do—and you might recognize her from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon or Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Miranda Sings is a Charlie Chaplin or Groucho Marx for the digital age: a goofy, obnoxious character played with vaudevillian exaggeration by comedian, singer, and YouTube star Colleen Ballinger. With her trademark, overdrawn red lipstick—always painted onto either a repulsed scowl or sly grimace—Sings presents comedic skits and songs while splitting her stage time with the normal, much-less-cartoonish Ballinger. Learn more.