Model home explosions, children dancing in Scottish kilts, men playing baseball on donkeys, murder-suicide aftermaths, linoleum, and America Legion parades. Life in Bloomington, Minnesota, during the 1950s and '60s runs the full gamut of the human experience. For years the Norling family made a hobby of capturing it. Using a police scanner for tip-offs, Irwin Norling, his wife June, and their three kids would often beat the press—and sometimes even the police—to gruesome crime scenes, where they would click away. The Norlings, led by father Irwin, captured the grisly as often as they captured the mundane, and though they would provide pics to police, lawyers, and local papers, their motivation mostly derived from the sheer love of posterity. Their prolific documentation of all things Bloomington was almost forgotten and lost to seldom-glanced-at archives, but fortunately, journalist Brad Zellar happened upon this hidden trove of suburban life in 2002 on a random trip to the Bloomington Historical Society. These smatterings of restaurant openings, head-on bridge collisions, and school dedication ceremonies have been reprinted in Zellar's new book, Suburban World: The Norling Photos, and selected images will be displayed at the Minnesota History Center's Library through mid-June. Opening reception 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 1. — Jessica Armbruster

It's hard to explain the suburbs to someone who has never lived in one. Like an exclusive fraternity, the 'burbs are full of cultural tics that influence our culture, political climate, and society in ways we might not even realize. The Walker's "Worlds Away" explores the split personality of the suburbs; how they can be simultaneously hailed as a utopian realization of family values and the American dream, and criticized for being an intestinal tract, shitting out conformity and homogeneity. In this group show featuring 30 artists and architects, works include colorful photography: a man mowing a dead lawn, a woman proudly standing in front of her McMansion in a silk robe, as well as architectural designs proposing the dawn of a new suburban aesthetic. The Walker After Hours Preview Party promises to be far more fun than a soccer-mom ice-cream social thanks to music by the appropriately named Alpha Consumer, and DJ Glen Leslie, and a screening of Jonathan Kaplan's Over the Edge (1979), a flick about a planned community and the teen hooligans who act out against it. Just don't try to make small talk about your sprinkler system or new SUV. The opening party is $35 from 9 p.m. to midnight on Friday, February 15. — Jessica Armbruster

Though August Sander's photography runs the gamut from nature to architecture to street performance, he is easily best known for his portraits, including his epic series, "People of the 20th Century." The extensive project of documenting German society began in the 1920s, growing to over 600 portraits of individuals who hailed mainly from the Cologne region. Subjects spanned the full spectrum, including wealthy politicians, homeless artists, farmers, housewives, children, and others. Sander sought objectivity in his photography, striving "to see things as they are and not as they should or could be." Perhaps this is why his work was banned by the Nazis in the 1930s; his frank and matter-of-fact photography captured a diverse, cosmopolitan, and culturally rich country, which conflicted with the Aryan ideology. Though Sander passed in 1964, his work carries on today with his grandson Gerhard, and his influence can be seen in the work of many later photographers, including Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon. The Weinstein Gallery will feature 23 large-format images from original negatives from his collection. Opening reception 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Friday, February 22. — Jessica Armbruster

Eugenics, the practice of changing the composition of a population through sterilization, or discouraging reproduction among people with "undesirable" traits and encouraging it among those with "desirable" traits, is an unsettling concept. But what "Deadly Medicine" shows about eugenics in Nazi Germany is downright terrifying. Organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the display demonstrates that eliminating non-Aryans or unwanted members of society from the German population was not and could not have been a solely military or government operation. It took the efforts and compliance of scientists, anthropologists, geneticists, and doctors to plan and execute a path toward eugenics, forced sterilization, and genocide. "Deadly Medicine" shows this tragedy of the rise of eugenics in Germany from before the Nazi regime to its peak through video of survivors, photographs, propaganda, and objects. Throughout the display's run, the Science Museum will host a lecture series with experts discussing the ideas "Deadly Medicine" presents. On April 10, Eva Kor, survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele's harsh experiments on twins at Auschwitz, will speak about her process of forgiveness. — Ben Palosaari

It turns out Lucille Ball's hair wasn't her only red trait. The FBI had a file outlining its suspicion that Ball was a scheming commie. This little-known nugget of America's history of terror and subversion is just one of hundreds displayed in this exhibit from the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., "The Enemy Within." Although the all-encompassing term "war on terror" has gained substantial popularity since 2001, administrations have been battling terroristic groups and individuals since the end of the American Revolution. A few prime examples include the 1919 bombing of Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer's home in response to his anticommunist raids, the explosion of the Munitions Depot in New York Harbor in 1916, and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In addition to these past terror threats, the exhibit identifies current hate groups functioning inside the U.S. today, and an eight-minute film, Under Siege (no, not the one starring Steven Segal fighting mercenaries on a Navy battleship, although that film would be fitting, too), analyzing current terror threats to America today. As part of the History Lounge series, this Tuesday at 7:00 p.m., author and Minnesota historian Annette Atkins and Minnesota Historical Society Curator Patrick Coleman will discuss how Minnesotans dealt with fear, terror, and government surveillance in the early part of the 20th century. — Ben Palosaari

The categorization of great coffee as a fine art has taken on a new meaning. After hitting Boston, New York, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C., over the past few years, the traveling photographic exhibition "The Birth of Coffee" is visiting Minnesota until May 7. Journalist and photographer Daniel Lorenzetti's most recent project tries to expand the scope of coffee past consumers' mouths and into the larger, overtly political world in which it is grown. The 40 black-and-white silver prints on display are quite fittingly, and literally, toned in coffee, and depict the lives of coffee growers in Brazil, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Yemen. Lorenzetti and his wife, Linda Rice Lorenzetti, traveled five different continents doing research that resulted in a co-authored coffee-table book, The Birth of Coffee, and this exhibition, which explore the individuals and unique experiences that contributed to the $4 latte so many people mindlessly gulp each day. — Amy Lieberman

Trisha Brown is an artist of and for our time, and has been for over 30 years. She began walking on walls and dancing on New York City rooftops in the hectic post-modern era of the 1960s. Since then she has made excursions into opera, visual art, even robotics. Her movement suggests the fluid architecture of, say, a liquefied Weisman museum: flowing in eccentric and unpredictable ways while maintaining a clarity of design that dazzles both the mind and the eye. This week, the Walker Art Center inaugurates "The Year of Trisha" with a show of her drawings that opens with a live performance by Brown in which she synthesizes dance and drawing by improvising movement across a large piece of paper with charcoal and pastel. Next week her company of superbly articulate dancers performs new and classic Brown works at Northrop Auditorium, including the splendid "Foray Forêt" to the eerie strains of a marching band playing from the lobby; "I Love My Robots" with, yes, honest-to-goodness robots (and one live dancer); and "Present Tense," a new work to music by that iconic innovator John Cage. One of the most articulate artists around, Brown will talk about her career in dance and the visual arts at a "Talking Art and Dance" event on April 22. Then she'll be back in July to remount several site-based works from the 1970s, including a work in which the dancers float on rafts in Loring Pond. Kudos to the Walker and Northrop for bringing us so many aspects of Brown, a major 20th-century artist who is still rocking and invigorating the 21st. Opening reception with dance/drawing performance by Brown is free at 7 p.m. (tickets available at 6 p.m. in the Bazinet Lobby) Thursday, April 17; free artist's talk 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 22; dance performance is $25-$42 at 8 p.m. Friday, April 25 at Northrop Auditorium (84 Church St. SE, Minneapolis; call 612.375.7600 for tickets). — Linda Shapiro