Sun spots, Bears & Flowers

Greetings from the North Shore where we continue to be inspired by beauty in our flower gardens. We also were awed by the night sky earlier this week as the sun hurled large energy packets toward us, sparking an incredible display of northern lights.

On the other side of the happiness/delight spectrum, a couple of black bears have decided to hang out in Grand Marais to sample what people are feeding their birds and putting in their trash.

Editorial comment: Yikes!

Meanwhile, art-making continues.

The Memory Cafe (Care Partners) and the Grand Marais Art Colony have organized three art-making workshops this week to help support the caregivers of people with memory loss.

On Thursday, Aug. 15, spouses and loved ones are invited to Memory Cafe: Weaving Memories Together 1-2:30 pm. 

Participants will creatively connect using hands-on, engaging artistic processes while creating a unique project that will serve as a memento of the shared experience.

On Friday, the workshop, Heart of the Caregiver, will be held at Studio 21 from noon to 2 pm.

 Participants will share lunch followed by an art activity using mixed media and various art materials to create their own fabric heart, incorporating personal and symbolic touches.

Art therapist Erin Rafferty-Bugher will guide the group with prompts to explore individual needs for personal support, reprieve, and respite from the daily ongoing demands of caregiving. As an option, participants are invited to bring personal fabrics and materials such as beads, baubles, charms, ribbons, and ephemera to add to their pieces. Options for hand sewing will also be available for this activity but not required. All materials are provided and no experience is required.

To register for lunch (free,) click here. 

On Saturday, the Memory Care workshop is entitled Avoiding Practioner Burnout: Resiliency Trees and will be held at Studio 21 from 9 am to noon. 

This experiential-based hands-on workshop invites any area practitioners working in healthcare and caregiving spaces to explore personal resilience and strength. Whether you are a social worker, an educator, a physician, a therapist, or working in physical or occupational therapy, this session is for you. CEUs are available.

Free. Pre-registration is requested.

Also on Thursday, Joy and Company will hold a White Box Art Night from 3:30-5 pm.

Participants will be given a white box filled with art supplies to create something beautiful and interesting. Free, with a suggested $5 donation.

Note: Joy and Company will be closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays through October this year for seasonal rejuvenation  It will be open all the other days from 10 am to 5 pm.

The Grand Marais Farmer’s Market will be held from 4:30-6 pm on Thursday in the parking lot of the Cook County Community Center.

Look for lots of locally grown produce, including tomatoes and zucchini, baked goods, homegrown mushrooms, fresh flowers, and more. Open to all.

On Thursday evening, Grand Marais potter, Adrea Beres, will lead a Third Thursday Skill Share on how to make monoprints on clay at the Art Colony’s Ceramics Studio from 5:30-8 pm. Free.

Beres is a skilled potter who is currently working on a project to monoprint native plants on her work. Open to all.

The North Shore Community Swing Band will play for Jazz Night at Up Yonder from 7-9 pm Thursday.

On Friday, the Johnson Heritage Post will open a new exhibit, Northwoods Quilt Art, with a reception from 5-7 pm.

Artist Beret Borson Nelson is inspired by the Northwoods and expresses this through masterful quilting. The public is invited.

On Saturday, the Cook County Market opens in the parking lot of The Hub at 10 am.

The market features a wide variety of arts and crafts made by local artists. Look for pottery and paintings, fiber art, jewelry, local Lake Superior stones, glasswork, and more. The market is open until 2 pm. The public is invited.

Also on Saturday, the Grand Marais Public Library will present Celtic music by  Willow Brae with Andrea Stern and Laura MacKenzie.

“Brae” is a Lowland Scots word meaning hillside by a river, and their name refers to a bank of willow trees swaying alongside a Scottish stream. Andrea and Laura skillfully convey traditional music from the Scottish and Irish countryside. The program will feature their unique array of instruments while providing history and stories about the instruments and the music. Open to all. Free.

On Sunday, Sugarloaf Cove Nature Center will present Diver Van Avery and “Writing as Listening,” a free creative writing workshop. The event will be held at Sugarloaf from 1-3 pm.

Van Avery will lead a tour around Sugarloaf Cove and offer writing prompts to help people practice writing as an act of opening up, receiving, and connecting to the surrounding elements. Participants will find a location that speaks to them and draft an essay, a short story, or a poem. There will be time to share their work-in-progress if desired. Open to all. Free.

Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center will host Rita Walaszek Arndt on Sunday from 2-3 pm. She will give a presentation on The Indigenous History of Minnesota.

 

She is a citizen of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe and is also of Polish descent. Rita began working for MNHS as a cataloger in the collections department and soon supported the NAAIR program. Rita moved to the Native American Initiatives Department in 2020 where she continued to support NAAIR and other programming and outreach efforts.

Through her work, Walaszek Arndt is focused on Indigenous representation in the historical society and encourages people to think differently about the land now known as Minnesota. She tells about the challenges of cataloging MNHS’s Indigenous object archive, examining the history of this land beyond statehood, and how Indigenous art is inseparable from culture and Indigenous ways of living.

Open to all. Free.

Also on Sunday, The Grand Marais Writer’s Guild will hold a session at Cook County Higher Education or via Zoom from 2-3:30 pm. The workshop is led by Rose Arrowsmith. For the Zoom link, inquire at arrowsmith.mn@gmail.com

This month’s Full Moon Poetry Bonfire at Drury Lane Books will be held from 6-8 pm on Monday. It will be led by poet, Sandra Hisakuni, author of “The Northland Beckons: Focusing on Haiku.” 

Hisakuni is an English Language teacher who has taught in Japan, China, and the United States. She enjoys spending time in the wilderness and with her son and daughter. She lives in Minneapolis. Following her reading, there will be an open mic for participants. The public is invited.  Free.

The Cook County Chamber of Commerce will host a Membership Drive Fish Fry and Raffle Drawing on Wednesday from 4- 6 pm at the Visit Cook County Information Center. All welcome.

Tickets are on sale now for a Grey Duck Paddleboard, on display at the Information Center. The drawing will be held at 6 pm.

Proceeds of the raffle benefit the Great Place Project, which supports projects that fall outside the typical operational budget, encouraging creativity and innovation in beautifying the local business environment. Chamber members can secure financial assistance ranging from $250-$1,000 per grant.

This year, the Cook County Chamber of Commerce was able to award $7,000 in funds with the help of the Cook County/Grand Marais EDA, Lutsen Tofte Tourism Association, and Grand Marais Area Tourism.

The 2024 winners are  Shook, the Gunflint Trail Historical Society, Superior Creamery, Voyageur Brewing, World’s Best Donuts, The Big Lake, Roam & Whimsy, and Joy and Company. 

In another poetry event, the Grand Marais Public Library will hold a poetry workshop from 6-8 pm on Wednesday at the library with Emily August.

August is an associate professor of literature at Stockton University, where she teaches courses in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, literature of crime and detection, medical humanities, and creative writing. Her debut poetry collection, “The Punishments Must Be a School,” explores themes of domestic violence and intergenerational trauma. She divides her time between Lake Superior’s North Shore and the Atlantic Ocean’s Jersey Shore.

To participate fully, attendees should bring drafts of poems and ideas for new poems. This workshop will provide the opportunity to devise, revise, read aloud, and receive constructive feedback.

Neither registration nor a fee is required. Attendees should bring both paper and either a pen or pencil. Non-alcoholic beverages with lids are welcome. For more details about this poetry workshop, email Ryan at Ryan.Leng@alslib.info.

Exhibits:

Grand Marais Art Colony’s Gallery Store is exhibiting fabric appliqués by Natalija Walbridge. She is one of four Arrowhead regional artists who were selected to show work at the Gallery Store this summer.

The fiber artist works in her home studio on Park Point. In 2014 she established a business making canvas bags with hand-printed art under the name Dock 5. She has recently returned to her roots as a fine artist to create a series of large-scale fabric appliqués that are inspired by the local ecosystem and the importance of biodiversity. Her exuberant use of color gives the viewer a sense of joy, similar to experiencing the wonder of nature. Her dedication to her craft is evident in every stitch of her work. The exhibition runs through Aug. 31.

View Natalija’s work at: www.dock-5.com

This exhibit is sponsored in part by Joy and Company.

Embodying the North Shore, the summer exhibition at Studio 21 runs through the end of the month.

All the artwork was donated to the Art Colony by  Gene and Bonnie Martz and is currently on sale. For more information, contact the Art Colony at 218-387-2737.

Emily Donovan is exhibiting her watercolor paintings at Tettegouche State Park this month.

Donovan mixes her own paints with natural minerals and is inspired by landscapes of the North Shore. The exhibit continues in The Great Hall through the end of August. Free.

Craig Blacklock has opened an exhibit at the Joseph Nease Gallery in Duluth. Entitled Within the Waves – A Work in Four Movements, the exhibit features digitally modified images of the waters of Lake Superior.

The entire exhibition is created from photographs made for his book, “Light Waves, Abstract Photographs of Reflections from Lake Superior,” which make up the exhibition’s first movement. For subsequent movements, Blacklock uses techniques that took him months to master, doing a multigenerational dance between newly-developed AI sharpening and enlarging, and traditional editing software.

The metaphors Blacklock explores begin with his musings on the dismaying and disorienting state of the world during the start of the pandemic in Light Waves, which leads to our desire to escape into nature in Dream Waves. Encroachment brings us up to our present inflection point: whether we will continue down a path of growth and environmental destruction, or be able to reverse course in time to mitigate the worst ramifications of out-of-control population growth and consumption. The final movement, Lamentations, looks at a theoretical future, warning us of what inaction may look like.

The exhibit continues through Sept. 28.

Upcoming:

John Schroeder Day will be held on Aug. 24 in three locations this year: the Cross River Heritage Center, Temperance Traders, and the Schroeder Town Hall.

Local artists who would like to exhibit and sell their work at the Heritage Center are invited to contact Katie at businessmanager@crossriverheritage.org for more information.

The Radio Waves Music Festival will be held at Sweetheart’s Bluff in the Grand Marais Rec Park Sept. 6-8.

There are a number of new acts this year as well as old favorites, including the Carpenter Ants, who will be doing a Gospel Hour show on Sept. 8 with John Ellison. To see the lineup and learn more, click here. Stay tuned!

Opportunities:

A Call for Artists: Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church will once again sponsor a community art exhibit at the Johnson Heritage Post. The theme this year is Love Your Neighbor. The exhibit will be from Nov. 1 through Dec. 8. The show is open to all community members of every age.

Art in a variety of media will be accepted, including clay, paint, fiber, words, glass, etc. When they create, artists are asked to consider ways that art can inspire awe, care, and, ultimately, love. How might your craft invite others to feel deserving of love, to know their limitless supply of love can be shared? 

Artists are asked to submit the title of their piece (or pieces) to the Spirit of the Wilderness by Oct. 1. Questions? Email spirit@boreal.com

 Artists at Work:

Online Findings:

 Online Music:

Photographs:

Here’s a selection of the photos we found this week:

Wildlife: 

 Potpourri:

Flowerscapes: 

Landscapes, Skyscapes & Waterscapes:

 

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

 

Hoping that we hear from you this week!

As you can probably tell,  I put a lot of effort and thought into crafting an interesting experience for you every week. It is fun, and your support shows me that it is worth it.

To contribute, just click on the link below. And thank you!

Here’s a big Thank You to Jeremy Lopez, Live Music schedule, tech advice;  Yvonne Mills, proofreading;  and Kari Carter, photo captions, for their support in putting out this week’s issue. And Thank You to Visit Cook County for its outstanding Events Calendar.