Unplugged, Sky Candy & Play Time

Greetings from the North Shore where summer continues despite the time of year. Instead of cool days, we’ve been hitting over 70 degrees along the North Shore, pretty amazing for mid-September.

All this heat has made a difference in Lake Superior, too.  Stephen Janasie, conservation technician for the Cook Soil and Water Conservation District, said that he and co-workers were out on Lake Superior on Tuesday, sampling the water. Lake Superior was 66 degrees Fahrenheit up and down the shore– pretty good for swimming, perhaps, but warm for our beautiful cold lake.

In terms of Sky Candy, the Harvest Super Moon with a partial eclipse on Tuesday night was outstanding, too. We found lots of photographs, but here’s a taste:

And the Northern Lights made an appearance this week, too.

Check out our Photograph section for more.

There’s no doubt that cold temperatures will get here eventually, but meanwhile, it’s time to celebrate. The weather should be perfect for North House Folk School’s Unplugged this weekend, as well as other community events.

Unplugged begins on Thursday with the Community Open House and the Welcome Center Grand Opening from 5-7 pm.

Look for tours, refreshments, live music, and a community gathering to celebrate the completion of this soon-to-be iconic new building on the North House campus.

Unplugged continues throughout the weekend with concerts, a Folk Artisan Marketplace, a live auction, classes, and presentations.

The Great Lake Swimmers and local musicians will perform on Thursday and Friday nights.

The Roe Family Singers will play for a free family concert on Saturday morning.

The Birch Bark Bash Dinner with Chef Scott Graden will be on Saturday night.

For more information and to get tickets, click here. 

There are other fun events this weekend, too.

Glass artist Jeri Persons will teach a class on how to make glass spinners or suncatchers at Joy and Company from 2-4 pm on Thursday.

All supplies will be provided as well as instruction. The cost is $20. Open to the public. Drop-ins are permitted.

Thursday is also Art Night at Joy and Company from 3:30-5 pm. This week it is White Box Art Night. Participants will be given a white box with art supplies inside and they can make art with them. Free, with a suggested $5 donation.

At 4:30 pm, the Grand Marais Farmer’s Market opens in the parking lot of the Cook County Community Center.

The market features a variety of locally grown produce, maple syrup, baked goods, and more. It runs from 4:30-6 pm. The public is invited. SNAP is accepted.

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

This talented band plays once a month at Up Yonder. Look for an inspiring musical performance and great danceable music. Free.

Saturday is busy in the county, too.

It starts with the Cook County Market, which is held from 10 am to 2 pm in the parking lot of The Hub. It is held every Saturday through MEA Weekend, weather permitting.

There are more than 20 vendors who sell at this market and feature everything from glass and pottery to paintings and semi-precious Lake Superior stones as well as chain-saw sculptures, lotions and balms, and sometimes homemade cookies. A perk is a spontaneous dog parade around noon. Open to all.

In Lutsen, the annual  Maple Fall Festival at Caribou Cream will be held from 10 am to 5 pm on Saturday.

The festival features lots of maple goodies for sale along with wood crafts, handmade jewelry, maple cotton candy, hand-harvested wild rice, goat’s milk lotion and soaps, baked goods, and more.

Caribou Cream is located 2 miles up the Caribou Trail from Hwy. 61 at 558 Caribou Trail. The public is invited.

Also on Saturday, a Batik Workshop with Kim Gordon will be held at the Seagull Lake Community Center from 10 am to 2 pm.

Participants will learn watercolor batik, a modern twist on the ancient Javanese art of batik. They will work with an image from an original winter watercolor batik of a chickadee. Participants will also learn a little history and theory and then participate in hands-on batiking.  The class will help participants gain skills in batik to continue exploring the medium on their own.

The cost is $35 if you are a member of the Gunflint Trail Historical Society or $45 for non-members. All materials and information on building a batik kit at home are provided.

The workshop is limited to eight participants. Call to reserve your spot at 218-388-9915 or email info@gunflinthistory.org.

Jan Siverston will give a presentation at the Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center from 2-3 pm on Saturday. The title of her presentation is “Once Upon an Isle.”

Jan founded Sivertson Gallery with her father, Howard, in 1980, focusing on regional artists. Shortly after, Howard decided he preferred to focus on his art and Jan went on to expand the gallery’s vision to “Art of the North,” traveling to the Canadian & Alaskan Arctic to find Inuit & Eskimo art to enhance the gallery offerings.

In 1995, she opened Siiviis in Duluth and had a gallery in Bayfield, Wis., for a short while.

Howard, an accomplished artist and author of “Once Upon an Isle,” grew up in Washington Harbor, Isle Royale.

The presentation will show the paintings Howard focused on in the early 1980s telling his story of life on Isle Royale from the 1930s through the 1970s when the commercial fishing culture began to disappear. All presentations are family-friendly and free to the public.

Duluth poet Bart Sutter will present an Author Talk at Drury Lane Books at 6 pm on Saturday.

He will talk about his latest book, “Cotton Grass: New and Selected Poems of the North.”  The natural world has been a major source of inspiration for Bart Sutter’s poetry for more than half a century, during which he has explored the backroads, trails, rivers, lakes, and bogs of the North, returning with vivid reports of otters eating golden walleyes, a big bull moose groaning for love, and the memorable music of a field full of bobolinks.

Sutter is the only writer to win the Minnesota Book Award in three categories—for poetry with The Book of Names: New and Selected Poems; for fiction with My Father’s War and Other Stories; and for creative non-fiction with Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map.

The author of 10 books, he has also written for Minnesota Public Radio, he has had four verse plays produced, and for more than thirty years he has performed as one half of The Sutter Brothers, a poetry-and-music duo. Among other honors, Bart served as the first Poet Laureate of Duluth and received the George Morrison Artist Award for his contribution to the arts in northeastern Minnesota.

Free. The public is invited.

Exhibits:

The Grand Marais Plein Air exhibit opened at the Johnson Heritage Post last Friday. More than 70 artists from the region participated in the week-long competition and their inspiring work fills all the rooms at the gallery.

Grand Marais plein air artist, Neil Sherman, won the Best Body of Work Award. The juror for the competition was Brock Larson of Duluth.

There is a wide variety of work and mediums in this outstanding exhibition, including oil, watercolor, and pastel. Winners in each medium were recognized.

There are more than 250 paintings in the exhibit, which continues through Oct. 6.

The Heritage Post is open from 10 am to 4 pm Wednesday through Saturday and from 1-4 pm Sunday. Free.

Watercolor artist Margie Helstrom is exhibiting her work in the Grand Marais Art Colony‘s Gallery Store.

To Helstrom, painting is exercising her spiritual self and that is defined as a place to play, experiment, and take risks. The exhibit continues through Sept. 28.

This Saturday is the last day the Tim Vahle Fine Art Gallery in Grand Marais will be open this season.

Vahle is a plein air artist inspired by the North Shore. The gallery will be open from 11 am to 4 pm. The public is invited.

In Duluth, the Joseph Nease Gallery is exhibiting work by photographer and digital creator Craig Blacklock.

The exhibit is entitled “Within the Waves: A Work in Four Movements” and is AI-generated from photographs he took of Lake Superior.

The Tweed Museum of Art is featuring a new exhibit entitled ” Screen Time: Photography and Video in the Internet Age.

Fun, mischievous, and subversive, the artists in “Screen Time” pursue playful, engaging, and thought-provoking approaches to contemporary culture. Turning the telescope in on themselves, they question the evolving role of still photography and video media in an age of digital communication, appropriation, and memes.

Drawn from one of the pre-eminent art collections in Europe, the exhibit includes an extraordinary group of artists separated by geography, ethnicity, and gender, but united in their concern with the onslaught of information in the 21st century. These works include wry references to historical photography and video art while exhibiting a fresh sensibility of humor, self-awareness, and inter-subjectivity, tackling serious issues of identity in a society that is by turns self-obsessed, skeptical, nostalgic, and funny.

“Screen Time” will be on view through Oct. 31. The Tweed is free and open to the public.

After almost 10 years, Franz Marc‘s “The Large Blue Horses” is on view again at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Acquired in 1942, the piece quickly became a visitor favorite and is considered one of the founding artworks of the Walker’s collection.

Experience this beloved piece in the exhibition “This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection.” Admission to the Walker is free on Thursdays.

 Artists At Work:

The Art Along the Lake Fall Studio Tour starts next Friday, Sept. 27, with more than 30 open studios and galleries participating in the 10-day event.

With 30 studios and galleries, it would be impossible to run images from everybody, but here are a few we found.

 Click here to see the artists and studios that will be participating this year, including addresses and more information. 

Artists at Work:

Online Findings:

Here’s a great video with weaver Christine Novotny:

Online Music: 

 Live Music:

Photographs: 

Here is a selection of photographs we found this week:

Wildlife:

More Mushrooms:

Potpourri: 

 Landscapes, Moonscapes & Waterscapes:

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Note: If you enjoyed NorthShore ArtScene this week, we hope to hear from you. Contributing to ArtScene lets us know that you enjoy what we provide each week and ensures a stable future. So please donate today. It’s easy. Just click on the button below. You can also choose to be a sustainer with a small donation each month.

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Joan

Thank you to Jeremy Lopez (Live Music Schedule, tech support), Yvonne Mills (proofreading,)  and Kari Carter (photo captions and research) who made this blog possible. Also thank you to Visit Cook County for its outstanding Calendar of Events.