Fall Begins: Plein Air, Fall Studio Tour & Music

Greetings from the North Shore, where we are looking forward to two wonderful art events this month: The 2026 Grand Marais Plein Air Competition and the Art Along the Lake Fall Studio Tour.

Plein air painters from across the region will fan out around the county starting on Friday, Sept. 11, painting its beauty for a week, followed by an exhibition at the Johnson Heritage Post on Sept. 18.

Look for them in the woods, along the shore, in town, painting what they see. And don’t forget the Quick Paint, which will be held at Artist’s Point starting at 3:30 pm next Thursday. Watch the artists create a painting in an hour and a half. Free and open to the public. The opening reception for the exhibition is at 5 pm Friday, Sept. 18 at the Heritage Post. Stay tuned.

The next week, starting Sept. 25, is the Art Along the Lake Fall Studio Tour. This is a self-guided art tour featuring open studios and galleries scattered throughout the county. In all, 25 studios are featured this year. Many have a selection of guest artists, so there’s lots to see.

Expect to find paintings, prints, photography, mixed media works, fiber art, fused glass, ceramics, and more. The studios are open from 10 am to 5 pm daily during the tour. Free and open to all. Stay tuned.

And art-making continues.

Joy and Company will hold its weekly Art Counter project from 3-4:30 pm on Thursday.

The event is free and open to all. Supplies and instruction are provided. A $5 freewill donation is appreciated.

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

The market features a wide variety of locally grown produce, baked goods, artisan breads, jams and jellies, cut flowers, and more. Open to all. The market closes at 6 pm.

On Friday, Jeri Person will teach a fused glass class at Joy and Company from 1- 4 p.m.

Participants will learn about fused glass and have a choice of colors to work with. The pieces will be fired and ready for pickup after 2 pm on Saturday. They can be mailed for a $5 charge. The class costs $20.Walk-ins are frequently accepted, but to reserve a spot, email Person at jperson2@boreal.org 

The Superior Fall Trail Races are Sept. 11-12 this year. The event features 100MI, 50MI & 26.2MI races that are extremely hilly, rugged, and technical trail races that traverse the Sawtooth Mountain Range via the Superior Hiking Trail.

 All three distances are run point-to-point, finishing at Caribou Highlands Lodge. For more information about the races, click here.  

Saturday opens with the Cook County Market, which is held in the parking lot of The Hub from 10 am to 2 pm.

Local artists and artisans offer everything from paintings to pottery, rock jewelry to hand-dyed fabrics, handmade balms to fused glass art, to name a few. Open to all. Bump Blomberg will play.

This fun, casual workshop is designed for beginners or anyone who wants to expand their artistic expression. You will learn the basics of shape, value, color, and more while participating in exciting activities that lead to a completed landscape painting that Tim personally guides you through.  The class is $195 and includes a complete painting kit that you will take home to use for future paintings.

To register and for more information, click here.

The Grand Portage Lodge and Casino will host a Classic Car Show from 11 am to 4 pm on Saturday.

The event will feature food, fun, and lots of interesting cars and trucks. For more information and to register, click here. Open to all.  

The Grand Marais Public Library will host Ryan Rodgers for an Author Talk at 6 pm on Saturday.

Rodgers is a freelance writer, a frequent paddler, and author of Winter’s Children: A Celebration of Nordic Skiing, also published by the University of Minnesota Press. He is a regular contributor to several regional publications and lives with his family in Duluth.

After his presentation, there will likely be time for questions. He will also sign books. Free and open to all.

Also on Saturday night, nationally acclaimed singer/songwriter Charlie Parr will be in concert at the Arrowhead Center for the Arts at 6:30 pm, hosted by WTIP as part of its Scenic Route Music Series.

FYI: The concert is free, and it is sold out.

On Sunday, the  Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center will hold its regular Monday Porch Talks.

 The talks focus on the Northwoods and are free and open to all. They are held at 1 pm.

Exhibits: 

This is the last weekend to see Marcia Roepke’s exhibit at the Johnson Heritage Post,  “Painting Pictures with Words, Telling Stories with Paint.”

Marcia paints in a number of different media and is inspired by the North Shore and the Boreal forest. The exhibit closes on Sunday.

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

A new exhibit has opened at Studio 21 featuring paintings by Sue Rauschenfels and tapestries by Emily Wick. It is part of the Rising Arrowhead Artists series. The exhibit runs through the end of  September.

Rauschenfels’s layered compositions combine paint, texture, and movement to create richly worked surfaces that feel both intuitive and deliberate. Her work explores abstraction, memory, and the passage of time, inviting viewers to uncover meaning within each layered mark.

Wick’s handwoven tapestries offer a tactile counterpart, where color, structure, and material come together through slow, deliberate process. Rooted in tradition yet distinctly contemporary, her work emphasizes texture and pattern while reflecting a deep connection to place. Together, Rauschenfels and Wick create a dialogue between gesture and structure, surface and thread—highlighting the beauty of process and the expressive potential of material.

Studio 21 is open from 10 am to 5 pm Thursday through Saturday. Free.

Painter Mary Ann Cleary is exhibiting work at Tettegouche State Park this month. She is inspired by northern landscapes and works in pastel and oil.

Her work is on display in the Great Hall at Tettegouche. The exhibit is free and open to all.

The Duluth Art Institute has a number of exhibits, including “Send Flowers” by Cody Paulson and Stephen Pestalozzi.

“Send Flowers” takes the postcard as its medium. A postcard, often overlooked as ephemera, becomes a centerpiece in the language of care and human relationship. This exhibition asks the viewers to notice visual language in their day to day—the billboard we pass by, or the digital consumption of art on our personal devices. Art surrounds us—let’s slow down and smell the flowers.

Mailable postcards fill the gallery walls with an illustrated garden, each adorned with unique, hand-designed flowers, inviting viewers to pause, pluck their flower of choice, write a note on the back, and mail it off, sending a little piece of the exhibition to someone they love—all from within the gallery. The gesture recalls the universal symbolism of flowers and the lost art of handwritten mail. Transforming a small act of connection into a lasting, collaborative art experience.

 The exhibit continues through Oct. 2.

The installation, Collection in Focus: Martine Syms, is currently on view at the Walker Art Center.

Martine Syms’s (US, b. 1988) The Borrowed Lady (2016) examines how decontextualized gestures circulate online. Against an all-purple backdrop, four video monitors stand in a circle, facing inward. The artist Diamond Stingily appears in patterned blips across each screen—snapping, calling out, shifting her body. Evoking the public sphere of the internet, the installation replicates the web’s dense network of posts, reposts, and clapbacks.

The Borrowed Lady emerged from a moment when social media was rapidly transforming the way that culture spread. In the piece, Stingily performs a series of gestures drawn in part from GIFs and memes of Black women’s expressions. A decade after its creation, the work remains both a portrait of an earlier media moment and a reflection of the continued hypervisibility of Blackness in visual culture.

This presentation is part of the Walker’s Collection in Focus series, spotlighting major works in the museum’s collection.

To find out more, click here.

Artists at Work:

A Thank You

“Thank you, Betsy Bowen, for all you’ve done and all you continue to gift us.” – Layne Kennedy.

Betsy’s decades-long contributions to not only thousands of kids (and parents) around the world with her brilliant woodcut Children’s Books, but also her contributions to her local community are enormous. If I could give out a Presidential Medal, Betsy would get one, maybe two. See her work here.

Online Findings:

From lake to table: Turning  invasive crayfish in Cook County into a Minnesota delicacy

Online Music:

Photographs:

Here is a selection of what we found this week:

Wildlife: 

 Flowers:

Potpourri: 

Landscapes, Skyscapes & Waterscapes:

 Have a great weekend, everyone!

Thinking Ahead: Winter Prep Time! Contribute to NorthShore ArtScene to keep the heat on and the electricity flowing this winter. Thank you so much for your continued support.

 

Here’s a big thank you to Jeremy Lopez for the Live Music Schedule and tech support, and to Yvonne Mills for proofreading this week. And a special thank you to Visit Cook County for its great Events Calendar.