Graphic of participating galleries for the 2016 Gallery Hop, including Duluth Art Institute, Siiviiss of Sivertson Gallery, Lake Superior Art Glass, Washington 315 Gallery and others. Photo courtesy of Art for Earth Day Gallery Hop on Facebook.

Five years after the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of what would have been the 30th annual Art for Earth Day Gallery Hop, no plan is in place to bring the event back. But its organizers are still considering some type of reboot.

“So many people that were involved in helping are retired or they aren’t in a gallery anymore,” said Bev Johnson, owner of Art Dock in the DeWitt-Seitz Marketplace and co-founder of the Gallery Hop. “And so to get it motivated, (to get) people interested in doing it again, would take a big effort.”

From 1990 to 2019, the Gallery Hop carved out a space for Duluth-area artists and art enthusiasts to come together and appreciate visual art, view art demos and mingle. Held each year on the Saturday closest to Earth Day, the event involved multiple galleries holding simultaneous receptions, with attendees “hopping” from one location to another at their whim.

The first Gallery Hop occurred on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. The event was created by representatives of the Duluth Art Institute, Art Dock and Art Options as a way to both celebrate Earth Day and promote their galleries.

“The three of us … got together and we said, ‘Well, why not have an Earth Day themed event that we can all promote together?’” Johnson said.

Bev Johnson, owner of Art Dock in the Dewitz-Seitz Marketplace, is a co-founder of the Art for Earth Day Gallery Hop. Photo by Delaney Shipman.

The first year, eight galleries were involved. The event grew to 20 shops at its peak with galleries in Duluth and Superior collaborating with the Tweed Museum of Art at UMD in addition to the Duluth Art Institute.

It was a free, all-day affair, with the Port Town Trolley transporting attendees in early years, and musicians and dancers busking in the streets. The mid-April event date meant Duluth’s winter weather was beginning to turn, and community members were ready to get out of the house again and explore the city.

The art collections centered around Earth, with themes of recycling, nature and even doomsday. Art ranged in medium, from painting, to pottery, to photography, to sculpture. Some artists chose to repurpose garbage or natural material, such as styrofoam to-go containers, driftwood and wrappers.

“Artists would take those containers and make stuff out of it for their artwork, so that it wasn’t going into the landfills, it was being repurposed,” Johnson said. “It was a niche for an event or an activity that people wanted to do, and then we were all consciously aware, especially of the people that came through, they loved the environment, they loved the northland.”

The abrupt cancellation in 2020 was unavoidable, but as the pandemic lingered into 2021 it slowly unraveled the event’s organizational momentum.

“We started in January (2020), we had all this information ready to go to print, to be advertised, and then we were in the shutter,” Johnson said. “And then the next year it was like, well, what if we shut down again? Because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Much planning went into coordinating the Gallery Hop each year. Joining Johnson as a key organizer was former Art Options owner Sue Pavlatos. In the early years Geri Michelli, from the Duluth Art Institute was also heavily involved. They typically spent four months planning the event, which is why Johnson is a bit leery of bringing it back.

“You have to make five, six, ten phone calls, just to get information, and then you have to do it again to get the money, and it was a hassle at times,” she said.

Also, some formerly involved galleries have closed since 2020.

Johnson’s gallery, Art Dock, was a stop in the Gallery Hop. Photo by Delaney Shipman.

Johnson floated the idea of having a gallery crawl, or similar event, that might take less planning than the Gallery Hop.

The hop was perceived as the start of the “arts season,” as Pavlatos put it. “It was a kickoff of the arts; it got more people and more groups of people in there than would have, because people would go from gallery to gallery in ways that they wouldn’t do otherwise.”

Beyond Earth Day and promotion, the Gallery Hop and its planning process was a way for Duluth galleries to connect with each other.

“That was nice about it, it made communications open between the galleries and the artists,” Pavlatos said.

Johnson echoed that sentiment.

“Everybody was doing their thing, and we were also, as a community, working together, as an art group,” she said.