Art
Pond Hockey Rink in Shape of Minnesota
What says Minnesota more than pond hockey? How about a rink in the shape of Minnesota? I made this rink in the shape of Minnesota over the course of two days. The project took a total of a few hours and I had some help on the final shovel off.
Arrowhead Christmas by Knute Heldner
Impressionist painter Knute Heldner lived in Duluth during the early 1900s.
The Most Read Saturday Essays of 2016
Perfect Duluth Day launched its “Saturday Essay” series at the beginning of 2016 and it quickly became the most popular recurring feature on the website. With the first set of 50 essays now complete, it’s time to take a look back at which pieces have been the most read of the bunch so far, according to the folks at Google Analytics.
Before we get all Casey Kasem, a few notes about how the “Saturday Essay” feature works: Yours truly, Paul Lundgren, is the editor. A small group of writers are featured somewhat regularly, but anyone is welcome and encouraged to submit a piece for consideration. Shoot an email to paul @ perfectduluthday.com to inquire.
And now, the countdown … (more…)
Selective Focus: Hansi Johnson
For years, Hansi Johnson has worked as an advocate for outdoor recreation in our region, and his photography shows the rest of the world how lucky we are to live here.
H.J.: I am a photographer and I generally shoot full frame DSLR. However I am not married to any one camera, aspect ratio or format. I have published photos from my Iphone, my cropped camera as well.
I am generally considered an action photographer but like all labels that description is not quite right. My style is more around environmental photographs but instead of shots that only show landscapes I love to position a person interacting in that space as well, generally enjoying some form of adventurous outdoor recreation.
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Selective Focus: Ivy Vainio
Ivy Vainio is a self-taught photographer and this week she talks about how she got started, how her photography has grown, and where she would like to take it.
I.V.: I started taking photographs in about 2001 when the office that I work in got a Olympus SLR camera to help document our programs and events. With time, I became better at taking photographs and started to have a yearning to try this art form outside of the University. My husband surprised me, in 2011, and bought me a Canon Rebel camera from a local pawn shop in Duluth one day and that is all I needed to fuel my passion for digital photography. I took that camera out in our woods, and played around with it. It was in the summer of 2011 when I got my big break. I was at a powwow with my camera and I got a call from Jana Peterson of the Pine Journal newspaper in Cloquet. She heard that I was at the powwow and she asked if I would take a couple photographs for the newspaper. I told her yes and I have been taking photographs ever since with more intent of getting the perfect shot.
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The Event of the Century: Standing Strong for Our Precious Water
The Standing Strong for Our Precious Water Art Exhibit and Concert Benefit for Standing Rock took place this past Friday at AICHO Galleries and was an amazing success. 400+ people showed up, raising a preliminary estimate of above $7,000 for Standing Rock water protectors and Honor the Earth (and that number continues to rise as more artwork is purchased over the course of the next month). The evening featured artwork by roughly 100 different visual artists, with musical performances by Annie Humphrey, Keith Secola, Jamie Labrador, #theindianheadband, Oshkii Giizhik Singers, Jake Vainio, and Richie Townsend. (more…)
Selective Focus: Chris Monroe
If Duluth has an official “look,” it’s a Chris Monroe cartoon. There is no possible way that you haven’t seen her art at some point. She has a show of new work opening Monday, Dec. 12, at in the Zeitgeist Arts Café. In this week’s “Selective Focus” she fills us in on some of the details.
C.M.: I work in several different mediums — gouache, pen and ink for the comics and other drawings, and oil pastel. My upcoming show is primarily oil pastel. It is the medium I often go to for fun. (more…)
Streets of Duluth: 1968-1971
For those who missed the exhibition of D. R. Martin photos on display at the Red Herring Lounge this past summer, or those who want to revisit it, the images are now available online at curator Kip Praslowicz’s website. It’s a collection of street photography shot in the Duluth area between 1968 and 1971. As evidenced by the sample above, these are hot!
Selective Focus: Brian Barber
This week’s Selective Focus subject is … me. You may be thinking, gee whiz, PDD must have run out of Selective Focus subject ideas. Far from it. We still have a long list of artists we want to include, but we’re also open to more suggestions. If you know someone doing interesting work in the visual arts, or if you would like to be featured, send us a note. [email protected] I’ve jammed myself in the schedule here because I’ve got a show of new work opening at Beaner’s next Thursday.
B.B.: Graphic Artist is probably the best way to describe what I do. I work as an illustrator, designer, animator, and videographer. In college I studied pretty equal parts design, illustration and photography, so I guess this mix of work makes sense, and I feel lucky to have the variety every day. I’ve done children’s books, logos, brochures, TV ads, training videos, package design, interactive design, character design, prints for sale, music videos, and more. (more…)
Selective Focus: Jeff Ruprecht
Jeff Ruprecht is a curious guy who’s not afraid to jump into new things. He tells us how he sorts through a constant stream of ideas and projects.
J.R.: I work in many mediums and categories. I’m a graphic designer first, but I consider myself a “maker” at heart. I love to build things, make things, sketch things. I love technology, but love true craftsmanship and ways of doing things. (more…)
Video: Low Remixing Shakespeare
This collaborative performance and art installation at Karpeles Manuscript Museum took place Oct. 22. Performing the music in this clip is Low; the projections are the work of media artist Joellyn Rock. The event was held to mark the arrival of Shakespeare’s First Folio at UMD’s Tweed Museum. The video is by Blue Boat Films.
Selective Focus: Aryn Bergsven
Aryn Bergsven is an artist and an art teacher at Harbor City International School. She talks about sharing her time and energy between her own work and the work of her students.
A.B.: I work in acrylics primarily but also dabble in watercolors and ink, mostly for sketching and traveling. I love to work with portraiture. This has always been an area of interest for me, even when I was in middle and high school. I think it’s even more compelling to me now though as a mother and an art teacher. So much of my life focuses on people and relationships I have with them that the act of really studying faces and reading between the lines has become second nature in some ways.
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Russell Prather’s “Rope” takes Arrowhead Regional Biennial prize
Russell Prather’s “Rope.” Photo by Tim White.
Russell Prather’s “Rope,” a hanging piece made with acrylic on layers of polyester film, took the $1,000 first-place prize at the Duluth Art Institute’s 61st Arrowhead Regional Biennial last week. Prather is a professor at Northern Michigan University who teaches British literary and visual culture of the 18th through 20th centuries. (more…)
PDD Holiday Socks
We’re going to try something, offering some PDD Holiday swag for you to sport at your holiday gatherings. You can pre-order some Warhol-ish funky socks with the PDD smokin’ reindeer on them.
If 20 or more people order them, the order goes through, and everyone receives socks in about 4 weeks. If less than 20 people order, they don’t get made. So spread the news, we’ve only got 7 days.
Click here to order:
bakdrop.com/products/perfectduluthday
Customized Alphabet Letter Wall Art
Words From Nature is a new business created for an entrepreneurship project at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Our business allows customers to customize their home decor by creating their own alphabet letter art. Our large collection of letters are pictures from the outdoors and illustrate the beauty of nature. All of our pictures were taken by us, and only offered by us. (more…)
Message to a White Boy Who in Some Ways Reminds Me of Me
Dear Russell:
I want to tell you some things that might not make sense. I wish an adult would have seen me clearly enough to know I needed to hear similar things when I was 18. Do you know what I mean when I invoke the impact of being seen?
You’re a sharp kid. Like a lot of sharp kids, especially ones in their first semester of college, you know both way more and way less than you realize. I was the same way. So was—so is—every other adult, including every other teacher, you’ve known and will know.
You should accept nothing from us as truth before vetting it against your own inquiry. We do probably know more than you and your peers know about some things. We also tend to indoctrinate young people instead of helping them become autonomous thinkers. Please heed Walt Whitman and “re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.”
By “inquiry” I mean deep, active curiosity that includes interrogating your own thinking at least as much as you interrogate the thinking of people you disagree with or consider stupid. It’s very hard work. It’s not just navel-gazing. You will find few examples of how to do it well. Even after doing it for years—after it has helped you learn to discern valid insight from self-serving magical thinking—it will lead you to many inaccurate conclusions because all perception is distorted and opinions can definitely be wrong. (more…)
Selective Focus: Scott Lunt
No doubt, if you live in Duluth, you’ve been exposed to the work of Scott Lunt, aka Starfire; founder of the Homegrown Music Festival, co-founder of Father Hennepin and Perfect Duluth Day, radio host on KUMD, the list goes on. His latest endeavor is St1tch:::red, a quilt show at the Red Herring, opening Saturday November 12. He tells us how he got involved in the craft.
S.L.: I cut up perfectly good fabric and sew it back together again. I made my first quilt about twenty years ago and another five years after that. At the time I knew nothing about quilting and had to enlist my mother to help me finish. Then about a year-and-a-half ago Karen McTavish opened a quilting studio in Duluth, I took my mom to visit since she is a long time quilter and something clicked. Two weeks later a sewing machine showed up at my door (thanks Mom!) and I have been making about a quilt a month since.
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Woven into the tapestry of an old home
Recently a reporter came a calling, and we had to prepare our house for a photojournalist in just four short days. In the process I achieved a lifelong goal of being clutter-free, and became a better steward of our century-old home that has had only four owners over a breathtaking sweep of history. This place has housed a U.S. Senator, and also Richard Gastler, the beloved Denfeld teacher.
When we moved in we bought the eyesore on the block, because it was all we could afford, and have grown to cherish it as we make a large portion of our living between these four walls. I jotted down some thoughts over at Ed’s Big Adventure, and you can take a look-see at Christa Lawler’s marvelous column here about my daydreaming wife, who is cranking out another amazing painting at this very moment.
Selective Focus: Bryan French
Bryan French has been busy over the last couple of years building a photography business as well as the Duluth Folk School. This week we hear about Bryan’s artistic side.
B.F.: I’m a photographer (and director of the Duluth Folk School, an adventure guide with Day Tripper, and on-call naturalist at Hartley). My background includes an undergrad in musical theater (song and dance!) and a master’s degree in environmental education (nature!). I’ve been making photographs for about ten years. (more…)
Selective Focus: Eric Helland
Eric Helland makes things from natural materials. His work shows off the beauty in the texture and grain, and also in the imperfections and missing chunks.
E.H.: I’ve always dabbled in art starting with drawing as a kid, experimenting with glass in my family’s glass shop in Southern Minnesota, and photography after moving to Duluth. Eight years ago I made my wife a free form wooden bowl and a sofa table and have been working with wood ever since. Being self taught my technique is always changing and I’m forever seeing what I can do differently. Many people prize exotic woods but I think we have beautiful prime woods right here in the Northland. I like finding my own wood and seeing it in its original form, allowing the individual piece of wood to determine what the end product will be instead of having a preconceived idea when I start. Seeing what hidden grains and patterns I can reveal in the wood is my favorite aspect of this work. My style is always changing but I’m probably best known for my free form pieces, leaving live edges or bark on my lathe pieces, incorporating antler into my pens, and working with burls.
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Experienced piano teacher bouncing with new ideas looking for students
I’m a piano teacher with more than 20 years experience teaching students of all ages and all abilities on the hunt for students! I spent last year getting an MA in Community Music in Ireland, and while that was happening I lost a lot of students (which makes me sad).
That MA is changing so much about the way that I approach my teaching and music making, I decided that I might as well present myself to the world as a brand new teacher, and to do that, I made a brand new website: emilymoepianostudio.com. (more…)
Disfluency
All names in this story have been changed, because this is the internet. But not because of you. You’re wonderful.
If you had told me five years ago that a life could be forever altered by a toddler’s stutter, I would have rolled my eyes deep enough to dislocate my optic nerve. Maybe that’s a little melodramatic. My point is, I wouldn’t have understood. Like so many things, there’s often a pretty good delta between experience and imagination. I know a little better now, because of my own experience, and while this isn’t the worst thing that ever happened to me, it actually did change my whole life. This one little thing. A stutter.
I remember how, a week before my second daughter, Lilly, was born, I was thinking about how, in the new Pooh movie, Piglet lost his stutter. I had a little internal dialogue about the ridiculous, reactionary nature of helicopter parents, so sensitive to anything that might hurt … someone … that we couldn’t even joke around anymore. They had probably driven the change in Piglet’s fluency. Except I didn’t know to use the phrase, “change in Piglet’s fluency,” yet. (more…)
Selective Focus: Carolyn Olson
Carolyn Olson takes extremely ordinary daily events and turns them into big, colorful studies of life and relationships. (more…)
GinStrings from Minneapolis at the Gunflint Tavern
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5JFVaNMHls
These guys killed it last night at Gunflint Tavern in Grand Marais. 10.14.16 – Check these guys out the next time you have a chance. #minnesotaproud
The truth about Shakespeare in Duluth
2016 has been full of 400th anniversary observations of Shakespeare’s 1616 death. Having first read Shakespeare in Duluth, I was thrilled to return for my hometown’s own First Folio celebrations, from the exhibit at the Tweed Museum to an early music concert. It was an honor to speak at St. Scholastica, where I was once part of the crew for Cymbeline, with librarian Todd White as the baddie Iachimo. At the Marshall School, I did the lighting for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starring Maria Bamford (Titania) and Katie McGee (Puck) under the direction of Tim Blackburn. (Our Marshall librarian Louis Jenkins recently teamed up with Shakespearean actor Mark Rylance.)
Caught up in the quatercentennial excitement, it’s easy to become fixated upon what Shakespeare supposedly thought, rather than how he thought — that is, what kind of education led him to think the way he did. I take as an example of this misguided fixation myself, 25 years ago. My 1991 yearbook profile includes the usual pimply portrait scribbled over by classmates’ farewells. For my motto, I selected a quotation from Hamlet: “To thine own self be true, and it shall follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
And I of course attributed those words to Shakespeare.
Unwittingly, I was doing what countless others had done before: quoting a dramatic passage out of its ironic context, and acting like Shakespeare said it himself, rather than a fictional character. Shakespeare’s words circulate far beyond their origins, whether in 17th century manuscripts, 18th century novels, 19th century poems, 20th century cinema, or 21st century politics. (more…)