The Seed AfFAIR is a meetup for people interested in crop art, the environmental art practice of using plants and seeds to create images, usually by gluing them to a background. The AfFAIR part of the name references the goal of entering pieces in the Minnesota State Fair’s juried competition.
The group began meeting at the start of 2024 and has been featured twice on The Slice; the 2025 part-two video is above, and the original 2024 video is below.
The theme behind the fourth annual Minnesota Film Festival might not seem obvious when looking through the lineup. The selections represent a variety of genres and were submitted and scouted from local, national and international filmmakers. Still, there’s a certain something that connects them.
“The goal, to put it simply, is to inspire difficult conversations and find that common ground between groups of people, where they may not have realized there is that common ground,” said Vera Bianchini, the festival’s director.
March 11 is Wanda Gág’s birthday. After Charles Schulz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wanda Gag is my favorite Minnesota author.
NorthWords, the monthly publication of Lake Superior Writers, features a link to Joseph Bussey’s profile of local author Amy Jo Swing.
Great Lakes Now interviews artist/historian Carl Gawboy about his book Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History.
Last semester, I taught a class in the writing major at the University of Minnesota Duluth called Minnesota Writers. It was a survey of a few “greatest hits” (Laura Ingalls Wilder and Wanda Gag; Upton Sinclair and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Tim O’Brien), but mostly, it was a tour through some of the writers alive and well and shaping Minnesota culture (Margi Preus, Chris Monroe, Julie Gard, Emily August, Michael Fedo, Lucie Amundsen, Kelly Florence, Meg Hafdahl, and contributors to the Pride Zine).
Duluthian Feodor von Luerzer presumably painted this image 125 years ago; an auction listing on invaluable.com notes it is “signed and dated 1900.” The listing, however, renders the name as “Frederick von Luerzer” and lists the artist’s year of death as 1917. Feodor von Luerzer died in 1913. The landscape painter lived in Duluth from 1889 to 1909.
For more on Von Luerzer visit the zenithcity.com archive on archive.org.
As we reach the end of another year of rawk and/or roll, Perfect Duluth Day once again looks back at the posters that pimped the gigs.
The Christmas-themed Elf on the Shelf doll is the protagonist character of a 2005 children’s book with the same name. Since its emergence to mainstream popularity, the decorative figurine has inspired parody photographs in which the Elf is staged in a wide range of holiday scenes causing chaos, or referenced in memes.
Below are some elves spotted and submitted by Duluthians, as well as some local art inspired by this internet trend.
Boubville — not at all to be confused with Bentlyville; that would never happen — is a winter celebration that takes place on a property in Duluth’s Central Hillside neighborhood. In addition to the musicians performing, some of the artistic experiences this year include an interactive phonebooth called “Bent-to-Boub InterOpterative Phones” by Swertyman, “Ghosts of Dinners Past” by Annmarie Genuisz, “Silent Crude” projections by Allen Killian-Moore, a gift shop to peruse, a blacklight forest, an interactive electronic instrument made by Digetic and Ginger Juel, and more. Collected here are some snapshots captured by Jess Morgan at the first two nights of the 2025 spectacle.
The Utility Cabinet Artwork Program is a Duluth Public Arts Commission project that seeks to beautify the city’s utility boxes.
In its series The Slice, PBS North presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
Behind the scenes putting together the layout of Duluth-based zines and poetry collections is a visual artist creating works in several mediums. Sabrina Wertman, or Swerty, has paintings and other artwork available at Alt Creative, The Loch Cafe and Games, and recently had a display up at Wussow’s Concert Cafe. They created the poster for the 2024 Boubville event, where attendees can interact with a new art installation they’re curating. Their visual art can continuously be found in issues of On the Record, a local arts zine that they contribute comics and complete the layout process for. Photos of their artwork and an interview with Swerty can be found below.
One can hear the anguish in Martin DeWitt’s voice as he talks about artists who are suffering. When Hurricane Helene hit Asheville, North Carolina in September, the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers came together with powerful force. The flooding devastated Asheville’s entire River Artist District.
DeWitt, who lived and worked in the Asheville area for more than a decade, had followed the hurricane’s path. “It wiped out the first and second floors of galleries and shops … the water totally demolished them,” he said. “Over 20 galleries and studios … the artwork of over 200 artists, were all destroyed.” The artists were DeWitt’s friends and colleagues.
A group of clowns at Cherry Koch’s clown karaoke birthday celebration at The Embassy. Photo by Jess Morgan.
Various arts experiences featuring clowns, mimes, jesters and circus-inspired shenanigans are having a moment in the Twin Ports arts scene. Some of those fools happen to be on the payroll at Perfect Duluth Day, which makes it the perfect journalistic inside-job for a feature marking the 10-year anniversary of PDD’s Selective Focus arts feature.
Left: Eric Sturtz self portrait. Right: Stony Point.
When looking at Eric Sturtz’s body of work, it’s clear the natural world inspires him. His photographic journey has taken him to the Grand Canyon and the hills of South Dakota, as well as out of the United States to places like Iceland.
