MINNEAPOLIS — Celebrating history, and culture, has a way of igniting both pride and curiosity.
A moving mural has been sharing the history of a people whose voices were silenced for generations.
WCCO first introduced you to Spirit Lake Dakota artist Marlena Myles and the pastel-colored Metro Transit “We Are on Dakota Land” bus her design adorned last month.
“We never really saw anything that showed that this was Dakota homelands when I was a child,” Myles said.
It stirred both emotions and interest.
“I want to learn more about the origins of Minnesota history, and in a real up-close and very personal way,” said Minneapolis resident Kathryn Ringham.
RELATED: The story behind the Metro Transit bus that honors Indigenous culture, and its first driver
As stories like this often do, its winding route led to a pleasant, and welcome increase in attention.
“We’re achieving the foundation of our culture. Today people are acting it out by becoming good relatives,” Myles said.
Metro Transit driver Kevin Montry is Lakota and Anishinaabe. He was one of the first to drive the bus.
“Living and sharing. That’s what we do as an Indian person,” Montry said.
“It was this art and it was Native and I, it just, it made me smile and touched me,” Montry said. “I just felt like, of course, it’s me.”
Following their chance meeting, Montry and Myles have developed a bond.
WCCO
The two partnered with others in the Native community to bring the public on this bus tour of Dakota art, history, culture, and sacred sites in the Twin Cities.
Stops included Indian Mounds Regional Park in St. Paul, the overlook of the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, where many women and children were force-marched after the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, and Pow Wow Grounds Coffee in Minneapolis.
“I have been to some of these sites, but now I have a better explanation and understanding of what happened there and what it means,” said Rosemount resident Charlene Kaletka Delaney.
RELATED: Marlena Myles’ new augmented reality exhibit Dakota Sacred Hoop Walk opens
“Every Native person, we have a different way of telling our story, and all of those stories are important to tell,” Myles said.
As this tour ends, and passengers disembark, a high school teacher who had just finished her day was waiting for Myles.
“Marlena came to our attention through your original story. And our students, we showed them the story on the first day of class and they said that is something they wanted to learn more about,” said Dawn Johnson, a Wayzata High School English teacher.
Myles didn’t learn that “We are on Dakota Land” as a child, but because of her, future generations will.
“I’m just really appreciative that people are listening. I don’t think my grandmother’s era, I don’t think anybody would have listened to her. Like a thing like this wouldn’t have happened during her time,” Myles said.
The “We Are on Dakota Land” Bus Tour sold out in less than two hours. Myles hopes additional tours will be offered. She also hopes in the future, local Native artists can provide bus designs for Ojibwe, Somali, Hmong, Latino and Scandinavian communities.
A tripod is a vital tool for many photographers. There is a wide range of tripods available in every price range. You can invest as little as fifty dollars or go as high as fifteen hundred dollars. There are some things to watch out for, regardless the price range.
A tripod serves as a crucial piece of equipment. It stabilizes your camera and lens in a chosen position. It doesn’t matter if you’re using a 16mm wide angle lens weighing only 500 grams or a hefty 800mm lens weighing 5.5 kilograms. It allows for long exposures without issues or enables incredibly precise macro photography with substantial magnification. Moreover, it comes in handy for group portraits where you need to be in the shot too.
There is a tripod for every conceivable use, and this determines the type of tripod you need, up to a certain extent. It might be easy to just recommend a thousand-dollar tripod with the assurance that your camera will be secure in every situation. But that would be bad advice.
After all, it would be foolish to invest in such an expensive tripod if you only use it a few times a year. In fact, even budget-friendly tripods can be a suitable choice as long as you consider a few factors. In this article, I will provide some key checkpoints without steering you directly towards the most expensive tripod.
There are a few fundamental considerations when it comes to tripod advice. Firstly, consider the weight it can support. A general rule of thumb is three to four times the maximum weight of your heaviest equipment. If this is 5 kilograms, I always recommend choosing a tripod and ball head capable of supporting at least 15-20 kilograms.
While this might seem excessive, it will help minimize vibrations. Additionally, if you tend to use your camera backpack as a counterweight at the center column, this extra capacity becomes valuable.
Another crucial factor is how you intend to use the tripod. Is it for studio work, or does it need to accompany you on a long hike? For the former, a large, heavy, and sturdy aluminum tripod will suffice, while a lightweight carbon tripod is preferable for the latter.
Will you be using the tripod in conditions with wind or near water? Is videography the primary use, or will it be primarily for macro photography? These considerations will steer you towards a specific type of tripod.
Price is, of course, a consideration. What is your budget for a tripod that meets your needs? As mentioned, the most expensive one isn’t necessarily the best for you. True, it will perform the task impeccably, but it doesn’t make much sense if you’re using a small compact camera on a heavy duty $1,500 tripod.
On the other hand, a $50 tripod might be an excellent choice if it’s only needed occasionally, provided you choose carefully. After all, stability is the key. You don’t want your costly equipment tumbling to the ground. That’s why you have to check some key points before buying.
I’ve come across some surprisingly good cheap tripods. They’re compact, lightweight, and quite robust. I wouldn’t hesitate to use one from time to time. That’s precisely what these tripods are designed for: occasional or low-stress use.
If you’re in the market for a tripod, always check the key points I mentioned below. It doesn’t matter if your tripod will be an expensive or a cheap one.
Leg locks come in two types: the twist lock and the lever lock. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and you should choose the type that feels most convenient for you. In other words, try both before making a decision.
A consideration that’s much more important is how securely the legs lock in place. Does it offer a firm lock that keeps the legs at the desired height, or do they slowly sink down? Remember, sinking occurs only under a constant downward force. This means you should test this with your heaviest camera and lens combination, or even with a camera backpack suspended from the center column.
Do the twist locks or lever locks operate smoothly? Do you need to apply a lot of force to lock or unlock the legs, or is it with a simple flick of a wrist? If you plan to use the tripod near water, you might want to consider whether the legs can be taken apart for cleaning.
A common issue I’ve observed with many basic tripods is the ease with which a ball head can be unscrewed from the tripod itself, sometimes unintentionally. If you constantly need to check if the ball head is securely in place, there will come a moment when you forget.
The ball head is the component to which your camera attaches. You must be certain that the ball head is always properly secured. Even if there’s minimal risk of your camera falling, a ball head that is not fixed in place won’t maintain your camera in a stable position.
Another crucial consideration is the operation of the ball head itself. Typically, there are two or three knobs, each serving a different function. Ensure these knobs function seamlessly. They should be easy to lock and unlock without excessive force.
When you lock the knobs, it should be a secure lock. The panorama knob should keep the ball head fixed in the desired direction, while the ball head lock itself should hold the ball in the correct position. If it fails in this regard, you’ll find it challenging to use the tripod in a convenient manner.
Most ball heads now incorporate an Arca-Swiss connection plate. This small plate is screwed to the bottom of your camera, allowing for quick attachment to the ball head. This plate must be securely fastened, without any play. I don’t need to explain the potential consequences if the camera plate comes loose.
Fortunately, various third-party camera plates are available. You’re not restricted to using the one that comes with the tripod head. Seek out one that stays securely in place, or even consider an L-bracket if the one you received with the ball head fails to do so.
As mentioned at the outset of this article, an expensive tripod doesn’t guarantee it’s the best one for you. Therefore, it’s essential to visit a store and try out different tripods yourself. You might discover an affordable tripod that presents none of the aforementioned issues and meets your requirements.
However, when searching for an inexpensive tripod, don’t assume you can overlook one single issue as mentioned in this article. While you might save money with a budget tripod, it could jeopardize your expensive equipment if you accept certain shortcomings.
I’d like to ask if you have any additional tips to share when it comes to choosing a tripod. Please feel free to share it in the comments below.
Damian Williams, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced today that ROBERT NEWLAND, the business partner of convicted art dealer INIGO PHILBRICK, was sentenced today to 20 months in prison in connection with a multi-year scheme to defraud various individuals and entities in order to finance PHILBRICK’s art business. U.S. District Judge Sydney H. Stein imposed today’s sentence.
U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “Robert Newland helped Inigo Philbrick commit one of the largest fraud schemes ever perpetrated in the art market. By taking advantage of the lack of transparency in the art market, Philbrick and Newland defrauded art collectors, investors, and lenders by lying about the true ownership interests of artworks and selling or pledging as collateral over 100% of numerous artworks. As the financial adviser, Newland appeared to give legitimacy to Philbrick’s art business, but in reality, he perpetuated the fraud. Today’s sentence sends a message to anyone who facilitates fraud in the art market that they will face serious consequences.”
According to the allegations in the Complaint, Indictment, and statements made in court:
From approximately 2016 through 2019, to finance his art business, PHILBRICK engaged in a scheme to defraud multiple individuals and entities in the art market located in the New York metropolitan area and abroad (the “Fraud Scheme”). NEWLAND was PHILBRICK’s business partner and financial adviser and conspired with PHILBRICK to perpetrate the Fraud Scheme. NEWLAND and PHILBRICK made material misrepresentations and omissions to art collectors, investors, and lenders to access valuable art and obtain sales proceeds, funding, and loans. NEWLAND and PHILBRICK knowingly misrepresented the ownership of certain artworks, for example, by selling a total of more than 100% ownership in an artwork to multiple individuals and entities without their knowledge and by selling artworks and/or using artworks as collateral on loans without the knowledge of co-owners and without disclosing the ownership interests of third parties to buyers and lenders.
Over the years, PHILBRICK obtained over $86 million in loans and sale proceeds in connection with the Fraud Scheme. NEWLAND and PHILBRICK made fraudulent misrepresentations about artworks including, among others, a 1982 painting by the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat titled “Humidity,” a 2010 untitled painting by the artist Christopher Wool, and an untitled 2012 painting by the artist Rudolf Stingel depicting the artist Pablo Picasso.
In the fall of 2019, NEWLAND and PHILBRICK’s Fraud Scheme collapsed as various investors and lenders learned about the material misrepresentations and omissions PHILBRICK and NEWLAND had made.
* * *
In addition to the prison term, NEWLAND, 46, of the United Kingdom, was sentenced to two years of supervised release, during which time he must complete 200 hours of community service per year. NEWLAND was further ordered to pay a forfeiture of $76,000 and the following property: (i) Personal Distance A, painting by Carroll Dunham, 96.5 x 124.5 cm (49 x 38 in.); (ii) Untitled 2016 painting, oil and etching on paper, by Christopher Wool, image size 19 x 15 cm (7.5 x 6 in), paper size 41.3 x 35.6 cm. (16.24 x 14 in.); (iii) Untitled 2007 print, Epson UltraChrome inkjet on linen, by Wade Guyton, 213.36 x 175.26 cm. (83.21 x 68.35 in.); and (iv) a Jean Prouvé desk H 72 x L 160 x P 71.5 cm. In addition, NEWLAND was ordered to pay restitution to victims in the amount of $67,489,808.
PHILBRICK, 35, a U.S. citizen formerly residing in the United Kingdom, pled guilty to one count of wire fraud on November 18, 2021. On May 23, 2022, U.S. District Judge Sidney L. Stein sentenced PHILBRICK to seven years in prison and two years of supervised release. PHILBRICK was further ordered to pay forfeiture of $86,672,790 and restitution of $82,592,367.
Mr. Williams praised the investigative work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Art Crime Team.
This case is being handled by the Office’s Money Laundering and Transnational Criminal Enterprises Unit. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jessica K. Feinstein and Cecilia E. Vogel are in charge of the prosecution.
Considering getting into film photography? You have arrived at the appropriate destination. In this concise yet comprehensive video, you will learn all you need to know to get started with the fundamentals of film photography.
One of the most important choices in film photography is making sure you pick the correct film format. Choosing which format best suits your needs will influence decisions further along the process, so knowing what you need is key, which is where this video by Isaac Abner comes in with all the information that you need to make those informed first decisions.
Discover the charm of film cameras! There is a wide array of film camera types at your disposal, ranging from 35mm models to medium format cameras. Do you need point and shoot or SLR? This video aims to help you find the perfect one for your needs and budget.
When it comes to film, there are a variety of different types and film speeds, each with its unique characteristics. This video will help to demystify the world of film and help you choose the right one to achieve the look you desire, as well as learn how to load film, set your camera’s exposure settings, and focus accurately. You’ll be walked through the essentials of operating a film camera seamlessly.
Isaac advises beginners not to begin by processing film by themselves, but instead to send your film to a lab for processing and development, which means you will not be learning too many things at once.
Bloomington Handmade Market – Holiday – will be taking place on November 11th and 12th at the Monroe Convention Center located at 302 S. College in Bloomington, IN from 10a-4p both days.
Featuring 100+ amazing handmade artists.
First 30 people in line BOTH DAYS get a free SWAG BAG, screen-printed locally and filled with goodies from our sponsors and vendors!
Free admission. Free parking. Vendors both upstairs and downstairs. Concessions. Kid booths & SANTA on Sunday in the Lobby. Did we mention 100+ vendors both upstairs and downstairs!
As a molecule, water is breathtakingly simple. Combine two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen. That’s it, and good to the last drop.
As a substance, water is breathtakingly various. It can take the form of snow, mist, clouds, glaciers, icebergs, desert springs and groundwater, rivers, rivulets, ponds, oceans, seas. All of these appear in the several shows currently up at Bridge Gallery, in Cambridge, and the Griffin Museum of Photography, in Winchester. One of the Griffin shows even incorporates Judkins Pond, behind the museum.
Evgenia Arbugaeva grew up in Siberia, and what the whiteness of the whale was for Herman Melville the whiteness of snow is for her. It provides an arresting visual ostinato throughout her dozen color photographs in “Disappearing Worlds: The Photographs of Evgenia Arbugaeva and Natela Grigalashvili,” which runs at Bridge through Oct. 14.
The photographs are from her series “Tiksi.” Tiksi is Arbugaeva’s hometown, a small port on the Arctic Ocean. Snow figures in nearly all the images. The blanketing white contrasts with the subdued colors seen elsewhere in the photographs.
Arbugaeva asked gallery owner Greig Cranna to show the photographs in white frames, adding to the prevailing whiteness. The handsome deep gray that Cranna has painted the walls further accentuates the prevalence. Without the whiteness, the colors would look washed out. Instead, the contrast gives them the delicacy and appeal of pastels — except for the photograph that shows the northern lights. Now those colors are anything but subdued.
Natela Grigalashvili is from Georgia, the one in the Caucasus. Her nine photographs face Arbugaeva’s, as if having a post-Soviet conversation. They’re from Grigalashvili’s series “The Final Days of Georgian Nomads.” Where Arbugaeva’s present a snowbound contemporaneity, Grigalashvili’s have a timeless quality. Enhancing that effect is the mist found in five of the images. What we see is at once magical and matter of fact.
The six shows and one video that make up the Griffin’s “Ceding Ground” look at climate change, doing so primarily through the lens of the water cycle. Sometimes that lens can be very large. Three of Camille Seaman’s eight photographs of the Arctic and Antarctic are more than 8 feet by 6 feet. To call them stunning would be a stunning understatement. Yet powerful as they are, they can’t match the emotional impact of Seaman’s much smaller image of a penguin skeleton. It’s a “mere” 16 inches by 24 inches.
Water, in various forms, defines “Ceding Ground,” but death and destruction, or the threat of them, are a near constant. With his “Cracks in the Ice” project, Jason Lindsey conveys destruction in a highly distinctive manner that’s literal as well as figurative. Lindsey has taken slides of glaciers, broken them up, and photographed the results. Earth art meets Cubism, courtesy of Lindsey’s camera.
Startling as Lindsey’s shards are, they may be less so than the easily overlooked presence of chicken-wire fencing in Bremner Benedict’s photograph of a pool in the Sonoran Desert. It’s there for a good reason, to protect the grasses behind it. But it seems like such an intrusion on the landscape. Unframed and unmatted, these nine photographs of springs in the desert Southwest have a fineness of color and texture that underscores their subjects’ fragility.
Their desert settings make the rippling waters seen in Amber Crabbe’s video “I Dreamed We Could Stand Still” all the more appealing. These up-close views of water passing over sand, soil, and stone, or bubbling and steaming from hot springs testify to the eloquence of ripples, and have a real depth of feeling.
The depth of feeling in Ellen Konar & Steve Goldband’s “Cut Short” is beyond doubt. But the nature of the 13 black-and-white photographs, which show cross-sections of felled redwoods seen against a black background, works against expressivity. The presentation of the cross-sections is almost clinical, which brings out the variation among them all the more, while also emphasizing the clinical in a way that one suspects the photographers didn’t intend.
Ville Kansanen is the artist who makes use of Judkins Pond, with an installation of tiles that extend from the museum to the pond. Made of earth from the Mojave Desert, they’re meant to represent soil salination, Kansanen says, though this isn’t readily apparent. Also on display are a series of large and attractive color photographs, from his “Airut Harbinger” series. Each shows “a makeshift tripod,” as Kansanen describes it, with a stone hanging from it. It functions, he says, “as a mystical instrument for measuring water levels.” This does seem to put an undue burden of meaning on the item.
Simon Norfolk is represented by two series, “Shroud” and “When I Am Laid in Earth.” Both are striking in appearance and unsettling in meaning, though only one is unsettling in quite the way Norfolk presumably wants.
For four generations, a Swiss family has earned a living by selling tickets to enter an ice grotto in the side of a glacier. To protect the attraction against rising temperatures, the family has fashioned a covering for it: a shroud. Shroud, of course, has a mortuary association. Norfolk’s photographs of it don’t belabor the point, though the angle from which he took one of them, “Shroud 8,” gives the covering an outline that looks like nothing so much as sharky jaws.
“When I Am Laid” shows the recession of the Lewis Glacier on Mount Kenya. Each photographic title includes two dates. The later was when Norfolk took the picture. That shows the current extent of the glacier. The earlier date denotes how far the glacier then extended to. How Norfolk indicates that extent is a visual tour de force: with a line of flames. Yes, ice and fire. It’s a bravura effect. To achieve it, Norfolk ignites petroleum. In the larger context of climate change, the contribution those fires make to warming is trivial. But the act remains troubling. As the anonymous US officer is supposed to have said during the Vietnam War, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
Norfolk’s photographs, Seaman’s, Lindsey’s, and Benedict’s are all hung in Griffin’s main gallery, often interspersed. At first this is confusing, until you realize that a larger, holistic point is being made. Glaciers and desert springs, the polar regions and Africa: It’s all one planet, our planet and it’s all one crisis, which is our crisis, too.
DISAPPEARING WORLDS: The Photographs of Evgenia Arbugaeva and Natela Grigalashvili
At Bridge Gallery, 5 Pemberton St., Cambridge, through Oct. 14. 617-930-3418, bridge.photos
CEDING GROUND
Camille Seaman: Melting Away: A Penguins Life
Jason Lindsey: Cracks in the Ice
Bremner Benedict: Hidden Waters
Amber Crabbe: I Dreamed We Could Stand Still
Steve Goldband & Ellen Konar: Cut Short
Ville Kansanen: Arid Harbingers
Simon Norfolk: When I Am Laid in Earth & Shroud
At Griffin Museum of Photography, 67 Shore Road, Winchester, through Oct. 15. 781-729-1158, griffinmuseum.org
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
