EDMONTON – Sabrina Williams is grateful to both her grandmothers, whom she affectionately calls Kokum (Cree for grandmother). They not only taught her the beadwork and sewing that gives her a meaningful vocation, they instilled a love of tradition she passes along to her daughter today.

But the knowledge the Edmonton artisan learned didn’t come without a dark side, as her parents were residential school survivors who became disconnected from their people’s ways.

“My parents lost most of their Indigenous identities and traditions. They are now coming back to the red road of healing and reconnecting,” said Williams, whose roots are Cree, Tahltan and Tlingit. “I was so thankful they let me make such a beautiful connection with my kokums, who taught me what my parents lost.”

Sabrina and her daughter Shelby, 12, are members of the Indigenous Arts Market Collective (I.A.M. Collective), an Edmonton organization of First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists. Members not only offer locally made Indigenous art and handcrafted items, they embody a spirit of entrepreneurship while sharing their culture with the world.

“We started in 2018, to break down barriers that were preventing Indigenous artists from participating in Edmonton’s local markets,” said Lorrie Lawrence, I.A.M. executive director and a founding member.

“We want to get as many youths to work in these traditional arts as possible. The elders who carry on with these traditions, it’s important for us to make sure they’re heard by the youth.”

Williams was taught skills such as quilt making and ribbon skirts by her kokum at Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, and learned beadwork, sweetgrass weaving and traditional medicine from her kokum in northern Saskatchewan.

“She taught me since I was six. Thirty-three years later I’m still embracing my matriarchs, my kokums’ sacred knowledge. And I am proud I am able to teach my daughter,” said Williams about daughter Shelby, who got an eye for acrylic painting and drawing after learning beadwork at age eight.

“She created the design for our orange shirt which was inspired by her grandparents, who attended residential schools. She also created MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) artwork, which was unfortunately inspired by the murder of my younger sister.”

Williams and Shelby now make a range of items, from quilts and handbags to Cree regalia and cedar hats, along with soaps, lotions and medicine oils using sage, sweetgrass and red cedar.

Frances Whitford, a Métis artisan and I.A.M. director, learned to work with moosehide and fur watching her Métis grandmother in Anzac, south of Fort McMurray. She recalls her grandfather’s trapline as a source of materials that were turned into mukluks and jackets.

“In our culture, you’re mainly taught by watching. All the things my grandmother would do, tanning hides, beadwork, the trapline; was part of my everyday life,” said Whitford.

Her brother and cousin have now stepped into their grandfather’s shoes, supplying furs and hide for her Beadwork & Bannock business, which was inspired by the family’s desire to preserve their Métis heritage.

“I didn’t realize I was taught something very special to my culture. It wasn’t until my grandmother passed away, that I realized it would be lost,” said Whitford.

A member of the Tataskweyak Cree Nation of northern Manitoba, I.A.M. director James Fox recalls wanting to connect to his Cree heritage, so in 2017, he joined Indigenous craft classes at the Edmonton library. From there it was beading lessons at the Native Friendship Centre, and his current Cree-ations now range from rawhide rattles and fish scale art to caribou hair tufting and leather crafts.

“When I started doing beadwork I wanted to keep the traditions, but I always add a modern twist,” said Fox. 

Creations by members of the collective are available at the Downtown Farmers Market in Edmonton, and at Fort Edmonton Park in the summer.

 “It’s very important to us, promoting authentic Indigenous arts,” Whitford said. “The number of beautiful artists is amazing.”

For more, visit https://iamcollective.ca/

For the past month or so, the New York-based artist Brad Kahlhamer has been making art in a cabin studio in Minnesota’s Northwoods. 

Just before, he had been traveling through Europe, exhibiting his work at shows in Paris and Cordoba. Then, he came to Park Rapids, Minn., the north central Minnesota town surrounded by lakes at the Mississippi headwaters.

“One of the reasons I wanted to do this residency in the first place was to fish the incredible waters that you have,” says Kahlhamer, pointing to the studio wall tacked with a large piece of painted canvas: watery pools of color form the shape of a bird over blue shapes. “This eagle is in a sort of vertiginous state over a series of lakes, a chain of lakes.”

Kahlhamer, whose work resides in museum collections around the world, and Waverly Bergwin, a fellow New York artist and Kahlhamer’s apprentice, are the first artists in residence of the Nemeth Art Center, which has been in operation for more than 40 years. The residency program culminates with the opening of an exhibition July 1, which will feature the artwork they created at the cabin. 

Artist Aaron Spangler is the vice chair of the center’s board and curates exhibitions with the new director Mark Weiler. They say the residency was created to help bring great contemporary art and artists to a rural area, essentially the center’s mission. 

“I just want to show work that is relevant to an international and regional narrative that’s going on in visual arts, in the visual language,” Spangler says.

He grew up in Park Rapids; his mother was one of the folks that started the center in the seventies, still in its original location in the 19th-century Hubbard County Courthouse. “We’re also trying to get school kids involved in meeting the artists,” he adds, “Like me when I was growing up, I think about, what did I want? My audience is me when I was 16.” 

The Nemeth Art Center has long exhibited the work of many internationally renowned contemporary regional artists; up until last week, it was Poa Houa Her’s “Attention Series,” a collection of photographic portraits of Hmong-American veterans.  

It has also been fostering an artist exchange, helping send regional artists to exhibit elsewhere, such as the current “Cross Country” show at the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s Ojai Institute in California, featuring artists Julie Buffalohead, Bruce Engebretson, Christopher Harrison and Melba Price. (Carolyn Glasco Bailey, who died in 2015, was formerly a Minneapolis gallerist and collector).

And the residency has been sort of unofficially happening for years, Spangler says, with artists and writers coming to stay and work at the cabin that is on the same remote woodsy property where he lives with his wife, Amy Thielen, the famed chef and tv personality behind “The New Midwestern Table.”

As of June, the residency became official under the Nemeth Art Center umbrella, complete with artist stipends to support a monthlong residency.  

Kahlhamer was an easy first choice for the residency program because Spangler has known him for years, since they were both artists living in New York. They even played together for a few years in a band in Brooklyn.

Although based in New York, and part time in Arizona, Kahlhamer has roots in the Midwest (he grew up in Wisconsin), and frequently shows his work in the Twin Cities, where his art is in the collections of Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and he is represented by the Minneapolis Bockley Gallery. Kahlhamer is known for art — prints, sculpture, painting and more — that explores, often playfully, his Native and white identity.  

Spangler says he hopes the residency gives artists the space and time to try new things with zero pressure to produce anything commodifiable.

“Part of what we want to do is: We’re a place where you can really experiment with new work,” Spangler says. 

In the cabin studio, Kahlhamer points to empty beer cans Bergwin is painting with plant life. 

“So, over the period of this residency, we’ve acquired or amassed a number of cans of which, you know, we physically have drank out of,” Kahlhamer says. “And then we’ll paint them. In a way, we’re kind of rebranding various things we pulled out of Park Rapids stores. Obviously, inspired by the local fauna.” 

Kahlhamer tours the other pieces they are developing: small sculptures, a totem painting, a dream catcher, oil portraits of folks from the recent White Earth Nation powwow and a reimagined La-Z-Boy type chair he found onsite. 

“Part of being in a residency that that has a lot of freedom is I can go through various things laying around,” Kahlhamer says. “I have a habit of improvising a lot of work, especially the sculptural work.”

Bergwin is a sculptor and writer who has been working with Kahlhamer for nine years as an apprentice, assistant and collaborator. Bergwin has also been creating their own sculpture series of “weird fairy tale swords and daggers” using wire and organic plant matter, including wildflowers and dead beetles found on site.

“One day I’ll go off on a cool quest or something,” Bergwin says, laughing. Bergwin and Kahlhamer have done other residencies, but those felt more like summer camp, they say. 

“We’re trying to complete the body of work here to take it to show at Nemeth,” Bergwin adds. “We have tasks, we have goals, there’s a direction with everything.” 

Mark Weiler, who became the center’s director in April, is helping move the artwork from the cabin studio to the center in town. He says just having the artists hanging around the area, having exchanges with the community, is important.

“When you bring someone like Brad Kahlhamer to work in the woods, he’s riding his bike to the general store every day, and he’s meeting the shop owners, and he’s naturally meeting people that are coming through to get gas or donuts or whatever,” Weiler says. “There’s a direct influence on that community, just from him being there and having that presence.” 

He says the Nemeth Art Center wants to create a “cultural nexus” in a rural area. “There’s such a concentration of really talented world-class creatives in a small place, that it kind of lends itself to that,” says Weiler who comes to Park Rapids from Fargo, N.D., where he ran the Ecce Gallery. 

“The key is that there’s an approachability to it in Park Rapids,” Weiler says. “Artists and creatives, people in general, chefs — they’re doing things at a very high level, but not something that’s fancy and makes you kind of shy around or embarrassed. Because people are wearing sandals at the opening. It’s not the Metropolitan or something like that … it’s upscale but not uptight.”

The artist residency exhibition has an opening reception 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, July 1, and runs through Oct. 1. In the spring of 2023, the Nemeth Art Center will welcome their next artist in residency, Madeleine Bialke.

As death bed promises go, this one was particularly beguiling.

Twenty-one years ago, Tom Jacobsen, a successful banking executive, was succumbing to leukemia. He knew he wasn’t going to make it.

In his final days, he had a request for his wife Diane DeMell Jacobsen: “Do you think you can build an American art collection that can be transformative?”

She’s spent every day since trying to do so.

Her efforts are on view now through September 24, 2023, during the exhibition “American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection,” at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, appropriately, in Jacksonville. The couple met there.

New Yorker Diane DeMell moved to Jacksonville in 1978 when she was hired as the local IBM branch manager. She continues residing in the area.

Though many objects from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection have been on view at other museums ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “American Made” marks the first comprehensive display of the collection. More than 100 artworks are featured, masterpieces spanning the Colonial-era through about 1950 in this presentation.

The Collection is comprised exclusively of American art, artists born, or who have lived, in America.

“Most of America doesn’t know about the great art that we have,” DeMell Jacobsen said at a press preview for the Cummer exhibition. “They don’t know about all of artists. They certainly don’t know all about the women artists, the people of color. They don’t know about the full range of the diversity of America, and American art.”

Substantial representation of female and African American artists distinguishes the Collection. DeMell Jacobsen has an entirely separate collection of Native American art.

“I have a family member who is from Korea and when she was a little girl, I took her to the museum and she looked around at all the portraits and said, ‘how come there’s nobody here that looks like me?’” DeMell Jacobsen told Forbes.com. “Part of my job is to make sure we represent all of America.”

Staring back at visitors from the museum walls are a cross section of American people. George and Martha Washington, Black laborers, a circus worker. And a beautiful Asian girl in Robert Henri’s 1914 Chow Choy.

Further distinguishing the Collection, and the foundation DeMell Jacobsen set up to support it, is its public nature. DeMell Jacobsen doesn’t have a single item from the Collection in her home. As soon as items are acquired, she and her staff are looking to place them in museums.

Such was the case with one of the Collection’s crown jewels: Thomas Cole’s The Arch of Nero from 1846.

This painting was the source of considerable controversy in 2021 when the Newark Museum of Art chose to deaccession the artwork and send it to auction. Newark was taking advantage of a COVID-era loosening of American Alliance of Museums rules requiring member institutions use any and all funds generated through the sale of artwork only for the acquisition of new items. Selling artwork and applying the money to operating expenses had always been strictly prohibited by AAM, but latitude was being given during COVID as museums were closed and revenues dried up.

In cases where institutions deaccession and sell items from their collection, a common practice, the great danger is beloved masterpieces long enjoyed by museum goers vanishing from public view into the third homes of modern-day robber barons. The DeMell Jacobsen Foundation saved the day, acquiring The Arch of Nero for $988,000. It was almost immediately put back on public view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“My goal when I set up the foundation was to create a collection that will not only honor (my husband’s) legacy, but that will be a gift to America,” DeMell Jacobsen said. “I want Americans to know how great the art is.”

What’s in a Name?

DeMell Jackson visited art museums including The Met as a child and carried her interest in art over to adulthood, but her deep immersion into American art came only following her husband’s death. She actually has a Ph.D. in international affairs with a specialty in peace negotiations–the ending of civil wars and ethnic conflicts.

“I wanted to learn about how the world worked,” she said.

Her expertise in American art comes via self-study and visiting museums, galleries, fairs, auctions and the counsel of experts she’s met along the way including a pair of art history professors at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

Inadvertently, this unconventional path to connoisseurship has given her an advantage. She is not beholden to the canon and its rigid indoctrination into a narrow definition of American art: white, patriarchal, strictly descended from European masters and movements.

“I try to buy masterpieces, but not necessarily the most well-known artists because I want people to know the full depth and breadth of our artistic and cultural heritage,” DeMell Jacobsen explains.

While the Collection surely has its share of “well-known artists” from American art history–Cole, Henri, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Grant Wood, a knockout Loïs Maillou Jones Paris scene that will be spotlighted in an upcoming exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris–it’s in the mostly unknown figures where DeMell Jacobsen’s eye shines and the exhibition soars.

Bror Nordfeldt’s exhausted Summer Dusk (Solitude) from 1920, a moody-blue nocturne of a weary rider and burro trudging under a harvest moon through the mountains of northern New Mexico. American landscape painting gets no better. Period.

Robert Gwathmey’s 1955 Clearing. Sharecroppers cutting pine and splitting wood under a sun so oppressive it has turned the entire sky yellow. The scene could have come from north Florida. Linear. Spare. Feel the weight of the hammer overhead.

Irene Rice Pereira’s blocky, bold, textured, heavily impastoed Still Life of 1932. Another still life, Peinture/Nature Morte (1924) by Patrick Henry Bruce–vibrant, geometric, bursting with visual interest.

Walt Kuhn’s 1939 Lady in Vest, painted with every ounce of empathy for working people as Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergére.

Gold stars for anyone acquainted with these artists previously. Similar discoveries occur over and over and over again throughout “American Made.”

“People who come here are blown away, and it’s not just the famous people, it’s all of America and really ferreting out the great, great, great artists,” DeMell Jacobsen said.

An early lesson she continues carrying with her when buying new pieces is how artists became famous. In the 20^th century, that was largely through critics–mostly in New York–writing about them. They couldn’t write about everyone, everywhere, and these previously unknown masterpieces by previously unfamiliar artists are the one’s Jacobsen most relishes sharing.

“My definition (of a masterpiece) is, it’s not how detailed the painting is, how many objects are in it, it’s what it does to me. It takes your breath away,” DeMell Jacobsen said. “With a true masterpiece, you see more and more and have a greater reaction every time.”

When collecting, she’s looking for items from an artist’s best years in the style for which the artist is best known, and then, of course, “what kind of impact it has.” Condition, likewise, is critically important.

As are the frames. She and her team place extraordinary emphasis on appropriately framing their acquisitions. Her passion for discussing frames is as great as her passion for discussing the artworks–she makes no distinction between the two.

Transformative

“American Made” debuted at the Mint Museum in Charlotte and stopped at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis before arriving at the Cummer. After leaving here, it will travel to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama.

Since DeMell shares her treasures with museums shortly after purchase, she’s never seen this much of her handiwork together. Just like the public, the Mint presentation was the first time she had a comprehensive overview of what she’s been able to achieve with her collecting over the past two decades.

Taking it all in, what did she think?

“I think its transformative.”

NOTE: Visitors to the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens in Jacksonville from outside of Florida should be aware that the NAACP has issued a travel advisory for the state noting, and warning, that under its current governor, Ron DeSantis, Florida has “engaged in an all-out attack on Black Americans, accurate Black history, voting rights, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, and free speech, while simultaneously embracing a culture of fear, bullying, and intimidation by public officials.”

Sabrina Williams is grateful to both her grandmothers, whom she affectionately calls Kokum (Cree for grandmother). They not only taught her the beadwork and sewing that gives her a meaningful vocation, they instilled a love of tradition she passes along to her daughter today.

But the knowledge the Edmonton artisan learned didn’t come without a dark side, as her parents were residential school survivors who became disconnected from their people’s ways.

“My parents lost most of their Indigenous identities and traditions. They are now coming back to the red road of healing and reconnecting,” said Williams, whose roots are Cree, Tahltan and Tlingit. “I was so thankful they let me make such a beautiful connection with my kokums, who taught me what my parents lost.”

Sabrina and her daughter Shelby, 12, are members of the Indigenous Arts Market Collective (I.A.M. Collective), an Edmonton organization of First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists. Members not only offer locally made Indigenous art and handcrafted items, they embody a spirit of entrepreneurship while sharing their culture with the world.

“We started in 2018, to break down barriers that were preventing Indigenous artists from participating in Edmonton’s local markets,” said Lorrie Lawrence, I.A.M. executive director and a founding member.

“We want to get as many youths to work in these traditional arts as possible. The elders who carry on with these traditions, it’s important for us to make sure they’re heard by the youth.”

Williams was taught skills such as quilt making and ribbon skirts by her kokum at Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, and learned beadwork, sweetgrass weaving and traditional medicine from her kokum in northern Saskatchewan.

“She taught me since I was six. Thirty-three years later I’m still embracing my matriarchs, my kokums’ sacred knowledge. And I am proud I am able to teach my daughter,” said Williams about daughter Shelby, who got an eye for acrylic painting and drawing after learning beadwork at age eight.

“She created the design for our orange shirt which was inspired by her grandparents, who attended residential schools. She also created MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) artwork, which was unfortunately inspired by the murder of my younger sister.”

Williams and Shelby now make a range of items, from quilts and handbags to Cree regalia and cedar hats, along with soaps, lotions and medicine oils using sage, sweetgrass and red cedar.

Frances Whitford, a Métis artisan and I.A.M. director, learned to work with moosehide and fur watching her Métis grandmother in Anzac, south of Fort McMurray. She recalls her grandfather’s trapline as a source of materials that were turned into mukluks and jackets.

“In our culture, you’re mainly taught by watching. All the things my grandmother would do, tanning hides, beadwork, the trapline; was part of my everyday life,” said Whitford.

Her brother and cousin have now stepped into their grandfather’s shoes, supplying furs and hide for her Beadwork & Bannock business, which was inspired by the family’s desire to preserve their Métis heritage.

“I didn’t realize I was taught something very special to my culture. It wasn’t until my grandmother passed away, that I realized it would be lost,” said Whitford.

A member of the Tataskweyak Cree Nation of northern Manitoba, I.A.M. director James Fox recalls wanting to connect to his Cree heritage, so in 2017, he joined Indigenous craft classes at the Edmonton library. From there it was beading lessons at the Native Friendship Centre, and his current Cree-ations now range from rawhide rattles and fish scale art to caribou hair tufting and leather crafts.

“When I started doing beadwork I wanted to keep the traditions, but I always add a modern twist,” said Fox. 

Creations by members of the collective are available at the Downtown Farmers Market in Edmonton, and at Fort Edmonton Park in the summer.

 “It’s very important to us, promoting authentic Indigenous arts,” Whitford said. “The number of beautiful artists is amazing.”

For more, visit https://iamcollective.ca/

JULY 2023:

MAY 29, 2023:

In less than two months, the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation will be ground zero for the 9th annual RedCan invitational graffiti jam, the first and only event of its kind in Indian Country. RedCan is scheduled for July 5-8, 2023, and is open to the public.

The Cheyenne River Youth Project announced the names of the 12 featured artists who will paint murals around the Eagle Butte community on July 5-6 and in CRYP’s public Waniyetu Wowapi (Winter Count) Art Park on July 7-8. The grassroots, Native- and woman-led nonprofit organization also unveiled a short film about the RedCan project titled “Changing the Narrative.”

“Five of our 2022 featured artists were Native women, and all five are returning this year,” said Julie Garreau, CRYP’s executive director. “We are excited to amplify their voices, perspectives and gifts through this little film, just as we are honored to welcome them back to Cheyenne River for four more days of creation, connection, cultural exchange, and the healing, transformative power of art.”

Those artists are 179, Lucious, Rezmo, TamiJoy and Yukue. Also part of the Redcan 2023 lineup are East, Cyfi, Hoka, Biafra, Wundr, Lawst and Desi Mundo.

During the four painting days, each artist will work closely with a CRYP Lakota Art Fellow or teen intern. These young Lakota art students will be able to learn new skills and practice new techniques as they assist the artists.

“This mentorship is a vital part of RedCan,” Garreau explained. “Not only does it bring Native and non-Native artists from across the country to our homelands, giving our community members a priceless opportunity to engage with the largest art movement in the history of humankind, it also gives our young people opportunities to explore their identities, share their voices and stories, and grow as artists.”

“I’m excited that even more teens are interested in participating in RedCan this year,” said Wakinyan Chief, CRYP’s art manager. “One of our programs assistant trainees completed several teen internships with us, and he’s heading into his third RedCan. Every couple of weeks, he tells me how much he’s looking forward to this summer’s event.”

Most of the featured artists have participated in multiple RedCans, as well; in fact, some have participated since the inaugural event in 2015. According to Garreau, that has deepened the RedCan experience in ways that she and her staff couldn’t have anticipated in the beginning.

“We’ve seen lifelong friendships develop, and the artists often refer to RedCan as a family,” she said. “That is profoundly moving to all of us at CRYP, because relationships lie at the heart of everything we do. And as we strengthen the bonds between us, we also see beautiful collaborative work develop — particularly between our guest artists, local Cheyenne River artists, and our young art students. It’s such an honor to witness this unfold year after year.”

While the artists paint in the community, CRYP and its volunteers will host youth arts, crafts and recreational activities at dedicated community sites. Then, when the artists move to the art park, the action moves with them.

“In the past, our two days in the art park have included DJ music, Lakota exhibition dancing, field day games, arts activities, hoop-dancing classes, and so much more,” said Jerica Widow, CRYP’s programs director. “It’s a joy to see the kids learning and having fun while family members and guests stroll through the park, enjoy the music and dancing, and watch the artists work.”

Community members also frequently gather at the mural sites in town, and not just the new ones. Garreau noted that, last year, CRYP staff witnessed people stopping at the older murals as well and discussing the details of the artwork with their companions.

“Our community really has embraced RedCan,” she reflected. “Throughout each year, as we drive or walk around town, we see all of this art — literally hundreds of murals since RedCan began — that uplifts us and reflects who we are as Lakota people. It is really powerful.

“For me, it’s a centering point,” she continued. “That’s so important, because the work we do here can be really challenging.”

On Friday and Saturday, July 7-8, CRYP will close each painting day in the art park with a free community meal and special performance on the Waniyetu Wowapi Art Park stage. Cheyenne River Lakota and Crow Creek Dakota rap artist, producer and sound designer Bazille will perform Friday night.

The Wake Singers, an Olgala Lakota rock band comprising cousins Douglas, Michael and Reed Two Bulls, will take the stage on Saturday. And, as always, the Cheyenne River-based Wakinyan Maza drum group will open and close each day of RedCan with a prayer, smudging and drum song for all who wish to participate.

In 2022, acclaimed hoop dancers The Sampson Brothers performed on RedCan’s final evening.
Photo credit Cheyenne River Youth Project.

Featured artists paint at mural sites in the community for RedCan’s first two days, then paint in the art park during the event’s final two days.
Photo credit Cheyenne River Youth Project.

Rockport artist Elizabeth Harty’s “400 Glosta” poster captures the salt of the sea spirit of America’s Oldest Seaport in an original block print that is not the city’s official quadricentennial poster, but certainly could be.

Harty, who makes her home and art in what was originally a 17th century Rockport tavern, is quite an original herself.

Though not native to Cape Ann, like many local artists and writers, she summered here as a child and returned like a homing pigeon to its influential roots. In her case, this followed a long career as a commercial artist illustrating for clients that included the Washington Post. “They’d send me the stories and I’d illustrate them,” she says of her work for D.C.’s famed daily.

That talent for capturing the spirit of a story in a picture is very much evident in her “400 Glosta” poster. Like Lanesville’s famed Folly Cove Designers, Harty is a skilled block printer reproducing from images she carves into linoleum blocks. But as a painter, she also works in mixed media, exploring, in her words, “the relationships of texture, color, shape and line,” and incorporating them with the technique of collage

This she has done to whimsical and authentically “weather-beaten” effect in her poster

Here are images that belong uniquely to Gloucester. St Peter, patron saint of fishermen, Our Lady of Good Voyage cradling a fishing boat bound for the sea, the fish that the fishermen bring home from the sea, and the seagulls that follow them into port. and there in the port, the iconic sails of a Gloucester schooner, and anchoring it all, the red brick and mortar grandeur of City Hall.

In the 20-so years that Harty has lived on Cape Ann, she has lovingly produced varied versions of all these images, both in acrylic paintings and block prints that have done a brisk business sold locally greeting cards

Block printing, says Harty, allows her to manipulate the process to achieve the weathered quality of a hard-working waterfront.

That, says Harty is the spirit she wanted to celebrate in her “400 Glosta” poster. “I just really did it for fun,” she told the Times, but she had second thoughts when it came to selling it, as the Gloucester 400+ Committee has strict copyright guidelines.

Luckily for her, her spelling of Gloucester as “Glosta,” and use of the number 400 without the plus, got the green light from the committee, and it is “flying out the door” where it’s on sale at Gloucester’s Pop Gallery and Rockport’s Seaside Boutique and Beads as a limited edition signed original print. It is available as a poster, also signed, in Gloucester at Pop Gallery, Art & Antiques, Alexandra’s Bread on Main Street, at the Building Center Gift shop and the Gloucester Stage Company. Prices begin at $50, vary accordingly, and prints are sized for standard frames.

Harty’s extensive collection of colorful abstract acrylics can be seen at https://www.elizabethharty.com/ElizabethHarty.com/Bio.html. Or, you can stop by Machacha, the Rogers Street Mexican restaurant that celebrates south of the border with a gallery of Harty’s spicy acrylics. Her works have also hung in galleries and in showrooms at the art associations in Rockport and Gloucester. Fifty of her abstract acrylics are now on view in two retrospectives Danvers-based Cell Signaling Technology, a supporter of the arts.

The Art Spirit Gallery announced the July exhibition, “New Western Vibe,” with an opening reception from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday at The Art Spirit Gallery, 415 E. Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene.

The works featured in the exhibit will accomplish the Western look with elegance and flair, and sometimes fun, gallery Owner Blair Williams said in a press release dated June 18.

“The American West brings to mind cowboy culture and majestic landscapes by popular imagination,” she continued. “But when decorating a ranch home perched on plains and hedged by mountains, there’s a fine line between honoring the place and perpetuating clichés.”

The month’s exhibit includes contemporary interpretations of Western images including wildlife, landscapes, cowboys, Native American imagery and more.

Wildlife photography, dramatic prairie scenes in oil, Western towns in watercolor, and mixed-media works by Native American artists that embody the region’s culture will be on display until July 30.

Featured artists include Terry Lee, Sheila Evans, Andrew Avakian, Christian Benoit, Paul Freidrich, Lance Green, Sam Scott and Sara Taylor.

Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday.

To assist in the 150th celebration of the founding of Coralville, Ottumwa native Isaac Campbell has erected historic photographs and those of the city’s younger residents around town through the art of wheat pasting.

Talk of Iowa host Charity Nebbe talks with Campbell and his collaborators about this project, and the art of wheat pasting which has taken him to places and projects spanning from Houston, Texas to the Louvre in Paris, France.

Jorge Toledo joins the conversation later in the episode. Toledo was wrongfully detained by the Venezuelan government for nearly five years before being released in October 2022. Toledo’s story was among several that Campbell has amplified with wheatpaste murals as part of the Bring Our Families Home campaign.

Guests:

• Isaac Campbell, artist
• Ellen Alexander, assistant director, Coralville Public Library
• Wendy Stevenson, digital history librarian, Coralville Public Library
• Jorge Toledo, former oil and gas executive, resident of Sugar Land, Texas

A ribbon-cutting will be held to celebrate a new sculpture at Cosmos Indian Store & Cafe, with free henna art offered to community members who attend.

Lead artist Mona Cliff, artist assistant Kaushika Panchal and concrete chair builder Matt Bellomy created the sculpture, according to an email from People’s Markets Program Project Coordinator Connie Fiorella Fitzpatrick. Store owner Amrutha Ravikumar thought of the idea to make the sculpture a chair.

Cliff is a multidisciplinary artist who explores contemporary Native American identity through use of traditional Native crafting methods like seed bead embroidery and fabric appliqué, according to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce website. Locally, she also recently participated in a temporary exhibition called Roadside Inappropriations and completed a mural in East Lawrence. 

Panchal, who’s a Kansas City-based henna artist, used a henna cone to assist in creating the sculpture, Fiorella Fitzpatrick said. Rather than use henna dye, she chose to use acrylic paint.

“[Panchal] is truly bringing her culture to public art,” Fiorella Fitzpatrick said. “It is beautiful.” 

The event is scheduled from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, June 30 at Cosmos Indian Store & Cafe, 3115 W. Sixth St., Suite H, in Lawrence. The three artists and the store owners will cut the ribbon at approximately 5:30 p.m. Panchal will offer free henna art to attendees as part of the event.

The sculpture is in conjunction with the People’s Markets Program, an initiative in which artists are paired with local retailers to highlight “diverse Culinary Arts through prerecorded cooking demonstrations using ingredients found at these retailers,” according to the Kansas Chamber of Commerce website.

Other retailers participating in the People’s Markets Program include African Caribbean Grocery, Mediterranean Market & Cafe, La Estrella Tienda Mexicana and F-Mart Asian Market. 

Caroline Zimmerman (she/her), intern for The Lawrence Times, is a rising senior at the University of Kansas studying journalism and mass communications. She has covered crime and public safety for the University Daily Kansan, and the Eudora City Commission for the Eudora Times.

She can be reached at czimmerman (at) lawrencekstimes (dot) com. Follow her on Twitter. Read her work for the Times at this link.

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Laguna Beach’s art festival season arrived with much anticipation Tuesday, as the town turned out in droves for Preview Night at the Sawdust Art Festival.

Half an hour after the grounds opened under the setting sun, the line to get in had pushed back to the neighboring Art-A-Fair and threatened to overtake the Village Entrance.

Once inside, those turning up for locals night got what they were seeking, a transport into another world. A flying saucer with lights flashing in three different sections below a crescent moon — a creation of festival artist Kirk Milette — might have signaled that was the case for those who were unaware.

A giant flying saucer scene greets visitors at the entrance of the Sawdust Art Festival on Tuesday in Laguna Beach.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

“We welcomed over 2,300 people onto our grounds [Tuesday] night,” Tom Hartmann, general manager of the Sawdust Art Festival, said. “The atmosphere was simply buzzing with community members eager to celebrate the vibrancy of art and music in our grove.”

The Sawdust Art Festival opens to the public on Friday, which is also opening day for Art-A-Fair. The first day of the Festival of Arts Fine Art Show is July 5, with opening night for the Pageant of the Masters coming on July 7.

Now in its 57th year, the current show at the Sawdust Art Festival has 168 total artists and makers walking the grounds, with 14 of them showing at the festival for the first time.

Glass artist Marcus Thesing shows guests a piece during the Sawdust Art Festival’s locals preview night on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Dylan Arthur Howard, 28, a Chicago native who moved to Laguna Beach two years ago, is among the newcomers. His booth sported an assortment of mirrors and tables made from locally sourced materials, specifically wood.

So when a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around, it does make a sound, as far as Howard is concerned. He said his work is inspired by his childhood, one that was spent mostly outside turning over rocks and building treehouses.

“They’re really supposed to be portals … like a reminder of where we come from, which is nature,” Howard said of his work. “Not us, specifically, but our ancestors, we all at one point lived amongst nature, and so I’m trying to create furniture that brings that back into our daily lives.”

Tile artist and exhibitor Jesse Bartels laughs with guests during the Sawdust Art Festival’s locals preview night on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

Howard added that with enough creativity, a piece of waste can be turned “into something to be cherished.”

“Other woodworkers can do the same thing, wherever they live,” Howard said. “Woodworking is one of the few industries where we can get away with really utilizing waste material in a big way. Whether you’re from Southern California, or you’re from Chicago, or New York, anyone can do what I’m doing. You just have to be willing to put in the effort and make that network of people, so that we’re no longer sourcing exotic woods from other continents.”

Lovisa Kjerrgren, 36, is also showing her work at the Sawdust Art Festival for the first time. The Swedish transplant recently created an art banner for the city along South Coast Highway. One of the walls in her booth displayed more than a dozen framed illustrations of cacti.

Longtime exhibitor and local Doug Miller smiles at guests over his table of toys at the Sawdust Art Festival on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

A landscape architect by trade, Kjerrgren’s background is reflected in her work.

“When you stop literally wherever you’re standing and you look closer at what’s at your feet, you’re going to see a different kind of intricacy of nature that is also beautiful,” Kjerrgren said. “Everything, it’s either growing or it’s disintegrating somehow and becoming something else. There’s a cycle in life and in the landscapes around us that I find fascinating.”

Kyle Caris, a 2009 graduate of Laguna Beach High, is back at the Sawdust Art Festival after leaving town to further his education at the Kansas City Art Institute. He also studied ceramics at Orange Coast College.

A ceramic mask made by artist Robert Jones hangs on his booth during the Sawdust Art Festival’s locals preview night.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)

In a unique twist to his pottery, Caris included sand around the edges of plates, tying in his time spent working in restaurants with a life spent on the water. Caris has had an abundance of time in the water, as a swimmer and water polo player, a surfer, a sailor, and as a lifeguard for the city.

Caris mused that his work aimed to recreate the naturally occurring sculptures that result in the aftermath of shipwrecks, combining the natural with the manufactured.

“It’s crazy how much of your history comes into play in all of your work, whether you’re consciously thinking about it or not,” Caris said. “I will say when I went to Kansas City Art Institute, that was one thing I was really thinking about.”

Guests gather around artist Shane Dunlap’s booth of carved wooden creations at the Sawdust Art Festival on Tuesday.

(Don Leach / Staff Photographer)