Spring has finally sprung, and that means we’re all rushing outside to enjoy the sun and warm weather. While much visual art happens indoors, here are three creative, art-filled events that take place outdoors — weather-permitting.

Tee up at Skyline Mini Golf

The Walker Art Center’s popular rooftop artist-designed Skyline Mini Golf is back. Tee times begin on Thursday and run through early fall. The putt-putt fun kicks off with a ride on a mini golf version of the light rail from Target Field Station. Golfers must stay on track lest they experience serious delays. Another hole weaves putters through the narrative on a Hmong story cloth. In a hole titled “Dream Catcher,” made in collaboration with Native Youth Arts Collective, a feather guides players. In the multiplayer hole “Color Wheel,” up to four people can hit their golf balls at the same time, racing to see who can score first. Other creative mini golf holes deal with the necessity of quick decision-making or the possibility that a player could become a sculptural obstacle, and part of the game itself. The last hole, “Right on Cue,” is a mini game of billiards transformed into a putting challenge. There are only 10 holes, so make each one count. Maximum eight per team. (Ends Oct. 1. $12, $10 Walker members and ages 7-18. Add gallery admission for an extra $6. 725 Vineland Place, Mpls. Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Wed., Fri.-Sun., 11 a.m.-9 p.m. Thu. Pre-book tee times at walkerart.org.)

Stay outdoors at Art-A-Whirl

The country’s biggest open studio tour happens in northeast Minneapolis this weekend. Now in its 28^th year, the event welcomes more than 1,200 artists, galleries and businesses at over 70 locations. While most events are indoors, there are various outdoor options. This year Art-A-Whirl hosts its first-ever coloring contest. Young artists are encouraged to color in the lines (or not!) of artist Destiny Davison‘s two-page spread, which can be found in the event’s guidebook. After the drawing is done, post it to Instagram and tag it with @nemaamn and #artawhirl. If staying outside is your jam, check out the mural events by queer and people of color collective Creatives After Curfew. Find more murals at the Elias Metal Studio. Catch a live outdoor glassblowing event at Stone Arch Glass Studio on Saturday and Sunday, weather-permitting, from 1-5 p.m. If it’s a puzzle you’d rather solve, test a Rube Goldberg interactive machine in NE Tree House’s (326 NE. Monroe St.) backyard. Chill out with some Zen vibes at the Meditation Center (631 University Av. NE.) and experience peace of mind.

Rise & Remember Festival at George Floyd Memorial

This Memorial Day weekend marks three years since now former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, killing him. Rise & Remember, a three-day event organized by the George Floyd Global Memorial, wants to ensure that people will remember the impact that Floyd’s death had on the world, while also focusing on the effects of police brutality on marginalized communities. The fight for racial justice continues, and organizers wish that all will participate to change the world. At George Floyd Square on May 25, there will be a candlelight vigil from 8-10 p.m. On May 27 from 9 a.m.-9 p.m., people will be able to spend time outdoors at the Rise & Remember Festival, which includes an art exhibition, kids’ zone, self-care fair, concert, live performances, inspirational speakers and food from Black-owned businesses. For more information, visit georgefloydglobalmemorial.org.

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center opened for the summer season on Wednesday near the Old Faithful area inside Yellowstone National Park.

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is a place where artists, storytellers and scholars from the 27 Native American tribes that are associated with the park connect with Yellowstone visitors. The center will be open to the public until Oct. 14, according to a news release issued by Yellowstone National Park.

This year, demonstrations and presentations will be devoted to many different topics, including nature photography, beadwork, making clothing, Native American art, songs, drumming, dancing, traditional storytelling and more.

“Many Tribal Nations have a continuous presence in the area now known as Yellowstone National Park,” said Alyssa McGeeley, Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center Coordinator and member of the Muscogee Tribe from Oklahoma, in a news release. “The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is a space where Indigenous people from the 27 Tribes associated with the park share the resiliency of their people with visitors from all over the world as artists, educators and culture bearers.”

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center opened in 2022, during Yellowstone’s 150th anniversary celebration, and represents a partnership between the National Park Service, the nonprofit organization Yellowstone Forever and Native American tribal consultants.

The center, along with many of the 150th anniversary celebrations, are some of the ways that Yellowstone National Park recognizes that before it was established as the world’s first national park, the land was home to many Native American tribes that still have significant connections to the land and water.

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is located between the Old Faithful Lodge and Old Faithful Visitor Education Center.

A complete schedule of presentations and demonstrations for the 2023 season is available online at Yellowstone Forever’s website.

Yellowstone National Park was established as a national park on March 1, 1872. Most of the park is located in Wyoming, but some of it extends into Montana, as well as a small, remote portion of Idaho that has no roads.

The view from inside Winslow Homer’s studio on Prouts Neck in Scarborough. Photo courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art

It was all major museums could do to remain accessible through the pandemic. Some hosted shows online and opened sporadically between COVID outbreaks. But even when they opened full-time again, other ancillary buildings and locations – such as deceased artists’ studios or buildings devoted to the work of a single artist – remained on pause.

Institutions used the down time as an opportunity to rethink these experiences for a post-pandemic museum goer. Now they are just reopening (or in one case, closing for major restoration).

These studios and private museums allow a deeper dive into the work of individual artists, helping us understand the environment that moved them, the light of their paintings, the forms of their sculptures and more. Here’s what’s going on at these facilities outside the museums proper.

Winslow Homer Studio
Prouts Neck, Scarborough; 207-775-6148, portlandmuseum.org/homer

“Our plan was to open the studio in 2020 with a whole reinterpreted experience,” says Christian Adame, Peggy L. Osher Director of Learning and Community Collaboration for the Portland Museum of Art. COVID gutted that idea. Instead, last year the PMA ran a few pilot tours with ticket holders thwarted by the pandemic to test out aspects of the reinterpretation, which is now fully functional for groups of about a dozen at a time (transported by bus from the PMA).

As part of the program, the museum transitioned volunteer docents to paid positions, hired others and trained them.

“Previous iterations were trying to tell a general story of Homer’s whole life,” explains Adame. “We’ve tried to focus on the last 10 years he lived in Prouts Neck, rooting the story in his sense of place here and in how he lived.”

The few of Homer’s effects that remained at his Scarborough studio, including furnishings, are displayed on raised platforms. Photo courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art

Not many personal effects remained (except for some objects and furnishings now raised on display platforms). Instead, working from the only extant photograph of Homer in his studio, the museum reproduced various paintings, drawings, copper plates and etchings known to be executed there, as well as tools and brushes – even his artist’s palette.

A custom soundscape now plays during the visit. We hear what Homer might have heard while working: his Jack Russell terrier, Sam, barking in the distance, brushstrokes on canvas, his pencil scribbling notes on the walls, fire crackling in the hearth and the artist cooking. Upstairs, there is a photo gallery of Homer, family members and visitors at Prouts Neck, as well as reproductions of botanical watercolors done by his mother, Henrietta. Visitors can also hold receivers to their ears to listen to letters, narrated by PMA staff, that Homer wrote to his father and brother.

Visitors get a newly minted field guide with information about Homer, his works, a chronology of his life, a family tree, notes on the area’s geology and local flora and fauna, and so on. “There’s a lot of self-exploration too,” concludes Adame. “So that visitors get a better sense of that place and the importance of it to Winslow Homer’s art.”

Admission: $65 ($40 for PMA members and $25 for students; group rate and off-season pricing also available), includes full-day access to the PMA. Tours are limited to 12 people. The studio is open until Nov. 12.

Sculptures by Bernard Langlais at the Langlais Art Preserve. Photo by Maura McEvoy

Langlais Art Preserve

Cushing; 207-888-2435, langlaisartpreserve.org

Native Maine sculptor Bernard “Blackie” Langlais was one of the most beloved artists in the state. He had enormous success on the national art stage, but eventually abandoned New York and the spotlight, preferring to settle back in Cushing to work quietly with scrap wood in his barn and surround himself with his monumental animal sculptures and the occasional figure (Richard Nixon, Christina from Wyeth’s painting “Christina’s World”).

The Georges River Land Trust has managed the 90-acre, ADA-accessible preserve since 2015 in a unique partnership with The Kohler Foundation Inc. (which contributes to the restoration of artists’ studios across the country) and Colby College Museum of Art (which currently maintains the sculptures, and a member of which sits on the preserve’s board of advisors).

Bernard Langlais’ workshop and barn are reopening in June. Photo by Maura McEvoy

Come June 29, the newly renamed Langlais Art Preserve will reopen the artist’s workshop and barn, which director Hannah Blunt describes as a “horror vacui,” a Latin phrase that refers to a fear of empty spaces. Considering the barn and workshop are packed to the gills – with tools, wood, multiples of wooden dog legs (to use when needed for a piece) and sculptures that Langlais both completed and left unfinished at his death in 2007 – the term fits.

Because the artist “left everything” and his widow, Helen, invited other artists to use the barn and shop as well as Langlais’s tools until her own death in 2010, Blunt observes, “For genuine makers and thinkers, it’s especially interesting.”

But Langlais’s whimsical work has an appeal that’s pretty nearly universal. And the experience of the barn and workshop will only enhance people’s enjoyment of it. “This is an immersive art environment and very site-specific experience,” Blunt says. “What you get in Cushing is a sense of his engagement with the place he called home since the late 1960s.” Space has also been made to screen Melanie Essex’s 1977 super 8 film of Langlais’s art-making environment (made when she was 17, shortly before his death).

Over a dozen of his sculptures dot the grounds (a 13-foot horse, bears, an elephant, Nixon emerging from a marsh), and visitors “get a sense of how climate and the environment affected his work.” Animals roost in or perch atop the sculptures, which would have tickled Langlais.

Admission: suggested donation of $10. The grounds are open every day from dawn to dusk. Langlais barn and workshop will be open from June 29 to Sept. 3, 1-4 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday. More information about programs, tours, and accessibility will be published on the preserve’s new website.

The Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Photo by David Troup

Olson House and the Wyeth Center
Rockland; 207-596-6457, farnsworthmuseum.org

For 30 years – from 1938 to 1968 – Wyeth produced some 350 paintings of Olson House and its inhabitants, Alvaro and Christina Olson, the latter becoming the subject of “Christina’s World,” arguably his most iconic work. “One of the things Wyeth’s paintings of Olson House document,” observes Farnworth Museum curator Jane Bianco, “is the concurrent aging of the house and the occupant. The house was an analogy for their aging process.”

For the near future, the historic landmark is closed as the museum undertakes a major restoration. “We’re pacing ourselves depending on our fundraising,” says the museum’s director Christopher Brownawell, who estimates it will cost $2 million to reopen. This requires adding structural support for the floor, rebuilding and hoisting the chimney into place, replacing windows and more.

Andrew Wyeth, “Alvaro on Front Doorstep,” 1942 watercolor on paper. Collection of the Marunuma Art Park. © 2023 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS) Courtesy of Farnsworth Art Museum

In the meantime, the Wyeth Center is presenting “Alvaro’s World: Andrew Wyeth and the Olson House” (June 17 through Oct. 29), which draws on the museum’s own holdings and those of Katsushige Suzaki, a prolific Wyeth collector who established Marunuma Art Park in Asaka, Japan. It’s a rare opportunity, says Brownawell, to “get a deeper understanding of Wyeth’s relationship with these people” from the point of view of Alvaro, who cared for his sister while tending pigs and hens, growing crops, haying fields, raking blueberries and endlessly chopping wood (11 cords per winter to heat the drafty house).

The first floor will also include a display about the progress of the restoration. The grounds of Olson House itself will be dotted with signage for self-guided tours of the remote saltwater farm on Hawthorne Point, about 12 miles from the museum. The museum galleries, where Brownawell says “we integrate Wyeth into the larger American art narrative,” will also host a Wyeth show.

Admission: $20 adults, $18 seniors, $10 students (free to members, children under 16 and Rockland residents). 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: [email protected] 

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ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV) – Counterpublic is an ambitious 6-mile public art exhibition garnering national attention across the City of St. Louis.

“It’s meant to be an invitation to come out and experience your city,” said James McAnally, the creative director of Counterpublic.

Counterpublic began in 2019 on Cherokee Street. The art exhibition happens every three years and last for three months. This rendition started April 15 and goes through July 15, featuring 30 artists and installations that span the length of Jefferson Avenue from South City to North City.

But some of the installations will be permanent. The most prominent is “Pillars of the Valley,” a sculpture by East St. Louis native Damon Davis. It’s located outside CityPark Stadium ensuring a steady stream of viewers. The sculpture is a tribute to Mill Creek Valley, a thriving Black neighborhood demolished in 1959.

Throughout Counterpublic are stories, tributes and pieces of art meant to spark a conversation.

“Counterpublic commissions dozens of artists, collectives, and community organizers to make and present works in St. Louis that engage the city’s histories and imagine new futures,” reads their website.

A prime example is the sculpture underway at The Griot Museum of Black History in North St. Louis. The museum has been a cultural institution for decades in St. Louis. Outside, a permanent sculpture is being created by world-renowned artist David Adjaye.

It involves a series of earthen sculptures and will be Adjaye’s first permanent public sculpture. According to Counterpublic, “Asaase III is conceived as a contribution to the cultural infrastructure of the city of St. Louis and The Griot Museum of Black History borne from Adjaye’s ongoing reflections on the origins of Black architecture.”

“Right here at St. Louis Avenue and 25th Street. Just a major coup that he found the work we do, aligns in a special way with the work he does,” said Lois Conley, the founder of The Griot.

Down the street is another piece of Counterpublic, Rudio Studios, the workplace of local artist Robert Green. His studio is open by appointment, but outside, you can view his sculpture called “Holding Up The World.”

“St. Louis Avenue is a busy street, and before that sculpture went up, people would fly through the stop sign. But now they’re starting to slow down and take a look,” said Green.

You can experience Counterpublic by stopping at an individual spot or you can start from one end and travel along Jefferson to experience it all.

McAnally says they created it with the idea of starting at the southern end at Sugarloaf Mound. Located at 4420 Ohio Ave, Sugarloaf Mound is the oldest human-made structure in St. Louis and the last intact Native American mound in what was once known as “Mound City.” On the site is a billboard and 40 wooden platforms painted and embellished with ribbons and tile, by artists Anita + Nokosee Fields.

To learn more about each site and the artists, go to https://www.counterpublic.org/.

You can hear a more in-depth conversation with founders James McAnally and Lee Broughton on the Meet St. Louis Podcast.

Copyright 2023 KMOV. All rights reserved.

Artist Melissa Chaney’s landscape painting of pale purple coneflowers amid tall, native grasses at Snowball Hill Prairie. // Courtesy MPF

Artists and nature enthusiasts of all ages are invited to enjoy the blooming wildflowers of Harrisonville’s native prairie May 20 at the Missouri Prairie Foundation’s fourth annual Paint it Priaire plein air painting event.

Plein air, which is French for “out of doors,” refers to the practice of painting entire finished paintings outside. Pioneered by impressionists in the mid-19th century, visitors to the Paint it Prairie event will get to channel their inner Monet at Missouri Prairie Foundation’s Snowball Prairie, located 35 minutes southwest of downtown Kansas City in Harrisonville.

Nature enthusiasts are encouraged to attend and learn about the native prairie through interpretive hikes planned for 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.

Tables will also feature information on the Harrisonville Fine Art Association and Missouri Prairie Foundation and its Grow Native program.

The event is free to all who enjoy art and community on the 20-acre original native prairie. And truly, we could all benefit from a wholesome painting session among like-minded nature enthusiasts and an abundance of grass?

The event starts at 7 a.m. and will go until 5 p.m. Artists should come prepared with their own medium supplies, drinking water in a non-disposable container, and a camera if desired. In the event of inclement weather, Paint it Priaire will be moved to June 10.

YELLOWSTONE – The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center has opened to the public for the season.

Located in the Old Faithful area, the center is a space where Indigenous artists, scholars and presenters from the 27 associated Tribes of Yellowstone National Park directly engage with visitors through demonstrations and discussions. Now in its second year, the center is a partnership between the National Park Service and Yellowstone Forever, with Tribal consultation.

During the 2023 season, 37 presenters from 18 associated Tribes will engage with Yellowstone visitors through formal and informal education. Presentations will include photography, beadwork, moccasin making, dancing, storytelling, quillwork and more.

“Many Tribal Nations have a continuous presence in the area now known as Yellowstone National Park,” said Alyssa McGeeley, Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center coordinator, and member of the Muscogee Tribe from Oklahoma. “The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is a space where Indigenous people from the 27 Tribes associated with the park share the resiliency of their people with visitors from all over the world as artists, educators and culture bearers.”

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center will remain open through Oct. 14. The center is centrally located between the Old Faithful Lodge and the Old Faithful Visitor Education Center.

The Yellowstone Tribal Heritage Center is made possible through funding from Yellowstone Forever, the National Park Foundation and generous private donations.

To learn more visit: Yellowstone.org/tribal-center.