Director's Note 10/1/16
It is fall, as in falling rain (lots) and falling leaves (not so many, yet). Darkness is falling earlier. Summer activities--Sara Caron's coffee Mondays and hikes--continue to fall away. Last weekend's Urban Forest Fest felt like summer's last hurrah: nearly 500 visitors, many of them new to Lynden, enjoying a day learning about the uses of urban wood. We watched sawmill demos, admired slabs of wood and then the furniture they became, made floating sculptures to launch in the pond, and were hoisted into one of our largest elms by the Wisconsin Arborists Association. There were artist-led hikes, a habitat walk, music from the Milwaukee Mandolin Orchestra, and plenty of opportunities to climb on stumps and build with tree cookies. Many thanks to Wisconsin Urban Wood for partnering with us on that lively day.
Two major projects wind down this month: Yevgeniya Kaganovich's long running grow residency, and the first phase of Fo Wilson's Eliza's Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities. We bring grow to a close with a one-day exhibition--indoors and out--of nearly all the interconnected, plant-like forms that Kaganovich, her students, and community members have made from recycled plastic bags over the past four years. Many of you have attended Kaganovich's workshops at Lynden, used her fused plastic bags to make kites during Kites Over Lynden, or encountered grow as it spread further afield (most recently to Milwaukee's City Hall). We will celebrate October 1 with a reception, a talk by Jennifer Johung, and the release of a limited-edition publication about the project. You are invited to return on Sunday to adopt a bulb or two; the remainder will be recycled.
The gallery portion of the Eliza project closes at the end of October, and we will put the outdoor cabin and its solar power system to sleep for the winter. You can catch artists Fo Wilson and Kirsten Leenaars--her exhibition, (Re)housing the American Dream, is currently at the Haggerty Museum--in conversation with Jasmine Alinder at the Haggerty on October 6 as part of the Imagining America National Conference. Lynden will be hosting a symposium, Eliza's Cabinet: History, Objects, and the Black Imagination, at the end of the month, and will publish a broadside soon after. We will also post video from the four performances we presented over the summer.
There is also, in the resumption of school-related activities like the weekly art drop-in, homeschool days and school's out workshops, and in the regular arrival of buses filled with students bound for field trips, a sense of excitement and renewal. We have a waiting list for our perennials workshop, Naomi Cobb is planning her first moon walk, Katheryn Corbin invites you to join her for a ceramics workshop, and Colin Matthes is preparing new challenges for beginning and experienced painters in his wet-on-wet watercolor workshop. For those turning their attention indoors, and to their own art collections, Bruce Knackert offers another installment of his conservation framing series, designed to help you make decisions about how best to care for works on paper.
Finally, fall is the time when we roll out the application for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation's Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowships for Individual Artists. Those of us who work on the program are busy updating the website, offering workshops, fielding questions from applicants, and making travel arrangements for the jurors who are coming from Chicago, Houston, and Reno.
