Director's Note 3/1/12

March 1, 2012

I’m here to talk about summer. I know, it was so foggy this morning that I couldn’t see my shoes to tie them, and now it is the sullen grey of incipient rain that drifts above the mess of ice and puddles on the lake. But we are busy making plans for summer, and we’d like to share them with you—or at least what I’ll call the educational installment. Future newsletters will delve into other kinds of programming, like performances and dog days—yes, dog days! We are going to open Lynden to our canine friends (leashed, of course) on a few days starting in…perhaps May?

For the younger set, we have a very full schedule of Summer Art Camps beginning June 13 and running well into August. The complete schedule is here, along with a handy enrollment form. If you sign up for one of our Spring Studio Classes you will also find yourself at the receiving end of some fine camp discounts.

For adults, we have three opportunities for creative expansion. Thea Kovac returns on June 16 with Fresh Starts, a workshop designed to ease you out of creative hibernation and into activity. Sally Duback will offer the second installment of her successful Dimensional Papermaking workshop beginning August 18. This is an opportunity to take paper pulp into the third dimension under Sally’s benign and watchful eye. Sandwiched in between, and kind of a big deal, is Direct Response, an outdoor painting workshop with Eric Aho (August 3-5). Eric, whose work may be familiar from his shows at the Tory Folliard Gallery, will be coming in from Vermont to share his approach to painting en plein air. Space is very limited for this workshop, and Eric’s fans from around the country are known to travel great distances to study with him, so I urge you to get your registration in soon.

The part of my mind that isn’t on summer is on Haiti, which was a preferred locus of escape from Michigan winters for painter Orville Bulman. Bulman’s work is the subject of Haiti and the Midwestern Imagination, our next exhibition at Lynden. Over time, the Grand Rapids native took the more practical approach of spending a good part of each year in Florida, where he could paint and run his business over the telephone, but his imagination dallied in the sunny Caribbean for more than two decades. The Bulman paintings, along with three watercolors of Haiti by Oscar Sanchez, go on view March 7 in conjunction with Haiti 2012: Dreams and reality € pays rêvé, pays réel, a three-day celebration (March 7-9) of contemporary Haitian art, cinema and literature. The conference travels from Marquette (film), to the Milwaukee Art Museum (art) and concludes at UWM (literature) and features several Haitian guests who will report on the state of Haiti’s cultural life two years after the earthquake.

Closer to home, we have a last call for the Wisconsin Visual Artists Juried Exhibition, which comes down after Friday. The outdoor installation by Gary John Gresl and Val Christell will remain on the patio for a few more days before it is reduced to mulch for the spring gardening. Also on Friday is our School’s Out Workshop, so if you are looking for an all-day activity for your school-free kids, this could be it.

On Sunday, March 4, we have a Magic Propellers Workshop, and on March 25 Heather Eiden will examine the throat chakra in our monthly yoga series. There’s one April event that I need to squeeze into this March roundup because tickets go fast: the next installment of our Women’s Speaker Series on April 3. Our guest will be Amy Krouse Rosenthal, memoirist, children’s book author, filmmaker, blogger…and more.

Don’t forget that we shift to spring hours on March 12, which means we will be open on Saturdays from 12 noon-5 pm in addition to our current hours.


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