Director's Note 6/1/18
June snuck up on us, its advent lost in one of those momentarily confusing changes of weather. The visual evidence seems clear enough: the splashes of color that came from the fruit trees, the lilacs, and the forsythia are gone, their season always too short; the lawnmower passes by my window more regularly. We are settling into the serious green of summer: darker, deeper, weightier. The tone of the leaves and the motion of the branches as they curve slowly and deliberately in the wind hint at an unseen burden of water, stored up for the hotter months. Much of the color to be found on the grounds just now comes from the ephemeral installations of the scores of young people who have visited Lynden in the past few weeks for their final school field trip of the year.
Still, programming goes its own way, and June is summer at Lynden. Tai Chi for Health Warriors begins this afternoon, and starting this week we will be open until 7:30 pm every Wednesday—an excellent time to picnic and stroll. Summer camp is just around the corner: next week our summer staff comes in for orientation and to prepare for the busy season ahead.
June also marks the beginning of our Call & Response programming. We have a drop-in family workshop tomorrow to introduce people of all ages to Fo Wilson’s installation, Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities, and poet Duriel E. Harris arrives at Lynden on Wednesday for a three-day workshop: Writing in the Light of Death: Withness and Experiments in Joy. The workshop, a collaboration with Woodland Pattern Book Center, invites us to enrich our writing and art-making practices by sitting with the vulnerability that accompanies our aliveness. And if you can’t make the daily sessions, you can still drop in for the final reading on Friday evening. Also this month, we will be opening the first stage of Arianne King Comer’s summer exhibition. Ibile’s Voice feature’s Comer’s own textile paintings; when she arrives in Milwaukee in July, she will begin to add the works made by community members as they join her around the dye vat.
For fans of the Women’s Speaker Series, our Gail Honeyman event is sold out, but tickets are still available for Jenna Blum, author of The Lost Family, on August 9. Summer workshops are filling up, so if you didn’t make it into today’s primitive raku workshop with Katheryn Corbin, consider signing up for Bonsai for Beginners on June 9, Cary Suneja’s paper marbling workshop on June 16, or one of the many workshops scheduled for July and August.
Present Music returns on June 23 for Sound & Sight, the kind of outdoor performance that will, inevitably, alter our perceptions of Lynden’s landscape and sculpture collection. Tickets are available from Present Music. We will be closing at 3 pm that day to prepare for the concert, and the shuttle bus will begin making its rounds at 3:30 pm.
We are also entering the Nohl Fellowship season, with the first wave of exhibitions opening this month. Join us at the Haggerty Museum of Art on Thursday, June 7, for a double opening of the 2017 Nohl Fellows Exhibition honoring this year’s fellows--Tom Berenz, Lois Bielefeld, Sara Caron, Sky Hopinka, and Ariana Vaeth--and The Nohl Fellowship at 15 which features work by nearly all of the ninety-six artists and collectives that have received fellowships during the program’s fifteen-year history. On June 23 we open Mary Nohl and the Walrus Club at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, an exhibition that brings together work by eight Nohl Fellows: Cecelia Condit, Sheila Held, Robin Jebavy, Anne Kingsbury, Sarah Gayle Luther, Kim Miller, Maggie Sasso, and Sonja Thomsen.
Lynden’s annual backyard barbecue is coming up on August 23. The proceeds from that event make it possible to offer our education programs to children for free or at reduced cost, and to cover bus transportation when schools cannot afford it.
