Art
My heart is on fire for this lost Duluth poet
Elvira T. Johnson was a leader among poets. As I reconstruct the history of the Arrowhead in poets, she seems to be a voice I need to reconstruct. (more…)
Literary History of Duluth: Helen Jenswold Dahle
Google tells me John “Jack” Dahle was “born in Duluth, Minnesota, to Minnesota State Senator Clarence Arthur and Helen Jenswold Dahle.” But I have no idea who Helen Jenswold Dahle is. Does anyone else have any ideas? As I build a literary history of Duluth, I am missing information about this author. (more…)
Selective Focus: Alex (Alby) Breilein’s Family Portraits
Inspired by time spent sifting through family albums, Alex (Alby) Breilein creates photo-drawing collages from old photographs. The drawings are from snapshots taken before Breilein was born or formed memories. “I never knew them, yet they are a part of me,” she says of her grandparents’ pictures. Her artwork can be viewed at Wussow’s Concert Cafe throughout the month of June. Below is a recent interview with Breilein, as well as photos taken at her recent exhibit at Hemlocks Leatherworks: (more…)
Duluth Literary History
As I prep to teach a Minnesota Writers class again this fall, I am working through little resources and breadcrumb trails.
William A. Sommers has been subject to my writing here before. Here is his page from Minnesota Landscapes. I wonder if anyone has a story to tell? (more…)
Looking for Minnesota Authors: Dorothy Bladin Hill and Ruth Slonim
Minnesota Landscapes, the book published by the League of Minnesota Poets, has a number of Duluth authors I don’t know and want to know more about.
Dorothy Bladin Hill has a vertical file record at the Duluth Public Library — I gotta check that out. Bladin Hill was also an author of the Big Book of Christmas Entertainments. What other stories might anyone share that might ignite my students’ passion? (more…)
‘Minnesota Skyline’ and the history of local literature
The League of Minnesota Poets once published an anthology that was loaded with Twin Ports poets and topics. Minnesota Skyline was printed in twelve editions, 20,000 copies.
I’m curious about the authors within, including Luella Bender Carr. (more…)
Celebrating frontline workers in housing and food insecurity through art at UMD
Too often, the frontline workers in housing and food insecurity go unnoticed in our region. Some of my students (and students of Adam Pine) interviewed some of these unsung heroes. Then, local artists Nelle Rhicard and Maryam Khaleghi Yazdi turned their insights into art — transformed, really, their insights into art. (more…)
Avant Garde Women: Elsa the Dada Baroness, Djuna Barnes and Margaret Anderson
Introduction
The story of Elsa the Dada Baroness transpired in a milieu of literary queer feminist icons circa World War I. This story was best told in 1930, in the book My Thirty Years’ War by Margaret Anderson. Anderson was the radical publisher (with Jane Heap) of the Little Review, the international modernist-Dadaist-anarchist magazine that punched above its weight and first serialized Joyce’s Ulysses. I bought my copy of My Thirty Years’ War hoping for a great first-person account of the landmark obscenity trial that ensued over Ulysses, but Anderson barely mentions it. However she does say a lot about the Baroness. Anderson got to know the Baroness by publishing her poems; every history of the Baroness goes through Margaret Anderson.
My Thirty Years’ War is in the public domain and, as evidence of that, my copy has a typo in the title on the front cover, and a couple pages are in the wrong order. But it has the goods. I also read Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity — A Cultural Biography by Irene Gammel. My copy of that has no typos and a hundred pages of footnotes, and it’s where I found accounts of the Baroness by another writer Anderson was publishing: Djuna Barnes. Like Anderson, Barnes became a supporting character in the Baroness’ story. (more…)
Future of Duluth’s Galley Hop still unknown
Graphic of participating galleries for the 2016 Gallery Hop, including Duluth Art Institute, Siiviiss of Sivertson Gallery, Lake Superior Art Glass, Washington 315 Gallery and others. Photo courtesy of Art for Earth Day Gallery Hop on Facebook.
Five years after the coronavirus pandemic forced the cancellation of what would have been the 30th annual Art for Earth Day Gallery Hop, no plan is in place to bring the event back. But its organizers are still considering some type of reboot. (more…)
A Creative Journey: Oddio Nib
“Three,” 18×24-inch acrylic on canvas.
Oddio Nib began making his mark on the Duluth art scene in the early 1980s with paintings representing a diverse array of styles. His profusion of work includes hundreds of images, and in the coming months, the Duluth community will have the opportunity to view an extensive retrospective. (more…)
The Slice: Connecting Threads
Abstract artist Mary Mathews has an exhibition of original, contemporary quilts on display at Duluth Pottery until the end of May.
In its series The Slice, PBS North presents short “slices of life” that capture the events and experiences that bring people together and speak to what it means to live up north.
The Slice: Making Seed Mosaic Art
The Seed AfFAIR is a meetup for people interested in crop art, the environmental art practice of using plants and seeds to create images, usually by gluing them to a background. The AfFAIR part of the name references the goal of entering pieces in the Minnesota State Fair’s juried competition.
The group began meeting at the start of 2024 and has been featured twice on The Slice; the 2025 part-two video is above, and the original 2024 video is below. (more…)
Minnesota Film Festival focuses on diversity and understanding
The theme behind the fourth annual Minnesota Film Festival might not seem obvious when looking through the lineup. The selections represent a variety of genres and were submitted and scouted from local, national and international filmmakers. Still, there’s a certain something that connects them.
“The goal, to put it simply, is to inspire difficult conversations and find that common ground between groups of people, where they may not have realized there is that common ground,” said Vera Bianchini, the festival’s director. (more…)
Happy Birthday, Wanda Gág
March 11 is Wanda Gág’s birthday. After Charles Schulz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wanda Gag is my favorite Minnesota author. (more…)
Local student profiles local author Amy Jo Swing
NorthWords, the monthly publication of Lake Superior Writers, features a link to Joseph Bussey’s profile of local author Amy Jo Swing. (more…)
Great Lakes Now: A Different Perspective on the Fur Trade
Great Lakes Now interviews artist/historian Carl Gawboy about his book Fur Trade Nation: An Ojibwe’s Graphic History.
Lessons from Scribes and Vibes and a Minnesota writers class
Last semester, I taught a class in the writing major at the University of Minnesota Duluth called Minnesota Writers. It was a survey of a few “greatest hits” (Laura Ingalls Wilder and Wanda Gag; Upton Sinclair and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Tim O’Brien), but mostly, it was a tour through some of the writers alive and well and shaping Minnesota culture (Margi Preus, Chris Monroe, Julie Gard, Emily August, Michael Fedo, Lucie Amundsen, Kelly Florence, Meg Hafdahl, and contributors to the Pride Zine). (more…)
Feodor von Luerzer’s Lake Superior oil painting
Duluthian Feodor von Luerzer presumably painted this image 125 years ago; an auction listing on invaluable.com notes it is “signed and dated 1900.” The listing, however, renders the name as “Frederick von Luerzer” and lists the artist’s year of death as 1917. Feodor von Luerzer died in 1913. The landscape painter lived in Duluth from 1889 to 1909.
For more on Von Luerzer visit the zenithcity.com archive on archive.org.