Matt Schlomer, 51, is finishing his 11th year of teaching at Interlochen Academy of Art. He is a conductor, and he is a teacher of saxophone — and, he is the founder of Sound Garden, an out-of-the-box approach to bringing musical performance to people wherever they happen to be. It’s a way of planting musical […]

Nancy Crisp, 81, taught visual art to all ages, and abilities, in public school and private institutions, from the 1960s until 2003. Her own visual art education began in junior high, guided by a teacher who grounded her in the fundamentals. Now, her painting practice unfolds in a home studio she shares with her husband, […]

“I’ve always built things. I’ve been a maker since I was a little kid,” said Leelanau County artist Larry Fox, 69. And the things he has built — sculptural constructions in Poplar and Baltic Birch — have found their way into homes and corporate settings across the US. A veteran of the art fair circuit, […]

Benzie County artist Jessica Kovan’s mixed media work is now on display in the GAAC’s Lobby Gallery. The Birds Are Watching, Kovan said, “asks viewers to pay attention from the vantage point of local bird species.” Kovan combines the personal with the political in this series of mixed media, avian vignettes created on cardboard. She took on the subject of local birds “in hopes of establishing a sense of interconnectedness between all beings.”

Royce Deans’s creative life has been a “crooked trail” of work in graphic design, and illustration — a not-so-straight path toward a process-driven practice focused on painting and printmaking. “I’ve identified as a painter even before I got out of art school,” Royce, 66, said. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan, and is a well-known […]

A conversation with John H. Hartig, Ph.D, author of the 2022 book Great Lakes Champions, the story of 14 people who loved the Great Lakes so much that they devoted their careers...

Leelanau County, Michigan, artist Cynthia Marks, 71, has been “making art for 50+ years, a startling and comforting thought,” she said. “I am consumed by using clay to conceptualize most any thought in a form or surface, generally drawing from my everyday life, art history, and nature.” Cynthia hand-builds vessels and pots from terra cotta […]

It was never a question of IF Laura Hood would play an instrument, but WHICH instrument she would end up playing. It was all in her genes, and part of her familial inheritance. Hood, 61, makes a wide range of music with her horn and guitar. She performs and teaches — at The Leelanau School […]

A Feral Housewife, an exhibition of collages by Leelanau County artist Mary Beth Acosta, take up residence in the Glen Arbor Arts Center Lobby Gallery January 6 – April 21. View it in the GAAC Main Gallery or on line. Working under the creative nom de guerre “The Feral Housewife,” Acosta uses simple, familiar tools […]

Mark Mehaffey relocated to Leelanau County five years ago. He lives in a house that bumps up against the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore — a fitting locale: A large portion of Mark’s work focuses on the landscape, although like so many things in this artist’s life, Mark is a guy whose creative work refuses […]

Traverse City artist Mary Fortuna, 66, draws on a number of inner resources to fuel her creative work — chief among which might be a self-identified weirdness. Over the years she has found teachers who encouraged, and helped her cultivate and fully embrace it. Today, Mary translates weirdness into an array of soft sculpture beasts, […]

Blacksmith Scott Lankton [left] was “hooked on hot steel” the first time he worked with it. The Leelanau County artist, 66, went on to find a vocation in the forge, pounding metal into domestic objects of great beauty. Scott Lankton also found that this old art + craft form can be put to use in […]