One of the newest buildings to the arts scene was hopping during Art-A-Whirl. Holland Arts East, the former Blackey’s Bakery/Randy’s Booth building at 22nd Avenue and Washington St. NE, is filled with small studios and a common space in front where Mattie of Earnest Threads demonstrated botanical print making.
The artist prepares (mordants) a blank silk scarf to receive and permanently fix dyes, then covers it with plant materials and another piece of fabric which has been infused with iron, all covered with a plastic sheet. The whole thing is rolled up tightly around a dowel, wrapped and tied off with shoelaces, and the bundle steamed in a fish steamer. Tannins and other chemicals in the plants resist or interact with the iron and impart colors of their own, while the background turns dark. In the photo, she’s starting to remove what’s left of the leaves. https://studio.earnestthreads.com
With daughter Evie, Elana Schwartzman of Fontlove was one of many to sell cards –messages she prints with old letterpresses. C. Korb is the happy purchaser. https://fontlovestudio.com/shop
Amy Pogue Brady –and studio mate Diana Trujillo of ClaraPepper Jewelry learned jewelry-making at Quench, which unfortunately closed a while back, due to the pandemic. Pogue Brady, https://www.poguebrady.com/, is by day a service designer for a bank, and Trujillo is in plant biotechnology producing proteins for pharmaceuticals. Her jewelry reflects her love for plants, color and nature. https://www.instagram.com/clarapeppershop/
DM Mak lives far west of here, but drives her kid to school in St. Paul. The studio at Holland Arts East is a mid-way point. Part of her artist statement: “My past rematerializes itself in dreamy drawings, paintings, collages, poetry, letters and philosophical reflections. Each, like a diary entry – incomplete, momentary, personal and reflective. They suggest that any truth about memory and the past cannot be determined through an exercise of reason and logic, but only through intuition and perception. My work is a collection of these ever-changing fragments.” See https://www.dawnmariemak.com/
At Bitter North Workshop, textile artist and multi-creator Jules Niemi worked on machine hooking a pattern. She’s working from the underside of the piece – a short pile of cut loops develops as she moves. https://www.bitternorthworkshop.com
Later on Saturday, May 21, people were invited to bring torn garments for a “punk patching” event, showing techniques like blanket stitching, or creating a vignette where the patch becomes art in itself aside from fixing the flaw. Niemi also sold some jewelry produced in collaboration with another artist in the building, EARTHENjoy.
Joy O’Conner, shopearthenjoy.com, sells a variety of ceramic work and jewelry. What caught my eye especially – the donut-shaped vases. We talked long enough for me to watch a video from which she’d learned to throw the vases on a potter’s wheel, and to say she was originally from Omaha… and then a crush of interested shoppers needed attention and I was on to the next studio.
At a home studio near the river open just for Art-A-Whirl and found now on Instagram and Facebook: SparklingRiverCreates, Carole Novitsky credited glass artist Malcom Potek for launching her artistic career in lampwork jewelry. She also thanked her daughter Ashley, a nationally known anime artist, for inspiration and assistance. The “keys to my heart” series started with skeleton keys found but no longer used in their home.
Below: Photos placed in order of mentions above. (Photos by Margo Ashmore)