Midwest Guest

Midwest travel links for August 2010

Check out these great Midwest-related stories I've read online this past month:

• Colorful Caribbean Floats-Charlie spotted some beautiful flashes of color while riding his bicycle through Detroit recently, discovering a workshop and artists creating floats and costumes for the city's Annual Caribbean International Festival Parade. Check out his story and photos of the workshop and the subsequent parade at Bikes, Books & A Little Music.





• Chicago and Milwaukee: Large Public Art and Placemaking-Public art pieces in Chicago like The Bean and a huge American Gothic sculpture are big tourist draws. Jeramey takes a look at <heh> Chicago's latest piece of public art and argues that Milwaukee could benefit from emulating Chicago's penchant for large pieces of statement art. Oh, and check out Milwaukee's Bronze Fonz, which is exactly what you probably think it is-the Fonz of Happy Days fame immortalized as (you guessed it) a bronze statue.

• Backyard Adventures: 100 Acres at the Indianapolis Museum of Art-Check out this outdoor arts park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Arrows Sent Forth. Traveling with kids? This story also has some great tips about the terrain, rest rooms, parking, picnicking at the museum, and more.

• Evansville Otters Baseball for Southwest Indiana-There is still a bit of time to take in a baseball game this season, and Erik takes readers to a game with the Evansville Otters of the Frontier League at Indiana Insider Blog. I enjoyed hearing about the team's historic 95-year-old ball park and its connection to the movie, "A League of Their Own".

• Thriving in the BWCAW-Join Rob and his family on a canoe adventure in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It's been a while since we visited the area ourselves, but I vividly remember the quarter-mile downhill portage and the quarter-mile uphill portage we did during one of our day trips, so I can feel Rob's pain as he talks about two miles worth of portages during his trip at The Intense Traveler. But it's all worth it!





• Looking at the End of Summer from the Lighthouse Steps- The marble, Albert Kahn-designed William Livingstone Memorial Lighthouse on Detroit's Belle Isle is a real beauty, so I particularly enjoyed taking a closer look at this unique tower at Belle Isle Home.

• Road Trip Music: Indiana-Kerry explores the Midwest and its music at Music Road. Check out this profile of Indiana folksinger Carrie Newcomer (born in Michigan, by the way) and other Midwest musician profiles at Kerry's site.

• Discovering Musical History on Race Street-Michael takes us to historic Herzog Studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, in his Soapbox Cincinnati story. Popular music legends like Hank Williams, Patti Page, Flatt & Scruggs, and Bull Moose Jackson (an early R&B artist whose song, "Big Ten Inch Record", some music fans may remember best as an Aerosmith cover) all recorded at Herzog Studios.

• Highway 100-Travel the length of this Minnesota highway via video in a matter of minutes! I enjoyed this little virtual vacation at the Nokohaha blog.





• 7/79 video takes views on unique visual tour of Cincinnati's center-Driving into the Ohio River? Seeing Cincinnati-area landmarks like the Roebling Bridge or The Ascent in nearby Covington, Kentucky, from the air? Randy posted this virtual vacation on Urban Cincy.

Do you know of any other Midwest-related blogs I should check out?

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail Highlights

Driving along the shoreline is always a special treat for me, and I'm particularly fond of the designated routes encircling the Great Lakes.

We live close to the Ohio border, and we've traveled the Lake Erie Ohio Coastal Trail many times. The 293-mile route is primarily Ohio's portion of the 660-mile Lake Erie Circle Tour and wends its way through a variety of nature preserves, historic sites, big urban centers, and small towns.

You can drive the entire route in a day, or you can easily spend several days exploring the trail. We're close enough to the western end of the route that we occasionally do a portion of the route just east of Toledo as a day trip.

The Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail earned its designation as an Ohio State Scenic Byway in December of 2004, and became a National Scenic Byway in September of 2005. The Lake Erie Circle Tour earned its designation in the early 1990s.

The Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail runs from the Michigan border near Toledo, Ohio, and on through Conneaut, Ohio, to the Pennsylvania state line.

Here are some highlights of our travels along the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail:

• Toledo-Stop by the legendary Tony Packo's for a Hungarian hot dog and some fried pickles and peppers, tour the city's Old West End neighborhood with its stately Victorian-era homes, and visit Toledo Museum of Art with its outdoor sculpture garden and renowned glass collection. Take in a Mud Hens' baseball game, or do a little shopping at the city's Farmers Market and the Libbey Glass Outlet.





• Maumee/Oak Harbor-Spend a night at the Maumee Bay State Park Resort or an afternoon on the resort's nature trail, where you can spot the Toledo Harbor Lighthouse in the distance. Nature lovers, hikers, photographers and birders will enjoy visiting the Magee Marsh Wildlife Area and Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge just east of Toledo. Don't miss the Ohio Bicentennial barn along the route near the wildlife sanctuaries.





• Sandusky/Marblehead-Most people know the Sandusky area best for the Cedar Point Amusement Park or island destinations like Put-In Bay. It's been quite some time since I've been to either place (which gives me more excuse to travel out this route yet again), but other favorite places in this section of the route include the city of Sandusky itself with its Carnegie Library and a trip out to the tip of the Marblehead Peninsula to see the Marblehead Lighthouse.

• Cleveland-Cleveland clearly rocks with us, as we've been there multiple times. I bought a charter membership to the city's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame + Museum, so we make it there quite often. You might not think of a cemetery as a trip destination, but Cleveland's Lake View Cemetery is an especially interesting stop for those who love history and taking photos. While you're at Lake View, don't miss the President Garfield Memorial or the Wade Chapel (the chapel's Tiffany-designed interior and windows earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973). President Garfield's home in Mentor, Ohio, is just east of Cleveland and another must-see for history buffs.





• Ashtabula-There is plenty to see in this city near the eastern end of the route. Catch a glimpse of the Ashtabula Lighthouse or check out Point Park with its great view of the city's bascule bridge. The Hubbard House was an important Underground Railroad terminus and sits on a quiet side street within sight of Lake Erie.

I expect we'll travel this trail many more times as there are plenty of other places along the route we've yet to see, so don't be surprised to see a sequel to this post sometime in the future!

We have a GPS, but I still find a good map invaluable when we travel. Delorme publishes a series of map books covering each individual state, with each book including listings of features like parks, historic sites, museums, campgrounds, and other great information. These books are a must for road trips, and I've worn out several of the Michigan and Ohio Gazetteers from use over the years. Check out the Ohio Atlas & Gazetteer before heading out on the Lake Erie Coastal Ohio Trail.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: The Bean and Me in Chicago

Chicago's massive "Bean" sculpture, the affectionate nickname for Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture in the city's waterfront Millennium Park, offers endlessly fascinating photo possibilities.

I included a handful of my favorite "Bean" images in yesterday's post, Chicago's Cloud Gate invites interaction, where I wrote about the sculpture, its meaning, and how it draws visitors into interacting with it.

Today, I want to share a few more Cloud Gate images and thoughts about photographing it.

There always seems to be a crowd around the sculpture on days best suited for taking photos, so people will invariably be part of any pictures you take. Having the crowd as part of the scene will give your photos a real sense of scale and a good idea of just how big "The Bean" is in relation to its surroundings.

One of the photos I posted yesterday looked almost like a black and white photo, although I shot it in color. I'm posting an alternate copy of it here that I created as a grey scale image in Lightroom.

I shot this image from a window in a room on the upper floor of a building across the street from the park. Look closely and you can see the birds perched on top of the sculpture!

Here I am shooting a quick self-portrait of myself as reflected in the sculpture.

Some of the coolest shots I got came when I took pictures from underneath the sculpture, where the concave surface created some great abstract-like images.

One thing that surprised me about my Cloud Gate images when I started going through them was the fact that all but one of the images I posted with today's post and yesterday's post were taken with a trusty little Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot. While I enjoy using my larger Canon EOS DSLR camera, I find that the smaller camera often gives me nice images more than suitable for using with my blog posts.

Check out my story, Shooting photographs for your blog, for a few tips and thoughts about the subject and a quick review of the book Confessions of a Compact Camera Shooter: Get Professional Quality Photos with your Compact Camera by Rick Sammon.

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Chicago's Cloud Gate invites interaction

Sculptor Anish Kapoor's striking "Cloud Gate" occupies a prominent place in the heart of Chicago's Millennium Park and a prominent place in the hearts of many Chicago residents and visitors.

Parking lots and rail yards filled the space now occupied by Millennium Park until its development in the late 1990s as a major waterfront park and public gathering space chock-full of attractions like an ice skating rink, concert venue. Millennium Park always seems busy when we've visited, whether it was a hot and humid July day, or a cold November afternoon.

Kapoor, a British artist born in India, won the commission to create Cloud Gate in 1999 as his first public art installation in the United States. Complications and cost over runs resulted in a final cost of $23 million for the piece, up from the original $9 million cost estimate, with Cloud Gate's final completion and dedication in spring of 2006.

The 110-ton sculpture is 33 feet tall, 66 feet long, and 42 feet wide, but its massive size isn't the only thing attracting and fascinating the throngs of people we always saw around it.

Kapoor's sculpture may look, at first glance, simple, but as you circle the work to explore it, it presents you with many complex images reflected and multiplied by its shiny surfaces. From a distance, Cloud Gate looks like a big drop of liquid mercury or a huge silver bean, but moving closer to the piece allows visitors to see wonderfully warped visions of the city, themselves, and others in its highly reflective surfaces.

Maintaining the sculpture's shine requires twice-daily wipe downs by hand of its lower portion and semi-annual overall cleanings with liquid detergent.

Kapoor named the piece Cloud Gate, referring to it as "a gate to Chicago" and "a poetic idea about the city it reflects". People usually call it "The Bean" due to its overall shape.

Cloud Gate appears as if it is a single object, but it consists of 168 stainless steel plates over a steel frame. Workers polished the surfaces until the seams between the plates disappeared from view. The structure is hollow inside, and the 12-foot clearance underneath the bean-shaped sculpture creates a gateway into the piece.

I was particularly fascinated by taking photos from underneath the sculpture, where the concave surface, or "omphalos" (Greek for navel), of the sculpture reflected and re-reflected the people below it to create cool abstract images that sometimes reminded me of either of beautifully symmetrical kaleidoscope images or something I might see in a carnival fun house mirror.

These reflections are the result of Kapoor's wish to create a piece that encouraged visitors to enter and interact with it, while the sculpture's exterior reflects the city and its surrounding environment.

Mathematician Ivars Peterson has an interesting take on the sculpture at his blog, The Mathematical Tourist, where he explores the laws of reflection and geometry in relation to Kapoor's sculpture. Peterson says the piece offers "an enthralling lesson in optics" with its reflective images that include the viewer as part of the sculpture and visual experience.

Be sure to stop back here tomorrow for more of my Cloud Gate photos.

  

Want to learn more about Anish Kapoor and his work? Check out a new monograph of his work, Anish Kapoor by Bhabha, Bourrriand, de Loisy, and Rosenthal or a catalog published to accompany a 2008 exhibition of his work, Anish Kapoor: Past, Present, Future.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Gwen Frostic Prints reopens for retail business in its long-time northern Michigan home

The comforting clatter of printing presses was music to my ears as I recently walked into the rambling stone building Gwen Frostic called home for many years in northern Michigan.

Familiar sights and sounds welcomed me back to Gwen's home as the business rumbled back to life after weathering a sudden foreclosure last October and an uncertain future before reopening its retail business just weeks ago under new ownership.

New owners Kim and Greg Forshee enjoyed a close association with the business over the years. Kim worked several years for Gwen Frostic Prints as an outside sales and marketing director, while the couple's Frankfort, Michigan, manufacturing company DAMB Mold Base provided many parts for Frostic's lumbering old Heidelberg presses that pumped out so many cards, stationery, placemats, and other products featuring Gwen Frostic's engaging nature images over the years.

The couple plan to preserve Frostic's artistic legacy and love of northern Michigan nature as they slowly restore the aging building and carefully add features and products that respect the Michigan icon's history and the close attachment many long-time fans feel for Frostic and her work, according to a recent article in the Traverse City Record-Eagle newspaper.

The Forshees told the newspaper that their plans include slowly repairing and restoring the property, expanding product lines that respectfully reflect Frostic's love of nature, and developing a museum centering on Frostic's career and life.

The scene at Gwen Frostic Prints seemed comfortingly familiar to me as I walked past the fieldstone walls and trickling fountain at the building's entrance, browsed the rustic racks filled with paper products featuring Frostic's elegant images, and paused for a few moments (as I always like to do when I visit) by the railing overlooking the press room as more of the paper products that were always the foundation of the business and perennial customer favorites rolled out of the machines.

Spots like the Gwen's quiet library with large windows overlooking the river and nature sanctuary behind the building and the short nature trails behind the parking lot always provided a bit of serenity, even on the busiest summer days, so it was nice to see that that serenity appeared largely unchanged even as the business weathered a rough winter.

I always believed the business would reopen as Frostic's legacy and importance as a draw for tourists in the region were just too important to lose.

As I reported here in May, as many as 1,000 people might stop by the store on a busy summer day. The business employed 15 to 20 people, and officials at the Benzie County Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Business Bureau reported that they answered more questions about Gwen Frostic's than any other attraction in the area. Even the bank forced to foreclose on the business and its former owners readily acknowledged the importance of the long-time business to the local economy and hoped to find a way to keep it open.

The Forshees credit their bank and former Frostic employees for helping them quickly reopen the business earlier this spring in time to welcome Frostic fans back for the busy summer season.

A steady stream of visitors shopped at the store as we visited the store in early July of this year. The occasional van carrying a tour group pulled into the lot, and I heard many individual customers and long-time Frostic fans tell workers they were so glad to see the business reopened.

The woman who waited on me and bundled up my purchases, one of the former Frostic employees rehired by the Forshees, seemed enthused about things when she told me the business was "getting there" as word spread about the reopening.

The product selection remains a bit thin in some areas as the business scurries to make up for the lost production time over the winter. I was unable to purchase the Gwen's signature green-and-white wrapping paper this visit, and received my purchases wrapped in plain brown paper instead of Frostic paper. I was able to buy a few of the small-size 2011 wall calendars, but the only large-size calendars they had in stock were for 2010. I also didn't see any of the plastic mugs with Frostic paper inserts for sale during my visit, but they did have some ceramic coffee mugs, and I bought one as a gift.

Some of the most immediate changes at Frostic's include a few new product lines like woven throw blankets and jewelry, like the little sterling silver pendant featuring one of my favorite Frostic designs (the "happy raccoon") that I couldn't resist buying for myself.

I felt a new sense of hope for Gwen Frostic's during this visit and thank the Forshees for their effort to insure a bright future for a place I've enjoyed and loved visiting for years.

Check out my earlier story, Gwen Frostic Prints weathers winter closing and reopens this spring, for more information about Gwen Frostic and the business.

 

You can also read The Life and Wisdom of Gwen Frostic by Sheryl James to learn more about this talented, but often enigmatic, woman. The book is fairly short, being an extension of an article James originally wrote for the Detroit Free Press, and predates Gwen's death by a couple of years, but it's still a fascinating read for those who grew up visiting the store and anyone interested in learning about the woman who overcame many odds to create a multi-million dollar business and artistic legacy.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Frankfort

Unique folk art lives on at the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota

A visit to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, may bring to mind the old paint-by-numbers kits you did as a kid, but the building is a beautiful and unique example of folk art using local prairie products in a surprisingly sophisticated way.

The building wasn't open when we visited, so we weren't able to go inside for a tour or to visit the gift store. We were, however, lucky enough to be there at the right time of year to catch a glimpse of some of the work in progress with the seasonal changing of the exterior murals.

Folks in Mitchell established the city's original Corn Palace in 1892, just three years after South Dakota achieved statehood and a dozen years after settlers established Mitchell. The building served as a place to showcase the abundant harvest of the area in hopes of attracting more settlers to Mitchell.

In 1905, the people of Mitchell rebuilt the Corn Palace as part of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to unseat Pierre, South Dakota, as the state's capital.

A third version Corn Palace replaced the 1905 building in 1921. It was fun to discover that the Chicago architectural firm of Rapp and Rapp designed this building, the one that still exists today as a community center and multipurpose building (the same firm that designed the beautiful Warner Theater in Erie, Pennsylvania, that I wrote about earlier this year).

The Moorish Revival onion domes and minarets were a 1937 addition to the building.

The building itself is reinforced concrete, but it is the changing exterior that draws a reported 500,000 visitors each year to check out the Corn Palace.

Each year, the process of creating a new exterior for the Corn Palace starts with the selection of a theme by the Corn Palace Festival Committee, which asks a local artist to design the murals.

The artist transfers their design to carefully coded and detailed illustrations on black roofing paper. Look closely at this photo, and you can see each section marked with a specific color.

Meanwhile, local farmers grow the 13 different colored corn crops, as well as the native grasses, straw, and wheat used to create the murals.

Most years, the new exterior requires 275,000 ears of corn and a crew of about 20 workers to complete as workers dismantle last year's murals and install the new year's themed exterior by hand. Work on the project generally starts in late August and continues into September as crops become available for harvest and use.

There are a few exceptions, like 2007, when I took these photos. A severe drought in 2006 created a shortage of crops, so the exterior underwent a less large-scale update with a few new murals and retaining the prior year's rodeo theme.

Fortunately, crops came back strong enough to support creating brand-new corn-art exteriors in subsequent years, with Travel Through the Ages as this year's theme.

There have been other corn palaces, but this, "The World's Only Corn Palace", is the last one still existing and carrying on with this traditional form of folk art.

The Corn Palace plays host to a variety of events that include concerts, school proms, and sporting events. Basketball teams from Dakota Wesleyan University and the Mitchell High School Kernels play home games there. USA Today listed the venue as one of the Top 10 places to play high school basketball, and called it the "Boston Gardens of the Midwest".

The Corn Palace offers free guided tours of the building from Memorial Day in late May through Labor Day in early September.

Want to see some vintage pictures of the Corn Palace throughout the years? Check out the Arcadia book, Mitchell's Corn Palace by Jan Cerney

 

You can also virtually visit Mitchell's Corn Palace on Facebook or check it out on Twitter.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Mitchell

Photo Friday: Ohio Bicentennial barn, Ottawa County

We recently drove by one of the Ohio Bicentennial barns along State Highway 2 between Toledo and Port Clinton.

Ohio's Bicentennial Commission conceived the barn project as a unique way to advertise the state's 200th year as a state in 2003. Seven years later, this Ottawa County barn still stands as a reminder of the anniversary, and it got me wondering how many other Ohio Bicentennial barns are still standing.

Scott Hagan was barely 20 years old when someone with the Ohio Bicentennial Commission saw a picture of a barn painted with an Ohio Buckeye logo, and the group began to consider a statewide project with barns in every one of Ohio's 88 counties painted with the state's bicentennial logo.

The Buckeye-logo barn in question belonged to the Hagan family, and the son who painted their barn soon found himself with a new career as a barn artist.

This is the other end of the Ottawa Ohio Bicentennial barn

Scott Hagan lived near renowned Mail Pouch Barn artist Harley Warrick in Belmont County, Ohio. The young barn artist talked with Warrick, who taught him some of the secrets of the craft of barn painting before he died in 2000 at the age of 86.

Hagan began the Ohio barn project in 1997, sketching each logo freehand before hand painting each barn. He painted the 88 barns, one in each county, plus a dozen more barns to make it an even 100 painted barns by late 2002.

Hagan used 100 paintbrushes, 645 gallons of paint and put 65,000 miles on his truck as he traveled from barn to barn throughout those five years. And no two barns are exactly alike.

This particular barn is actually the second barn painted in Ottawa County. A tornado blew through and destroyed the first barn when it was nearly finished.

Today, Hagan estimates his painted barns as numbering well over 300 barns in 14 states. His new goal is to paint at least one barn in every state.

 

Travelers who enjoy waymarking (a hobby similar to geocaching, except there is no physical cache involved) can record a find at this barn.

 

Looking for more information about the project and surviving Bicentennial barns? Check out the Bicentennial Barns of Ohio Facebook page.

 

You might also enjoy these books about the Ohio barns:

 

Ohio's Bicentennial Barns by Beth Gorczyca, with photos by B. Miller or Bicentennial Barns of Ohio by Christina Wilkinson.

 

Thanks to Debbie Dubrow of Delicious Baby for creating and coordinating Photo Friday to link travel photos and blog posts across the Web.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Things To Do
Toledo

Where I live: Get ready for the Berkley Art Bash, one of metro Detroit's great summer street parties

Get ready for another great Berkley Art Bash, 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturday, June 12, as local musicians and artists hit Twelve Mile to celebrate at one of metro Detroit's great summer street parties.

This festival, now in its ninth year, showcases local talent and businesses as a stretch of 12 Mile through the heart of Berkley's downtown area closes to traffic and becomes a great pedestrian mall for the day where visitors can shop, listen to some tunes, grab a snack, and the kids can try out the inflatable slide or sell their own artwork in a special student mart.

The art fair features the work of more than 90 artists, with many of them offering hand-crafted items at very reasonable prices.

I'm a big fan of wind chimes, and I especially loved these chimes created from discarded flatware that I found at last year's Berkley Art Bash (not only beautiful, but eco-friendly as well!). One set went home with me, and hangs on my front porch, and I bought a second set as a birthday gift for my mother.

The music is another highlight of the Berkley Art Bash for me, and this year the bill looks every bit as intriguing as last year's Art Bash shows (which included the bluesy Flint, Michigan-based Cidy Zoo, pictured here).

Brazil & Beyond, winners of "Outstanding World Music Recording" Detroit Music Awards in 2004 and 2006 for albums featuring, respectively, imaginative Brazilian-flavored versions of Beatles tunes and classical compositions kick things off at 11 a.m. this year.

The blues, rock, and funky soul-fueled Motor Honey, who, according to their My Space page, get their audiences dancing with an eclectic playlist that can include The Pretenders, Living Color, The Doors, or Diana Ross hit the stage at 1 p.m.

Royal Oak's Maggie McCabe fronts Maggie's Farm to round out the day's music with some great acoustic blues and folk at 3:30 p.m.

Berkley Art Bash director April McCrumb, owner of Berkley's Catching Fireflies whimsical gifts store, always impressed me with her command of social media and online outlets to promote her own business, as well as the Art Bash. This year, the festival has its own Facebook page where you can get a sneak peek at some of the artists' work, check out video clips from the performing bands, and catch any other late-breaking Art Bash news.

The Berkley Chamber of Commerce presents the Art Bash with help from several corporate sponsors.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to some fresh-squeezed lemonade, some shopping, some great music, and wondering if the fire truck housing the hot dog stand will be there again this year!

   

Note: "Where I live" posts are part of a series of periodic stories about special events and people in, and around, metro Detroit. "Where I live" posts are stories I'll post in addition to my regular schedule of stories about attractions around the larger Midwestern region. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Midwest travel links for May 2010

Check out these interesting blog posts about the Midwest I've found online in the past month.

• Honey Bee Market La Colmena, Est. 1956-Who says there are no great grocery stores in Detroit? I loved this great feature about a third-generation, family-owned market in the city of Detroit by self-avowed "Gentleman of Elegant Leisure" Jim at Sweet Jupiter.

• Street Artist Banksy Tags Detroit-Detroit Moxie's Becks managed to catch the work of internationally known street artist, Banksy, at a couple of Detroit sites (in one case just hours before it disappeared from a brick wall). The removal of Banksy's work ignited a great deal of discussion in the city, and the comments on this blog offer a bit of that discussion.

• Heidelberg Project: Art Calling-Kath checks out this Detroit landmark at the Great Lakes Gazette. Is it art? Innovative reuse of discards? A political statement of some sort? Take a look and decide for yourself!

• A Fascinating Neighborhood-Charlie takes us to Detroit's Creekside Neighborhood at his blog, Bikes, Books & a Little Music. This serene oasis in the big city with its lighthouse, beautiful riverside homes, and parks draws plenty of fishers, bicyclists, families, and others wanting to enjoy the view of Detroit's downtown skyline in the distance.

• River Water & Wine in Grafton, Illinois-Perceptive Travel's Tim turns a planned bicycle ride derailed by heavy rain into a wine tasting tour and a chance to check out the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.

• Oliver Winery Fits in Bloomington with a bit of Everything-Join Marcia at Wine and Spirits Travel as she visits Indiana's largest winery and its Creekbend Vineyard.





• A Weekend in Chicago with Kids-Carrie finds plenty of family-friendly fun in Chicago. Check out some of her family's favorite things to do and see in Chicago at Travel Savvy Mom.

• The Historic Westin Columbus-The Smiths, a Kentucky family of five, write about their visit to the oldest Westin Hotel in North America in Columbus, Ohio. Check out the great architectural details like marble floors, ornate woodwork, and original stained glass in this vintage 1897 building.

• Southwest Michigan Offers Great Parks-Tina lists some of her favorite parks in this corner of the state for the Pure Michigan blog. Dunes, beaches, camping, bicycle trails, wildlife sanctuaries-they're all here!

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved

Where I live: Focus on the work of local photographers at new Exposure.Detroit show

The work of talented local photographers is again the focus of a quarterly showing of images from the Flickr-based Exposure.Detroit group at the Bean & Leaf Cafe in downtown Royal Oak, Michigan.

Poster designed by Jon DeBoer

The show, which opened at the local coffeehouse on May 15, is the latest in a series of shows by Exposure.Detroit and spotlights the work of five photographers.

This quarterly show includes the work of Jon DeBoer, Anne Savage, Michelle and Chris Gerard, Anna Lysa, and Derek Farr (check out the links in this paragraph for a sneak peek at some of their work).

I'm not much for generic art that adorns the walls at many businesses, so the images showcased at the Bean & Leaf immediately caught my eye when I first noticed one of the shows as my local writers' group met at the coffeehouse. I've seen many subsequent quarterly photo shows at the cafe over the last couple of years, and there are always at least a few images that I am sorry to see taken down at the end of a exhibit--even as I know there will be even more great images replacing them with the next quarter's installation.

Although, if you really fall in love with a particular image at one of the Exposure.Detroit shows, the photographers will often sell you a print so you can support the work of a local artist at a pretty reasonable price.

I sometimes find the shows a bit heavy on images of "urban decay", although the regular Exposure.Detroit showings at the Garden City Hospital and a themed show staged last summer at the Bean & Leaf asked members to submit some of the more positive images in their collections (Tim showed a couple of his photos at Garden City and at that Bean & Leaf show last year).

The group, which includes well over 1,600 members, from beginning to long-time professional photographers, is open to any interested photographer. Check out the group on Flickr to learn more about Exposure.Detroit, read the active discussion boards, and sign up to join the group.

Exposure.Detroit promotes camaraderie, networking, sharing knowledge, and promoting the work of their members through shows, social events, group photo shoots, seminars, and other events.

I appreciate the idea of a local business supporting the work of local artists, and hope to see the partnership between the Bean & Leaf and Exposure.Detroit continue for a long time!

 

Note: "Where I live" posts are part of a series of periodic stories about special events and people in, and around, metro Detroit. "Where I live" posts are stories I'll post in addition to my regular schedule of stories about attractions around the larger Midwestern region. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoy writing them.

© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved