Midwest Guest

Where I live: The healing power of photography with Monte Nagler

I looked forward to seeing the image of one of my favorite lighthouses every day for nearly a month several years ago.

Some of those days, I could almost feel the warm sand between the toes of my bare feet, feel the cool water of Lake Michigan as it lapped up on the beach and hear the cry of gulls as they swooped down to catch a fish in the waves on a sunny Northern Michigan day.

Of course, I was walking into a hospital cafeteria each of those days, but a floor-to-ceiling image of one of my favorite places on the planet posted at the cafeteria's entrance would give me at least a moment of cheer me as I headed to the hospital's deli counter or salad bar.

I don't know what photographer captured that Point Betsie Lighthouse image I so admired in the hospital, but I was grateful for its presence every time that I saw it.

It is a pretty place, isn't it?

Photographer Monte Nagler has a real understanding of the healing and cheering power he can create for others in a stressful hospital setting with his beautiful images, so it was a special treat for me to see a recent presentation from him about his photography for the Motor City Camera Club at PROCAM in metropolitan Detroit.

I've spent an inordinate amount of time at hospitals over the past five years. I've often sat in a drab waiting room, perched on a hard chair in a patient's room or, as during my hospital adventure early last month, slumped for 12-plus hours on a flimsy folding chair in the middle of an emergency room hallway.

One thing I've learned to do over these recent years is to appreciate the work of photographers who create the peaceful images that seem to increasingly fill the walls and other spaces in newer medical facilities.    

Nagler works with many medical facilities to create spaces aimed at providing a more relaxing environment for patients, visitors and overworked medical staff. His scenic images of waterfalls, gardens, wooded paths and mountains grace hospital lobbies, exam rooms, procedure rooms, hallways, cafeterias and other places where a soothing image can create a bright spot in an otherwise stressful and dreary day.

His camera club presentation featured slides of many of his installations at medical facilities around town, and around the country. The images never ceased to amaze me with their beauty and Nagler's readily apparent care and compassion for those who will see his images most frequently.

Nagler seems to have a special gift for matching his images to the needs of his viewers, and many of his installations go well beyond being just a few pretty pictures on a wall. His images seem to draw you into the soothing scenes, and his installations represent some new and imaginative ways of showcasing them.

Nagler's use of installations like floor graphics and ceiling panels, images that curve around walls and equipment, banners and panoramic images help surround viewer with beauty that can momentarily make them forget the more sterile and cold aspects of their surroundings.

Be sure to check out Nagler's PhotosforHealing site and the page featuring his installations for inspiration spurred by his understanding of the healing power of photography.

Better yet, check out his main photography site to learn more about his fine art photography and to see if he has a gallery show, workshop or photography workshop in your area.

Nagler, a fine art photographer who began his serious study of photography with Ansel Adams, lives in metropolitan Detroit. You can find his work in museums that include the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and the Grand Rapids Art Museum, as well in many public spaces that include corporate offices, commercial buildings and medical facilities around the country. He teaches classes and seminars around the country, writes a nationally syndicated photography column and is the author of six photography books. We particularly enjoy his beautiful collection of black-and-white images from around the state, Michigan: The Photographs of Monte Nagler, which we bought last year as we traveled around northern Michigan.

© Dominique King 2014 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: ArtPrize 2013

As always, I have enough photos for at least a couple of posts about ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan, so here's a few random pictures and thoughts as a follow-up to my Tuesday recap of this year's grand pubic art festival and competition.

We always like stopping off at the B.O.B. (Big Old Building) as there are plenty of art pieces at this multi-floor venue with its restaurants and open courtyard display.

Tired Pandas

We found the "Tired Pandas" by Nick Jakubiak, a Top Ten choice in public voting, as well as the very cool "Bird of Prey" from Tom Sheerin in the B.O.B.'s open yard. I cast a vote for both of these in the preliminary round of voting because I liked how each artist used recycled items to create a new work of art.

Bird of Prey

We found the "Egg Prize" piece by David Kall in front of the Van Andel Arena, where a steady line of folks lined up to insert 50 cents into the machine to get their own piece of original art in a plastic egg. The hand-built nine-foot-tall art dispenser worked like a gum ball machine, and my prize was a hand-designed sticker. Each prize was different, and the quarters collected went to the artists who helped Kall create the miniature pieces of art. This reminded me of an Art-o-Mat machine I found in Chicago made from an obsolete cigarette machine that dispensed similar mini masterpieces.

Egg Prize (yes, that's the artist making adjustments underneath the machine)

Some ArtPrize pieces addressed serious issues like an entry from God's Kitchen, an organization that runs food pantries for the hungry in Grand Rapids. I knew about God's Kitchen as one of Tim's relatives made a donation to the group in our name one Christmas. The 2013 ArtPrize piece consisted of a representative "John Doe" figure perched atop a pile of hand-made pottery bowls donated by local potters.

God's Kitchen, Potters for the Hungry

Is it just me, or is it a bit ironic to see this piece in the luxurious lobby of the Four-Diamond Amway Grand Plaza Hotel?

Another one of my favorite ArtPrize pieces was "Grand Rapids - Downtown - HDR Time Lapse" by Jason Hulet, a Real Estate photographer from the Traverse City area.

Grand Rapids - Downtown - HDR Time Lapse

Hulet's work consists of 20,700 individual exposures processed into 6,900 High Dynamic Range images set to run as a time-lapse video. I'm not normally a big fan of HDR images, but I loved the idea of taking some fairly prosaic images of downtown buildings and creating something quite artistic with them.

We heard a lot about the SiTE:LAB venue last year, and finally got to see it for ourselves this year. The building at 54 Jefferson is the former home of the Grand Rapids Public Museum, going vacant in 1994 when the museum moved to a site downtown on the Grand River. Even as the building lay vacant, the museum never sold it and pieces of the old exhibits and the spacious main hall remain intact. SiTE:LAB is a Grand Rapids-based non-profit that organizes art exhibits in temporary locations. The museum and the City of Grand Rapids made the venue available to SiTE:LAB, which turned it into a venue that won ArtPrize awards for Best Venue in 2011 and 2012. I overheard several visitors talking about plans and possibilities for this venue as a new anchor for the neighborhood and exciting hub for various arts and cultural events.

Year of the Snake

The venue's main hall hosted artist Mark Dean Veca's "Year of the Snake" installation that honored the building's past partially as a natural science museum and likening its current ongoing transformation in 2013 (the Year of the Snake according to the Chinese Zodiac) to the animal's shedding of its skin as a symbol of transformation.

This weekend sees the announcement of the winners of this year's ArtPrize. It's always exciting to see who wins the big awards and how some of my favorites fare each year.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

ArtPrize 2013 recap

We just returned from our fourth annual ArtPrize trip, and I can say that the art festival and competition just gets bigger and better each year.

The city buzzed with excitement this past weekend as the first round of public voting ended and ArtPrize organizers announced the Top Ten selections determined by voters previewing over 1,500 pieces of art spread across the city in nearly 170 different venues.

The venues range from larger exhibition centers and showcases like the Grand Rapids Art Museum, The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, Kendall College of Art and Design, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA) and the Women's City Club where you can view dozens of artists in one place...to smaller venues like local restaurants, real estate offices and stores.

We try to see several of the larger venues each year so we're sure to see at least a few of the artworks that make it into the final round of voting.

We also like to get to a few venues we haven't seen in previous years because they are new to ArtPrize, or we just didn't have a chance to get to them in a prior year.

Kendall College of Art and Design

This year, we particularly enjoyed seeing pieces at the Kendall College of Art and Design, the UICA, Fountain Street Church and St. Cecilia Music Center for the first time. We remember the UICA from 2010, when it was a mostly vacant building that hosted a third place winner ("Lure/Wave" by Belli Liu), but it was fun seeing it this year as a large, multi-floor showcase with several galleries.

We also stopped off at a couple of venues on the advice of volunteers who we rode the ArtPrize shuttle bus with on Friday. That was how we discovered the Boardwalk Condominiums venue, which hosted about 40 artworks, and the nearby Canal Street Park with another half-dozen ArtPrize entries.

Glory Reflected by Bruce A. Niemi at Canal Park

It's also fun to see a few favorite art pieces from prior ArtPrize competitions that become a permanent part of the city landscape like one of my favorite sculptures from last year's ArtPrize, "Albert Einstein Between Theorems" by Jim Dolan, which still stands in a small public space along Pearl Street in downtown.

We used the ArtPrize app to vote in 2011 and 2012. We found this year's version of the app even easier to use and especially appreciated some of the newer features that made it simple to get walking directions from one place to another.

This year's Top Ten entries include "Tired Pandas" by Nick Jakubiak made from (what else?) recycled bicycle tires and "Dancing With Mother Nature" by Paul Baliker sculpted from cedar wood. The latter looks like a big hunk of driftwood from far away, but a closer look reveals numerous detailed carvings of sea and shore animals like flamingos and manatees. I also appreciated Jakubiak's use of recycled materials in his work.

It's also interesting to see "Myth-or-Logic" by Robin Protz make the Top Ten this year. This is the third year for Protz to compete in ArtPrize and while her suspended dragon piece made from 40,000 thousand buttons made the Top 25 in public voting last year, ArtPrize officials disqualified the piece because they believed Protz didn't complete the work in the time allotted by the contest rules that year. Perhaps the third time will be the charm for this artist with her fanciful animal made of suspended bamboo pieces.

Check out the rest of this year's Top Ten here. You can also check out my ArtPrize recap from 2012, as well as photo features from the 2012, 2011 and 2010 ArtPrize competitions.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Broad Museum of Art makes mark in East Lansing, Michigan

We often drive Grand River Avenue through southern Michigan while returning to the Detroit area after visiting friends and family in Grand Rapids on the western side of the state, so we kept track of the construction of a striking new art museum going up on the edge of Michigan State University's brick-and-ivy campus through 2011 and 2012.

Construction photos, August 2012

The silver sliver of a building looked strangely out of place in its traditional campus setting at first glance, but a recent visit to the completed building revealed how a lot of the design decisions worked to integrate the Broad Museum of Art into its community while the institution pursues a willingness to embrace diversity and think outside of the traditional square box.

Completed building, April 2013

The Broad inherited an art collection from MSU's Kresge Art Museum that included 7,500 items from early Greek and Roman periods, pre-Columbian cultures, Medieval and Renaissance periods, and modern and post-1945 contemporary art. This collection makes the Broad unique among contemporary art museums by giving it an in-house resource that allows study of art through multiple eras all in one place.

The university originally wanted to extend the Kresge Art Center, but MSU alumni Eli Broad and his wife Edythe had a much bigger idea that they were willing to back with a major donation.

The couple envisioned a new art museum that would raise the mid-Michigan university's profile in art and culture with a prominently placed museum that offered a very visible way to encourage community engagement.

The Broads contributed more than $25 million over several years to construct a new art museum to house the current collection as well as expand the collection and museum programming.

Michigan State officials got behind the plan by making a place for the museum near the one of its main entrances along busy Grand River Avenue and raising the remainder of the $40 million required for the project.

I thought of architect Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain as I watched the construction of the Broad Museum. It's a comparison many people seem to make because the striking metallic architecture of both buildings with a lack of corners and parallel lines seems to evoke a similar sense of adventure and no-boundary thinking.

We visited the Guggenheim in Spain about a half-dozen years ago, so the comparison isn't lost on me. For me, with both museums, the architecture was the major attraction, while the art inside became secondary in my mind.

I don't believe this was necessarily the intention with either building, but I'm so into architecture and design that my attention naturally goes there.

Another building the Broad brought to mind was architect Daniel Libeskind's The Ascent at Roebling's Bridge in Covington, Kentucky. The pairing of the contemporary Broad with the conventional MSU campus reminded me of Libeskind's sharp-angled modern apartment building juxtaposed with a Civil-War era suspension bridge on the Ohio River near Cincinnati.

Like the Broad, the Ascent stirs a feeling of dissonance with me because of the conflicting styles and sensibilities between the different buildings.  

August 2012

Architect Zaha Hadid won a competition to design the Broad in 2008. Construction commenced in March of 2010, and the building opened to the public on November 10, 2012

Hadid likes to push the boundaries of architecture, imbuing her buildings with a sense of movement and marrying her designs with their urban surroundings. She also became the first woman to design a museum in the United States with her commission to do the Rosenthal Centre for Contemporary Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio. The Broad is only the second permanent architectural project for the London-based Hadid.

Hadid herself admits that the vaguely parallelogram shaped Broad is "a strange object sitting on the edge of campus", but she put a lot of thought into subtle ways to integrate the building into its urban-campus setting.

Main entries to the building lay on both the Grand River side and campus side of the museum, with the main gallery facing East Lansing's Grand River Avenue. A straight-line route between the two entrances follows a former favorite campus footpath as a symbolic means of knitting the city and campus communities together.

The linear simplicity of the entrance hall is also a "palate cleanser" for the more complicated angles and geometric shapes visitors encounter as they move through the rest of the building.

The unusual appearance of the building hints at making new discoveries as visitors explore the art within and consider questions and ideas raised by the exhibitions.

There are some areas in the building where you feel slightly off-kilter, or your perspective feels distorted, as sharp angles, tilting lines and inclined walls are a distinct departure from conventional square-box galleries.

The sharp angles and light moving off of the metallic exterior also give the building a sense of movement that adds to its dynamic appearance.

More than 70 percent of the 46,000-square-foot building contains exhibition space where tinted glass and louvered windows let a lot of natural light into the galleries

The building also houses an education wing, a works on paper study center, space to host lectures and special activities for families or school groups, a small gift shop and cafe. An outdoor sculpture garden and pedestrian plaza (where we saw an art history class meeting during our visit) help further draw in and engage the community.

The uniquely shaped galleries and lack of permanent exhibits present a continuing challenge to curators as they mount an ever-changing schedule of exhibits insuring that every visit to the Broad presents something new to even regular visitors.

Visitors who want to view some of the museum's vintage collection can check out what is on display at the storage area in the basement, which is open to public view via a large glass window.

Another fun feature is the huge elevator that serves as both a freight elevator and a way for visitors to move from floor to floor.

The Broad Museum of Art drew plenty of attention at its opening from the national and European press, and nearly 73,000 visitors came through the doors during its first six months.

Limits on photographing contemporary art in the museum (like many museums), makes illustrating how the artwork looks in the building tough, but it was all about the building for me anyway.

The Broad Museum of Art is open every day except for Mondays and major holidays. Admission is free, except for some special events.

Thanks to the Greater Lansing Michigan Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Lansing, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Lansing area attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Cleveland Museum of Art: An artful work in progress

We made our first trip to the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) nearly seven years ago to see a show spotlighting the art, culture, politics and history of Barcelona across multiple media. I have fond memories of this particular show, but few memories of the museum itself as the Barcelona exhibition halls were the only part of the museum open at that time.

We attended another show at the CMA focused on modern art masters like Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse, Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Seurat and Van Gogh a year later, but, again, had few memories of the museum itself as it was still mostly closed for renovation at the time.

We recently visited the CMA for a third time when we could finally see the entire museum and appreciate its original Beaux Arts-style building even as its multi-year expansion and renovation remains a work in progress.

Founders of the museum in 1913 envisioned it as a place "for the benefit of all the people forever". They commissioned architects Hubbell & Benes, responsible for Cleveland landmarks like the West Side Market and Wade Chapel at Lake View Cemetery, with creating the neo-classic building of white Georgian marble on a plot of land donated by Jeptha H. Wade II in Cleveland's University Circle arts, cultural, education and medical district.

The original building, opened in 1916, cost $1.25 million.

Nearly a century later, the museum launched a $350 million capital campaign for a dramatic renovation and expansion to transform outdated spaces and continue to serve the public for the next century or so.

The museum renovation and expansion proceeded in stages, even in the face of the recent economic downturn, due at least in part to the foresight of the museum's founders who established a healthy endowment for the museum's operation. The endowment fund stands at $600 million today, which provides two-thirds of the museum's $36 million budget.

The renovation and expansion project increases the museum's floor space by about 65 percent, bringing its total size to 592,000 square feet.

I think one of the most striking features of architect Rafael Viñoly's design is the 39,000-square-foot atrium that showcases the original building's facade in a sun-filled indoor area that is now one of Cleveland's largest public spaces.

A 76-seat fine dining restaurant, cafe and gift store anchor one end of the enclosed atrium, making a pleasant place to linger with a book and a cup of tea.

The museum's embrace of popular computer technology to engage and guide visitors through the collection is also particularly notable.

Our latest visit to the museum coincided with the debut of some of the programs in Gallery One, a 12,000-square-foot interactive learning space near the museum's entrance.

Gallery One represents one of the most comprehensive use of popular computer technology in use at any art museum in the United States. Features like a 40-foot-long interactive display wall and a free mobile app for iPads called ArtLens provide guidance through the museum and interpretation without overshadowing the art itself.

We learned a bit about the art objects in Gallery One via some of the new touch screens mounted near them.

We opted to skip the app this time and casually browse the museum to get an overall impression of the collection as we felt more like first-time visitors because of our limited exposure to the museum during previous visits and the fact that we didn't have our iPad with us.

We will make sure to load the app on our iPad and bring along for our next visit so we can experience the museum's collection in a more in-depth way. (Visitors can rent an iPad from the museum if they don't have their own, and there are plans to introduce iPhone and Android versions of the system in the future)

Planning a visit to the museum? Download the app, a visitor's guide or browse the museum's online galleries at the museum's web site.

Museum hours are 10 a.m. until 5 p.m. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday and 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. Wednesday and Friday. The museum closes on Mondays and for major holidays.

Admission is free to view the permanent collection. Some special exhibitions require a separate admission charge.

Want to learn more? Check out Treasures of the Cleveland Museum of Art by David Franklin and Griffith C. Mann or the books accompanying the special exhibits I enjoyed at the museum, Monet to Dali: Impressionist and Modern Masterworks from the Cleveland Museum of Art by Laurence Channing, Barbara J. Bradley and William H. Robinson or Barcelona an Modernity: Picasso, Gaudi, Miro, Dali by William H. Robinson, Jordi Falgas and Carmen Belen Lord.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Midwest travel links for March 2013

Check out some great Midwest-related stories I found online this past month:

Marshall Fredericks' Cleveland War Memorial Fountain-Justin tells readers about one of Cleveland's iconic pieces of public art at his InACents blog. But did you know that the artist, Marshall Fredericks, had a studio in my hometown of Royal Oak, Michigan for many years? I interviewed Fredericks by phone for a story I did for a local newspaper quite late in his career, but his health was declining and he died before I could visit the studio and do a longer feature about him. And did you know that the Star Dream statue standing on a plaza between the library and City Hall in downtown Royal Oak was a preliminary study of the Cleveland fountain?  Fredericks has several iconic pieces around the Detroit area, including the Spirit of Detroit that sits in front of the city's Coleman A. Young Municipal Center.

Spirit of Detroit

Cincinnati Union Terminal by Alfred Fellheimer, Steward Wagner and Paul Phillipe Cret-Touring this building at the Cincinnati Museum Center is definitely on my Midwest bucket list! The team at Visualingual offers a comprehensive tour of this building with its beautiful Art Deco details.  Of course, it was the architecture geek in me that spotted Paul Phillipe Cret's name in the title and knew that French American architect was also responsible for the design of another Detroit icon, the Beaux-Arts and Italian Renaissance-styled Detroit Institute of Arts.

A Newbie's Travel Guide to Detroit-Eric shares a guide to some of his favorite Detroit gems at the Rustwire blog. Eric says that the first thing many visitors ask to see is the blighted sections of the city rife with "ruin porn" (and I've also found this to be true), but focuses on some of Detroit's more interesting treasures in this story like Eastern Market, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Belle Isle and the Riverwalk.

Oz Trivia in the Great Lakes State-Movie makers filmed much of the recent movie, "Oz the Great and Powerful", in Michigan. Kath points out that the Midwest has a few other strong ties to L. Frank Baum, the author of the popular children's classic. Check it out at the Great Lakes Gazette.

Where He Wrote: Rolvaag Penned Giants in a Cabin-Hasn't every writer fantasized about a quiet retreat where they could enjoy uninterrupted writing time? Check out the Road Trips for Readers blog where Thea writes about the northern Minnesota cabin where author Olaf Rolvaag wrote a classic novel, Giants of the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, about a pioneer family's immigration to America's Great Plains.

Travel-it's later than you think!-I'm a big fan of traveling "right in my own backyard" here at Midwest Guest, so this story at the Nebraska Outback blog appealed to me for a couple of reasons-its emphasis on making the most of a short trip to a nearby destination and because it was a chance to read about a couple of South Dakota destinations we enjoyed visiting several years ago: the Crazy Horse Memorial, Mount Rushmore and the beautiful Black Hills area.

Amish Acres-Carrie shares her story about visiting Amish Acres at the Indiana Insider Blog.  We've visited the Amish areas in and around Elkhart County in Northern Indiana, but we've yet to visit Amish Acres in Nappanee to go to the Round Barn Theater or tour the Old Order Amish farm. Sounds like another great idea for a road trip to me!

Door County: From Trolls to Ice Cream, and Perhaps the Weirdest In-Between-One of my favorite vacation memories as a child was taking a horseback ride with my father near Ephraim, Wisconsin. It started to rain during the ride, causing our horses break into a gallop as we headed back to the barn and thrilling me with a swift ride through the woods. India shares her memories of a swift bicycle ride along the lake in Wisconsin's Door County and a look at Ephraim's Scandinavian charm at the Wandering Educators blog.

The "Ghost Ship"-I loved Ronny's story about this abandoned ship near Cincinnati, Ohio. He offers a meticulously researched and illustrated history of the story of a ship that began life as a luxury yacht launched from Delaware in 1902. The ship was a fishing vessel, saw service during both World Wars, carried tourists around New York City and had a cameo in Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach" video before it purchase by a Cincinnati man. A crew piloted her from New York City to a spot along the Ohio River west of Cincinnati. Today, 27 years after its last voyage, the sadly deteriorated ship sits, abandoned, in the Ohio River. Check it out at the Queen City Discovery blog.

Rockford, IL: Rick's Picks-Check out Adam's story visiting Rockford, Illinois and seeing a cool exhibit at the city's Burpee Museum featuring the favorite guitars and music of one of Rockford's most well known residents, Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick. I saw a few of Nielsen's guitars at an exhibit of Rock Stars' Cars and Guitars a few years ago at The Henry Ford here in metro Detroit (an exhibit that included that five-neck Hamer guitar), so it was fun to get another glimpse of Nielsen's unique axes. Check it out at the Visit Flyover Country blog.

That's it for this month's Midwest travel links list. Do you have any favorite Midwest stories or blogs to share?

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Check out the World's Smallest Children's Art Gallery in Carmel, Indiana

I always check out signs, plaques and markers when I travel and often take photos of them as a means of taking notes, labeling my photos or to remind me to check something out at a later date.

So, it's not a surprise to find a photo in my files of this plaque I spotted on the side of a little building during our recent visit to the Arts and Design District in Carmel, Indiana.

The one-room gallery opened in 1998 and earned certification as the World's Smallest Children's Art Gallery in the World in 1999.

This vest-pocket building measures 15 feet 4 inches long and 9 feet 5 inches wide and is home to the first gallery to open in Carmel's now-thriving gallery district.

The gallery wasn't open when we visited, but I still wondered about the story behind it as I peeked in the windows and took a couple of photos of the still- cheerful little garden (this was November!) and sculpture of a cute little gardener tending the plants in front of the building.  

The gallery exhibits the artwork of kindergarten through sixth-grade students from local schools, staging a new show and opening reception for the young artists every month from September through May.

The most recent exhibit in January 2013, which featured 160 pieces of artwork of second- to fifth graders from Carmel's Towne Meadow Elementary School, drew 341 visitors to its opening reception-a new attendance record for a single day at the gallery. The show also featured four mosaics created by all of the school's K-5 students.

The gallery draws as many as 3,000 visitors each year.

The gallery also hosts international cultural exchange shows that feature the artwork of children from Carmel's sister city of Kawachinagano, Japan, and Changha, Hunan Province, China.

And their place in the Guinness World Records list?

When museum officials began researching the idea in the late 1990s, there were only two children's art galleries in existence. In fact, when the other children's art gallery closed, the Carmel children's gallery became smallest and the biggest children's art Gallery in the world.

I'm not sure how many stand-alone, bricks-and-mortar children's art galleries exist these days, but a Google search reveals many places listed as children's art galleries are not open, part of a larger institution or a Web-only display.

The story behind this building also reveals an interesting glimpse into Carmel's history.

I learned that the little building started life as part of a larger home owned by Zina Warren around 1875.

Zina Warren was the son of Daniel Warren, one of the area's early pioneers who helped found and plat the town of Carmel under the name of Bethlehem in 1837. The community was a typical farming town in the early years, officially incorporating and changing its name to Carmel in 1874.

Zina wrote about his life and times in what was then the semi-wilderness of Indiana in a book published around 1911. The book, Reminiscences of the long ago, details the important events, people, development and small-town life in Carmel during the late 1800s and early 1900s. You can read the entire book online here.

One hundred years after Zina moved into the house, at least this part of it belonged to Phil Hinshaw, a business person and long-time resident of Carmel. Hinshaw's father was the most recent occupant of the building at that time, and Hinshaw donated to Carmel for use as a Bicentennial House on the occasion of the U.S. Bicentennial in 1976.

The restored home moved from its original Main Street location to a spot further down the street and eventually found new life as the office of the Carmel-Clay Chamber of Commerce.

The building became the Carmel Arts Council House in 1993.

In 2005, the building moved to its third, and current, Main Street location.

The Children's Art Gallery is open throughout the school year on Friday and Saturday from 2 p.m. through 5 p.m. and Sundays from 2 p.m. until 4 p.m. The gallery is also open by appointment or for special events and exhibits during the summer months.

Want to learn more about the gallery and the history of Carmel? Check out Indiana Curiosities: Quirky characters, roadside oddities & other offbeat stuff by Dick Wolfsie or Carmel: Images of America by Terri Horvath.

© Dominique King 2013 All rights reserved

Top stories at Midwest Guest, 2012

It's always fun to take a look at the top stories at Midwest Guest and how that list does, or doesn't, change over the years.

Here, in order, are the nine most-visited links at Midwest Guest in 2012:

1. Visit the Fiesta factory in Newell, West Virginia (originally published August 9, 2011)-I've always loved Fiesta dishes, and this is the story about our visit to the Homer Laughlin Company factory store in West Virginia. It's also a brief history of the company and the nineteenth-century pottery industry centered just across the Ohio River in East Liverpool, Ohio.
   
   
2. Photo Friday: The Thinker ponders life in Detroit (originally published April 9, 2010)-A photo feature about a cast of Rodin's statue, The Thinker, that became one of the best-known icons of a city once known as the Paris of the West. Today, the statue sits proudly in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
3. Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive at Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (originally published March 25, 2010)-I've done many stories about the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, and this feature about a scenic drive featuring sweeping views of the dunes, Lake Michigan, Glen Lake and the Manitou Islands seems to draw a lot of traffic especially as the summer months arrive and people begin planning trips Up North.
4. Photo Friday: Motown remembers Michael Jackson (originally published July 31, 2009)-I wrote this story about a unique Detroit memorial to the multi-talented entertainer shortly after his death in July of 2009. Even as Jackson has been gone for more than three years, interest in this story remains strong.
5. Indiana in a jar, Sechler's Pickles factory store (originally published April 30, 2009)-This story of one of our accidental discoveries along the highway in northern Indiana held the top spot for most-visited link at Midwest Guest for a couple of years after I wrote it. I'm not sure about the fascination with pickles, but I found the store pretty much the same when we visited there and replenished our supply of Sechler's Pickles a couple of months ago.
6. Chicago's Smith Museum of Stained Glass Windows (originally published December 17, 2009)-This was another accidental discovery we made when we visited Chicago's Navy Pier. Fans of art and Chicago's rich architectural history will find this museum tucked away between concessions, rides and boat docks along the pier worth seeking out.
   
   
7. Indiana's University of Notre Dame embraces "Touchdown Jesus" (originally published November 23, 2010)-This is one of the Notre Dame campus' most iconic sites for football fans and fans of the school's great architecture and art. The mosaic of Christ earned its nickname because of its location on the wall directly behind the north end zone of the university's football stadium and the figure's upraised arms, reminiscent of a referee's signal for a touchdown. I also discovered that the artist who created the mosaic created a well-known mosaic in Detroit as well.
8. Seven sensational Great Lakes National Parks (originally published April 28, 2009)-This post lists some of the Great Lakes' most beautiful and interesting National Parks.
9. Ghosts of Punderson Manor (originally published October 28, 2008)-This story is one of my earliest posts at Midwest Guest, but it remains one of my most popular posts over the years. It still draws the occasional comment from readers relating their own paranormal Punderson experiences. Punderson was also the subject of my first post at the Ohio Tourism Division's Discovering Ohio blog (published in August of 2001), where it still draws the occasional comment from readers about their own strange and unexplained experiences at the Manor.

Stories usually take a year or so the garner the cumulative traffic that puts them on my top traffic list, but here is my most visited story written and published this year.

War Dog Tribute stands tall in South Lyon, Michigan (originally published March 29, 2012)-This, like a lot of my favorite stories, came about when we stumbled across something unexpectedly in our travels. This story tell the tale of a unique memorial in metro Detroit honors some of the most unsung war heroes in our country and the volunteers working to restore and respectfully maintain the site to help preserve those stories.

© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved

Discover the Toledo Museum of Art at Discovering Ohio

The Toledo Museum of Art has plenty to celebrate this year with the centennial of its Beaux Arts-style main museum building and the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the American Studio Glass Movement, as well as two particularly stylish exhibitions that include the portrait work of artist Edouard Manet and the striking images from some of the best photographers of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

There is still time to check out the Manet and Hollywood exhibitions before the end of the year, but there is much to see at the museum year round as well.

I always admired the story of the museum and its founders, Edward and Florence Libbey. Edward, of the Libbey Glass Company family, and Florence both had a love of art and the foresight to establish a healthy endowment for the museum that would continue to support the museum's mission of sharing that art with the public.

The museum is also especially forward-thinking in committing to various green initiatives as it continues to thrive and expand, something I learned as we headed back to our car in the museum's parking lot after our most recent visit.

Check out my latest story, Toledo Museum of Art Celebrates Milestones in Style, at the Ohio Tourism Division's Discovering Ohio blog.

Want to learn more about the museum's two current exhibits? Check out the companion book for the "Made in Hollywood" show, Glamour of the Gods by Robert Dance and John Taylor or Hollywood Movie Stills: Art and Technique in the Golden Age of the Studios by Joel W. Finler.

The catalog for the Manet exhibition, Manet: Portraying Life by Maryanne Stevens, Colin Bailey, Stephane Guegan, Leah Lehmbeck and Lawrence Nichols, is also worth checking out.

© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved

Photo Friday: John Seward Johnson sculptures in Carmel, Indiana

Check out these lifelike sculptures we saw during our recent visit to the Arts and Design District in Carmel, Indiana.

There are easily more than a dozen of these sculptures by artist John Seward Johnson placed along the streets of this charming cultural and commercial center, and it became a game for us to take photos of as many of them as we could find before it started raining the day we were there!

This piece goes with the sculpture of the busker I posted yesterday

Check out yesterday's post for a story about our visit to Carmel and a few more of my photos of Johnson's public art pieces.

Want to learn more about Johnson's sculptures? Check out Celebrating the Familiar: The Sculpture of J. Seward Johnson, Jr., which includes an interview with Johnson author and pictures of some of this work and the casting process.

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

Thanks to the Hamilton County Convention and Visitors Bureau for sponsoring my visit to Hamilton County, providing lodging, meals and a tour of Hamilton County attractions for my review during my recent visit there, with no further compensation. I was free to express my own opinions about the stay and experiences, and the opinions expressed here are mine.

© Dominique King 2012 All rights reserved