Opening celebration: June 15, 6-8pm.
On view June 1 - September 5, 2023.
Visit www.greatlakesalmanac.com for more details and photos of the project.
In May 2022, Great Lakes Almanac began as a community-based art project at the Great Lakes Aquarium. Twice each month, I was on site to engage with visitors and discover the different ways they experience wonder at the museum. While the younger folks participated in a craft, their older relatives helped fill out my monthly survey of nature-based questions. Their responses, in turn, inspired the artwork: 12 paper sculptures whose diorama-like quality invite the viewer in for a closer look at the details. While the main pieces hint at the stories shared by the visitors, a collection of companion pieces offer a textual representation of the visitor answers.
Exhibition view
The Great Lakes Aquarium was the perfect choice for my first community-based art project. My artwork is inspired by natural history, and is a platform for me to explore human’s relationship with the natural world as an observer and collector. So the chance to work with and exhibit in a science-based museum in my hometown was ideal. There is a strong focus on engagement and education at the Aquarium and everyone on staff embraced my project and helped me to make the most of my visits. It has been a spectacular year. In so many ways, the art is embedded in the experience of the last year even more so that the artwork itself. I have been enriched by the conversations with visitors and staff, the stories of how the community connects to their natural surroundings and the joys and challenges of turning their words into artwork. My hope is that viewers of the Great Lakes Almanac exhibit will be drawn into details, notice aspects of the museum in the content, and recognize the vast and varied input from their community in the making of this show. Much like how the Aquarium encourages visitors to “Discover Wonder,” my installations aim to inspire a sense of curiosity.