Art scene runs deep

A young, vibrant movement is burgeoning in Traverse City, running counter to established artists who’ve painted northern Michigan for years

By Patrick Sullivan | Dec. 10, 2016

Shanny Schmidt dipped her toe into the local art scene last summer when she hosted a modern art show in rented space during the Traverse City Film Festival. This month, she dove into the deep end.

Schmidt made the bold move of opening a contemporary art gallery on Union Street. She’s opened a space that might look more at home in Brooklyn. And she’s paying rent that makes her scared.

Schmidt’s gallery, Higher Art, is just one sign of a vibrant and burgeoning art scene that’s coming of age in Traverse City. If you look around, there are signs of it everywhere.

‘IT’S HAPPENING’

Schmidt got her start running “Artist Blender” shows at the now-closed Inside Out Gallery that gave space to artists who felt like other galleries had no place for their work.

“It was something for artists in the community who didn’t feel like there was a place where they belonged,” Schmidt said.

Last summer, Schmidt put together an open call art show at the Ecco event space on Front Street that was a big enough success that she believed Traverse City was ready for a contemporary art gallery.

“I feel like, unfortunately, a lot of our galleries here start to fall into that trap of collecting all the Michigan-related things,” she said. “Before you know it, the gallery is really, really crowded and full of things that are geared toward tourists.”

Schmidt’s gallery is not full of trinkets. She’s curated a (sometimes challenging) collection from artists that include local, national and international artists. She’s got a taste for the strange and the abstract.

The gallery features several works by Siyang Ziui Chen, a Chinese-born artist who works in Detroit. “Bride Dress,” for example, features a portrait of Chairman Mao wearing a cowboy hat and sitting in a bathtub with an albino peacock while sucking on a lollipop.

She wants to distinguish her product from landscapes and lighthouses sold in many of the galleries around northern Michigan.

“It’s not that I don’t like that art. I do. I love it. I have it hanging in my home,” she said. “But there’s enough of it everywhere.”

Schmidt feels like she is part of a growing movement in Traverse City, one that might be pushing up against the established artists who’ve painted northern Michigan for years.

“I honestly feel like it’s growing. It’s a very young art scene that just in the last year and a half is starting to take some hold,” Schmidt said. “It’s met with a lot of resistance, but it’s happening.”

A HOME FOR MICHIGAN ARTISTS

There are also many established artists in northern Michigan who are making interesting work. Owner Sue Ann Round moved Michigan Artists Gallery to Front Street in Traverse City from Suttons Bay last year to feature the most eclectic artists she could find.

It’s taken Round 17 years to collect a group of 80 eclectic and varied artists — around a quarter of them live and work in northern Michigan.

She favors artists who have mastered their medium and express themselves in whimsical and sublime ways. Consider outsider artist Jil Johnson, a self-taught contemporary folk artist. Her work “The Big Picture” features 179 odd hand-carved characters hanging on a board, each one comprising a little story.

Across the gallery hang work by Nancy Adams Nash, an Old Mission Peninsula resident whose work is shown in galleries across the country. She paints strange animals in surreal surroundings.

“It’s so much serious out there in the world, and I want it not to be serious in here,” Round said.

Round said she’s loyal to the artists she sells and rarely takes on new ones.

“When I first moved down here, I literally was approached six or seven times per day,” she said.

Round said she hopes more galleries open in downtown Traverse City. More galleries would mean more art buyers on the street and would be good for everyone, she said.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Down the street, in a more stealth fashion, there is another carefully curated collection, a mix of young and established artists, on the walls inside the Grand Traverse Distillery tasting room.

There is a new show every month curated by Robin Stanley, an art historian-turned-librarian-turned curator.

Stanley has art in her blood. Her father, commercial artist Robert Stanley, designed the iconic Chrysler Pentastar logo. Her mom was also a professional artist. 

Today, Stanley wants to bridge the gap between young artists who are getting started and established artists who could teach them what to do.

Stanley curates what she calls the “Art Mixer” at the spirit-maker’s tasting room. She knows something about curating shows. She has a degree in art history from Michigan State and she worked at the Museum of the City of New York. She’s worked at the Traverse Area District Library for the past 17 years and in the last couple of years decided that she wanted to get more involved in art.

“I realized in Traverse City that there was an untapped sort of thing no one was doing,” Stanley said. “Except for Art Bomb (an annual show that begins every January at Right Brain Brewery), there was no one putting up an exhibit that was just a free-form exhibit.”

In other words, except for cafe walls here and there or perhaps the now-closed Inside Out Gallery, there was nowhere for young, inexperienced artists to show their work.

“The Art Bomb is one of the few places that they can show their work — art galleries won’t show their work because they’re not experienced enough,” she said. “I thought, ‘What a shame. These kids aren’t meeting other mentors because they’re not getting out there.”

Stanley says the Crooked Tree Art Center, which expanded to Traverse City from Petoskey two years ago, does a great job promoting art in the community, but she believes its focus is on cultivating patrons of the arts.

Crooked Tree also runs classes for artists, but Stanley said the young artists she knows can’t afford them, and they don’t attend the talks sponsored by the art organization. She recently attended a talk at Crooked Tree Traverse City on Sixth Street that she thought would have been great for young artists.

“A lot of my younger artists, they would have dug seeing that, but in that whole room, there was no one younger than 40,” she said.

CHANGING OF THE GUARD

Paul LaPorte believes Crooked Tree does a lot to help artists.

LaPorte served on the board of Art Center Traverse City before it merged with Crooked Tree. 

LaPorte, a retired computer scientist, has also painted watercolors for 30 years and hosted a weekly radio show about local artists on WTCM in Traverse City until the show ended in September.

Arts organizations have sprung up across the region in the last decade or so, and LaPorte said when he was the president of the art center board, he envisioned a union of all of the groups across the northwest tip of the Lower Peninsula.

“We said, look, ‘Why do we have this little silo, and Glen Arbor’s got one and Northport’s got one, and Leland’s got one. These art centers. Elk Rapids has got one. Petoskey’s got one. Charlevoix. East Jordan,” LaPorte said. “Why don’t we get them all together, and we could do some things like joint programming or joint scheduling or group marketing for the area?”

A discussion of 19 art centers at Crystal Mountain led to the merger between Art Center and Crooked Tree, because Art Center was struggling financially and Crooked Tree was looking for bigger territory.

“Everybody thinks that because of the struggling nature of Art Center Traverse City, that we went to them with our hands out,” he said. “We didn’t.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t a stark contrast between the two. Crooked Tree runs on a $2.5 million annual budget and has a $5 million endowment. Art Center had a $100,000-per-year budget. But it was Crooked Tree that suggested the merger, LaPorte said, because it wanted to expand its territory.

Crooked Tree Executive Director Liz Ahrens said the merger was rocky at first because they were such different organizations. Art Center was started in 1951 by artists to serve artists. Crooked Tree started two decades later and was started by art patrons.

“We kind of started out with two organizations with different missions in the beginning,” Ahrens said.

The merger has meant Traverse City is now home to a very well-funded arts promoter that is flush with funds and adept at raising money and winning government grants. Add to that the expansion of The Dennos Museum at Northwestern Michigan College and its art banner program that’s spread public art onto buildings and into alleyways, and it makes for a pretty robust art infrastructure.

Also, Interlochen Center for the Arts offers adult art classes, opening up its world-class faculty to locals who want to hone their abilities. In Greillickville, Leelanau Studios at the Grand Traverse Regional Arts Campus rents space to up-and-coming artists in a former elementary school building.

LaPorte said that while art collectors don’t yet add northern Michigan to their list of places to hunt for the next big thing, that’s not out of the question.

“There are glimpses of that,” LaPointe said. “There are guys here in town. There’s a guy named Rufus Snoddy. He’s doing stuff that’s worthy of New York. I mean, he just had a big show in L.A., and his stuff is world class,” LaPorte said. “And I’m not alone in that. And he lives here in Traverse City.”

AT HOME IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN

Snoddy, a California native, ended up in Traverse City 15 years ago when he followed his (now) ex-wife. He’s raised a daughter here and loves the area. 

Snoddy, whose recent Los Angeles show received positive reviews in national art media, has been teaching painting at Northwestern Michigan College for the past three years. He said he believes he’s witnessed an art scene form in Traverse City since he’s lived here.

“When I first came here, I saw a lot of other areas like music and film and all that stuff. I saw all that happening, but the visual arts scene here seemed to be just pretty, not very exciting,” Snoddy said. “Things were clannish.”

Gradually that’s changed as opportunities for artists have broadened.

“I think after about four or five years of me being here, I did start to see things move in a different direction,” Snoddy said. “I think there are just so many pockets of energy in the visual arts that have been moving along over the past 10 or 12 years.”

But there have been starts and stops. Snoddy was a member of the Artists and Design Network, a collective of artists that ran a Front Street gallery that folded several years ago.

He said gallery space is one of the biggest challenges — downtown rents are so high it’s tough to make money selling art. Still, Snoddy thinks things are opening up for young artists.

“I think there is a changing of the guards in this area, and I think there are a lot of young artists, young people who are starting to make a move in the visual arts and put their imprints on things,” he said. “And I really, really like that. For a long time, it was just the same group of people.”

Snoddy shows his work at the Twisted Fish Gallery in Elk Rapids and at Higher Art, where his paintings fit in with the modern vibe of the gallery. He took part in an abstract art show at Twisted Fish in July that gallery owner Bob Streit said was the most successful show the gallery has ever hosted.

Snoddy likes how places like Higher Art or Twisted Fish or the contemporary art project at Warehouse MRKT offer space for strange and thought-provoking artwork.

“A lot of artists up here just like to reflect the area, and that’s cool, but there’s a lot of other stuff going on out there too,” Snoddy said.

A NEW ART PRJCT

Chris Sims started Prjct Omni a year ago because he thought he could sell Traverse City to artists from around the world.

He launched his first show at Warehouse MRKT in May and his second show on Dec. 2. It includes 40 works from 11 artists from as close as Grand Rapids and as far away as South Korea.

Sims said he came up with the concept after moving from Midland to Traverse City a year ago and talking to artists. He thought there was room for a gallery that decidedly didn’t show local art.

“Traverse City sort of inspired me to pursue it, based on all of the existing growth happening in the community,” Sims said. “It’s like a beacon or something; a place where you can come in and see something different.”

The most challenging part, Sims said, is convincing artists from around the world to actually send him art. He said he’s sold most of it, and his biggest expense is mailing back art that hasn’t sold.

“I essentially sell Traverse City — I sell what I believe about this community,” he said.

Sims hopes to spur a conversation among artists and art fans by exposing them to a wider body of contemporary art.

He said he’s run into some resistance from established local artists.

“I get a lot of questions based around, ‘Why don’t you show local art?’” Sims said. “I think there’s other ways to help your community other than just rotating the same artists around town. … Sometimes it’s good to have an outside perspective to remind us that there’s a world out there.”

NOTHING WORSE THAN BARE

Veteran artist and teacher Charles Murphy said he’s seen the art scene get better and better over the years across northern Michigan. He says it is a good sign that so many towns — Frankfort, Northport, Charlevoix, East Jordan — have seen art centers open up in recent years. That’s a sign that the area is full of artists and support for artists.

“I think this continues to happen in northern Michigan because the community of artists is so huge up here,” Murphy said.

Murphy said the fact that a gallery like Higher Art has opened in town signals that the art community is broadening and growing.

“I think what this attests to is the growth and the expansion of a younger community of artists,” Murphy said.

Murphy believes a community’s commitment to art and artists is a window into its identity.

“There’s a certain amount of sophistication and civility involved with support of the arts,” Murphy said. “There’s nothing worse than going into place, in my opinion, and seeing bare walls. That austerity, I think, breeds a certain discomfort.”