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Background Graphic
© Copyright 1995
by Elaine Larson
Web Site
© Copyright
1998-2007 by
Crystal Lake Art
Center and
ATI Consulting
All Rights Reserved.
Crystal Lake Art Center member and local artist, Peggy
Hawley
of Frankfort prepares a table with T.L.C. (tender loving care)
for the "TLC 2006" (tables, lamps, chairs) auction.
Wellspring Arts
An Artist Co-operative is being formed for adults with special needs. WellSpring Arts is a community-based arts program for adults with special needs to develop their creative talents, to become part of the area’s arts community and to earn their own income from their art products. The group is in the early stages of forming an Artist Cooperative and is looking for interested community members to help with this process. A Board of Directors is being formed; anyone with an interest in finding out more about the group and its mission please call 231-882-2171 for more information.
Art Center Signs Lease for Coast Guard Station
Officials representing the City of Frankfort and the Crystal Lake Art Center signed a lease for the former U.S. Coast Guard Station Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at Frankfort City Hall! This is an important milestone in the project to renovate the historic building as a new Art Center!
The City obtained the 1934 building from the federal government through the Land to Parks program.
“The Crystal Lake Art Center has promoted the arts in Benzie County for more than 50 years,” Frankfort Mayor Dick Bayer said. “The renovation project will enhance the local economy by serving as a magnet for students, local residents and visitors from throughout the country to area shops, restaurants and beaches.”
“This is a very exciting day for the arts community and the community overall,” Elaine Peterson, Crystal Lake Art Center board president said. “This project will provide the Art Center with greater space to expand programming and showcase the work of local artists.”
For more information on this project, contact Campaign Fundraising Chair Shirley Bishop at 882-4190 or email her.
Get Fired Up!
Ceramics Program and Fund Established at CLAC
The Crystal Lake Art Center is planning to restart our ceramics program this summer. To get folks working with clay again, we need to purchase a new kiln and other equipment and accessories. With Corey Bechler as our new ceramics department manager, we’re looking forward to giving youth and adults the opportunity to get their hands muddy and create a variety of exciting projects from vessels to tiles, mobiles to garden art.
Classes and studio opportunities are in the planning stage. For more information or to give input on what you’d like to see happen in the ceramics studio, please contact the Art Center. We can’t get this program up and running again without the support of our members and friends. Get fired up and give to our Ceramics Fund! Please mail your tax deductible donation to Crystal Lake Art Center, P.O. Box 1513, Frankfort, MI 49635. Or, call 352-4151 to make a credit card donation.
Benzie Drop In Center Offers Art Classes
The Crystal Lake Art Center has joined up with the Benzie Drop In Center to teach various classes to those suffering with, or who have suffered with mental illness. Classes have been taught by area artists and include painting, beading, mask decorating, art display and other fun crafts. These programs have been enjoyed by the clients of the Drop In Center as well as the instructors and will continue, thanks to a TAAC grant to the Drop In Center. For more information, please contact the Art Center. Or the Benzie Drop In Center, 76 Airport Road Frankfort, MI 49635, 231-352-5052.
Crystal Lake Art Center presents Mosaic:
a dance, visual arts residency in Benzie County schools
The Crystal Lake Art Center, in cooperation with the Michigan Dance Collective, is currently presenting an extensive dance and visual arts residency in Benzie County schools. The project will culminate with performances at Frankfort Elementary and Benzie Central Auditorium.
The project serves every third grader in the county, including classes at Betsie Valley, Crystal Lake, Lake Ann, Platte River, and Frankfort elementary schools. Frankfort fifth grade classes also are participating.
The project takes the students’ curriculum and explores the subjects through dance movement and visual arts projects. Subjects for the dances are chosen by the classroom teachers and include the life cycle of a dragonfly; the earth, moon, and sun; fractions; and other subjects. Dancers are working with students to create their dances and artists are underway in the classroom helping the students make props and backdrops.
While enhancing each child’s teamwork skills and creativity, the project helps students learn social studies and science coursework. The students also get to work with professional artists who live and work in their area, exposing them to the many possibilities in art. The artistic crew includes dancers Philip Leete, Elizabeth Reincke and Micaela Church with assistance from Eliza Forrest. Local artists Meg Louwsma and Ken Lake lead the students in the creation of scenery for the final performance.The project provides over 88 hours of instruction for over 200 students in eleven classrooms. It is made possible by support from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as private donations. Opportunities for sponsorship through program advertising are available. For more information, please contact the Art Center.
The final performance for Frankfort Elementary will be at 2 p.m., Thursday, March 20 in the elementary school gym. The final performance for Benzie Central classes will be at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 26 at the Benzie Central High School auditorium.
A Vision for the Future
In 2004, after 70 years of continuous duty, the United States Coast Guard closed its two-story, red-roofed, stout-as-a-wooden ship search and rescue station along the ship channel in Frankfort, and moved the crew and operations to a modern concrete and steel building next door.
The old building, which ties Benzie County’s gale-lashed maritime past to the more genteel, recreational, resource-conserving economy of the present, is not likely to remain empty much longer. Recently, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a $250,000 appropriation to convert the building, one of the signature historic structures along the northern Lake Michigan coast, into a center for the arts.
The House appropriation, which came in response to a proposal by Representative Pete Hoekstra, would be the first significant investment in the Crystal Lake Art Center’s campaign to renovate the building. The Senate is considering the measure and is expected to give it final approval. If the Senate concurs, the art center’s project would be the largest historic renovation in the county’s history.
On the sunny morning last month that Lee Harper, the Art Center’s director, learned about the House appropriation, her response veered from bridled calm to wide-eyed glee. “It makes it so real,” she said to a visitor. “It’s happening. It really is.”
For the Coast Guard, which has operated in Frankfort’s Betsie Bay since 1886, the move two years ago to a modern search and rescue station represented the turning of a new page in the long history it has written with the people, vessels, deep waters, and windy northern coast of Lake Michigan.
It is against a backdrop of economic and cultural transition that the Crystal Lake Art Center is launching the project to restore the historic Coast Guard Station and convert it to public use as one of northern Michigan’s foremost centers of art education, exhibitions, forums, and events. The House appropriation was secured with the help of the City of Frankfort.
Building a New Economy
The $2 million project to renovate the station is firmly based in the desire of a thriving community and its most prominent arts organization to gain more space to meet an expanding mission to educate, train, and exhibit the work of adults and school age students for public enjoyment. But it will also provide a further boost to a city that is working hard to make its downtown as vibrant as possible and boost a new economy that protects and reflects, rather than exploits, the beauty of the natural resources that surround it.
“It will be wonderful for downtown Frankfort to bring in more artists and students to take classes,” said Alice Fewins, the director of the Frankfort-Elberta Chamber of Commerce, who was raised in the city. “It will be on the waterfront and attract visitors. It will be another destination to bring people here.”
The Art Center has contracted Quinn Evans | Architects, an Ann Arbor-based firm that specializes in restoring and transforming historic properties to new uses, to turn what is essentially a large boathouse and crew quarters into a showcase of art education and exhibition. Michael Quinn’s design calls for building two galleries in what is now the boat storage area, carving teaching classrooms from dormitories, studios from dispatch rooms, all of it overlooking some of the rarest and most beautiful freshwater landscapes in the nation—Betsie Bay, the Elberta Dunes, and the Lake Michigan shore.
Ms. Harper and Susan Burks, an artist and the Art Center’s president, said the new center is intended to be a year-round educational and cultural resource for area residents and a distinctive cultural destination for tourists.
Along with galleries, classrooms, and studios the center will have space for a gift shop, a snack area, airy porches, and sunny patios blocks from Frankfort’s marinas and active main business district, a very pleasant shoreline stroll away. Cultural tourists who stay overnight have a choice of more than 100 first-class motel, hotel, and bed and breakfast rooms, five restaurants, a bakery, and several taverns, all an easy walk away. The Quinn Evans design also provides ample flexibility and space so that the center can host weddings, social events, and community meetings.
“We were talking the other day about the demographic that is coming to the area that appreciates what we are doing in our store, and would seek out an art center,” said Michele Fulkerson, an entrepreneur who along with her partner, Lisa Schroeder-Confer, opened the Blue Door, a gourmet food and wine shop on Frankfort’s Main Street that celebrates its first anniversary in September.
“To me it seems like we have a lot more weekend destination traffic, not just from Detroit, but also from Traverse City,” Ms. Fulkerson added. “People come here to walk through our town. The new art center can only help. It will give our city an artistic identity.”
Tight Space Collides with Expanding Program
The Crystal Lake Art Center, founded in 1948, manages an all-season program of teaching, hands-on instruction, studios, exhibitions, interpretation, and outreach to adults and school-age students. The center’s development as a community organization accelerated in 2000 when board members voted to move from the original home on Sutter Road, near Crystal Lake, to a former NAPA auto parts store in Frankfort.
The same year, the center hired Ms. Harper as director. Under her oversight, and with the help of an active board, the Art Center grew into one of Benzie County’s most visible civic organizations. This summer, for instance, the Art Center offered 29 art instruction classes for adults, many of them multi-day, in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, ceramics, kiln fused glass, wire wrap, paper folding, framing, and fabric dyeing. Fifteen more classes were aimed at kids, including calligraphy, painting, and a four-day art camp for school-age students.
Along with a prominent faculty, the center has attracted more than 600 members—six times the number in 2000—and it’s built an operational budget that this year totals $117,000, enough to provide Ms. Harper with an assistant.
Like half of the people that now live in Benzie County, Ms. Harper, comes from someplace else. In her case, all the way from Tarboro, in the tobacco belt of eastern North Carolina, where she was raised, and near where she earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English at East Carolina University.
In an interview, Ms. Harper said that one of the reasons she was drawn to Benzie County was its maritime history. She helped preserve the SS City of Milwaukee, one of the car ferries that operated between Elberta and Wisconsin, as a floating museum in Manistee. Renovating the Coast Guard station is another good psychic fit.
“It’s kind of full circle for me,” she said. “When I moved up here I was fascinated by the history. It’s so much a part of the culture. It’s why we have a Coast Guard building that size. That’s how important the maritime work was here.”
Even as late as 1993, when she arrived, the county had just 12,000 residents, was emerging from recession, and seemed so small and wild and distant that newcomers sometimes remarked that it felt like the closest thing to the Oregon Trail that still existed in America. That was the image the county was intent on portraying in the published histories and promotional literature: a resolute place built by the leathery hands of loggers, fishermen, ferry hands, and farmers.
Not nearly enough has been written about the county’s modern era: The swift population increases of the 1990s, the development of the 21st-century resort economy, the young entrepreneurs in the retail and building trades, and the countless Internet-based electronic cottages full of software developers, brokers, writers, and consultants tied digitally to the world. Benzie County, like so many other clean, green, small-town regions across America, has developed a bona fide knowledge-based creative culture and economy.
A Convergence of Art, History, and Promise
The plan to convert the old Coast Guard station to an art center, the largest historic renovation in the county’s history, fits into this transition. Of all the stretches of sand and water, sun and wind that define Frankfort and Benzie County, none describes this region’s rugged past or displays its new economic future better than the land that lies along the ship channel at the mouth of Betsie Bay.
To the east, in the place where the dawn sun comes over the ridge, blue herons and osprey rise out of fresh water marshes that once were choked with logs floated to mills and an iron smelter that operated along the shore.
Maple, hemlock, cedar, and pine now cloak the rounded hills of Elberta, across the bay, where home values and job prospects are rising. Pleasure boats tie up in a harbor once crowded by a succession of schooners, steamships, coal-fueled railcar ferries, and commercial fishing tugs. Children play at the edge of Lake
Michigan, on the very same beach that at the turn of the 20th century briefly supported a passenger rail depot and one of the Midwest’s largest and most luxurious summer hotels.
This stretch of land is also the place where the United States Coast Guard built a 9,600-square-foot station on the channel’s north side, room enough to house a crew of 12 men and their rescue boats, and soon to hold classes and art galleries. A study in Depression-era utility and efficiency, the old station has served as a kind of cultural sentinel. It is a seven-decade participant in the remarkable evolution that turned a busy industrial and commercial fishing port into a new economy city.
This article was written by Keith Schneider, a writer, editor, and the director of program development at the Michigan Land Use Institute in Beulah.
Match Grant Offered
A very good friend of the Crystal Lake Art Center has offered a match grant for $50,000. The stipulations are that the match would be one couple or person who has a residence in Benzie County and will meet a deadline of pledging by November 15, 2006, and it must be a firm and unqualified pledge payable in full prior to the end of 2008 to do this potential gift that would bring in $100,000 toward the fund raising efforts to remodel the Coast Guard Station into a premier arts center. We look forward with great excitement to finding a matching donor that would boost our project this much.
Art Yard Sale
Extra art supplies and frames cluttering your space? Donate them to the Art Center for an ongoing sale during the spring months or to be used in our children’s classes. You would be surprised what we need from each other’s leftover "stuff." Please drop off supplies Monday or Wednesday, 1-5 p.m., and be sure to browse through the sale!
Benzie County Artist Directory
As part of our Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs Rural Arts Program grant, we have created a Benzie County Artist Directory.
We’ll use this directory here at the Art Center to help make those important connections between artists and consumers. The directory features artists working in all types of art forms, including visual arts, music, and theatre. Someone may contact the Art Center looking for a muralist or a calligraphy or illustrator. We’ll use the directory to help point them in the right direction. Also schools and other organizations can use the directory to find musicians, performers, or other artists to present programs.
A limited number of print directories will be distributed through the Art Center. The directory is also available here: Benzie County 2005 Artist Directory (104 kB PDF document).
A listing in the Benzie County Artist Directory is open to any artist living and working in Benzie County and is free of charge.
To receive an application form, contact the Art Center at 352-4151, email us, or P.O. Box 1513, Frankfort, MI 49635.
Wishlist
Needful Things!!
The Art Center is always in need of many items that bite into our budget on a regular basis. Some of these items are quite frankly, well, expensive. We thought if we published a list it might inspire our members to think of us when shopping, cleaning the attic or garage, or just in a moment of generosity! So if you see anything on this list that you might want to donate, please feel free!
- Adjustable (Crescent) Wrench
- CD-R & CD-RW
- Cleaning supplies
- Coffee cups (Styrofoam)
- Coffee/Tea
- Copy paper
- Dish Soap
- Fonts & Clipart
- Ink for HP printer:
- Q6000A (black)
- Q6001A (blue)
- Q6002A (yellow)
- Q6003A (magenta)
- Kiln and equipment/supplies for ceramics department at the Art Center.
- Kleenex
- Letter-sized Hanging Files & Boxes
- Post It notes
- Screwdrivers
- Stamps
- Tape
- Toilet paper/paper towels
- Tools - Small Assortment of
- Vice Grips
- White Glue
- Chocolate!!!
- Wine
Elementary School Art Program Wish List
We would like to help out our elementary school art programs, which are in much need of supplies. We’ll gather donations for supplies here at the Art Center and get them to the Benzie Central and Frankfort-Elberta Area elementary schools.
- Beads
- Books on various artists (K-5 grade level)
- Clay for molding and firing
- Clear glass bottles (for collage project)
- Colored mosaic tiles and mortar
- Construction/drawing/tissue/specialty papers
- Embellishments
- Feathers
- Glue sticks
- Oil pastels
- Paintbrushes
- Paints (any “kid friendly” varieties)
- Punches (cool shapes)
- Regular and/or specialty colored pencils
- Scissors that cut designs
- Terra cotta pots to paint/plant
- Watercolors & paper
- Watercolor pencils
- Yarn & knitting needles
Any new/used art supplies in good condition are welcome, even if not listed above, so please keep the Crystal Lake Art Center and the schools in mind while you are spring cleaning in your studio or basement.
Also, the elementary art teachers have expressed an interest in hosting a visiting artists’ program in the schools. They are especially interested in found object sculptors and children’s book illustrators, but are open to other suggestions. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact the Art Center.
Bulletin Board
We often receive notices of call for entries, great gallery shows, and many other opportunities for artists and lovers of the arts.
We post all information we receive on our bulletin board at the Art Center. If you're looking for a show to enter, a new gallery to visit, or other arts related information, please stop by the Art Center often and check out the bulletin board.
| For more information, please stop by or contact us! |
Crystal Lake Art Center |
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