Celebrating 50 Years of Shoreside Art

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Gazing east across the endless blue water and humbling horizon line of Lake Superior, it’s easy to see why people come here to feel connected. The Big Lake certainly has that effect. Here on its westernmost shores in Duluth, where the road dead-ends at the Park Point Recreation Area, something else happens each year during the last weekend in June that amplifies connections in a uniquely Big Lake way. The Park Point Art Fair gets its day in the sun. And occasionally, in the rain, sleet and wind.

In its 50-year history, only a pandemic has postponed the outdoor event – in 2020 and 2021. This year, there’s an eagerness among the many Park Point Community Club volunteers who stage the art fair, as well as artists who make a living on shows like this, to pull off a golden anniversary together. 

For locals, it’s long been considered an annual rite of summer. An estimated 10,000 visitors descend for the chance to meet 115 juried artists from near and far displaying original fine art and craft. Art buyers can get rare finds and something more –  a backstory from makers who come from across the region and country. For weekend explorers, there are food trucks, live music, demonstrations and free art-making activities – all in a stunning natural setting.

What setting, exactly? Park Point is a 7-mile sandbar peninsula that becomes an island when the Aerial Lift Bridge in Canal Park rises for maritime traffic. It’s Duluth’s original neighborhood in many ways, with a history among the Ojibwe people and as the site of the first non-Indian settlement. The city’s Ojibwe name “Onigamiinsing” or “Place of Small Portage” involves this land spit. One spring day in 1971, it also became home to the region’s first art fair.

In the beginning

In 1971, Pat Joyelle was tired of schlepping her work to art fairs in far-flung locations. So the Park Pointer rounded up a dozen artists to start an event right in her own backyard. Or rather, on the grounds of the LaFayette Community Center, midway down the Point. Spreading their wares on blankets, artists hoped to cash in on the crowds that arrived for Lake Superior’s spring smelt run. But the beer-loving fisher folk weren’t biting on art. The next year, Pat and company moved the event down the road to the 12th Street “Tot Lot” park, or S-curve, before landing in the present day location near the end of the Point.

That informal start quickly evolved. More neighbors got involved. The community club ran a popcorn stand to fundraise for its youth program. By 1981, the event was drawing large audiences. But artists complained that visitors could hardly get to the show – or showed up without any money due to a proliferation of garage sales that stalled traffic along Park Point’s one-road corridor.

The next year in early June 1982, the community club organized spin off of the art fair, a communitywide rummage sale touted as “The World’s Longest and Largest Garage Sale.”

Over the next decade, the art fair quickly grew. Greater interest sparked greater returns. Volunteers pitched in and local causes benefited from Park Point Community Club proceeds, including the Duluth Rowing Club, youth programs, local parks and ecological efforts and other needs. Meanwhile, artists gained attention, the city gained sales tax revenue from the influx of visitors, and the passionate commitment of volunteers kept things humming along. A classic win-win-win.

During Pat’s 15-year involvement, a core committee took shape to help plan and coordinate. Another 50 volunteers would join in to staff the weekend event. The leadership baton was passed numerous times, with industrious, savvy, can-do Pointers leading the way. That included the likes of Jan Olson, Jean Laundergan and Maggie “Muggs” McGillis, the “Queen of Park Point,” who was dubbed the fair’s most consistent volunteer in 1998. Soon after, Ellen Dunlap stepped into that role and continues working behind scenes, and at the scene, to this day.

The evolution

When the rigors of hosting one of the region’s biggest events became too much, the community club added hired help. Karen Monson-Thompson, a Superior fiber artist, was among the first paid artistic coordinators. In 2005, the club hired Carla Tamburro to coordinate the show in its entirety. An artist and art teacher, the Park Point resident (and, full disclosure, my spouse) heads the show to this day. 

“Getting to know our neighbors has probably been my favorite part of being involved,” Carla says. “That, and seeing the consistent high quality of the art that comes here each year.”

Carla worked with the committee to restructure the event, expand marketing and add children’s art activities and a live music stage. That’s allowed dozens of musical acts – the Boomchucks, Michael Monroe, Woodblind, Gaelyn Lea, Keith Secola, Briand Morrison, Erik Berry and others – to enliven the scene as families nosh on food, fabricate driftwood sculptures or lie in the grass watching seagulls fly by. The stage has also hosted puppet theater, drum storytelling and an interactive jug band.

Visual art, as always, has remained the main attraction. Partnerships with arts-supporting organizations have given visitors hands-on opportunities to join an iron pour, try print making activities and use a loom with the local fiber guild.

The art is diverse within the categories, with a dozen or more practitioners in each medium: ceramics, photography, printmaking, painting, sculpture, glass, wood, jewelry and fiber. Some artists demonstrate their craft in real time. In recent years, that’s meant glass blowers with flames blazing, wood turners fashioning bowls or oil painters capturing the show in plein air.

Juried artists set up wares in tents along a paved path beside a stretch of towering pines and an open field with views of the Superior Bay and, just over the dune, Lake Superior. Stepping inside a tent offers a window into each creative world, whether it’s whimsical postcard drawings or massive metal sculpture, hand-sewn silk scarves or shimmering silver earrings.

The memories

“We take pride in our tradition and reputation as ‘The Artists Show,’” says Ellen Dunlap, a writer, interpreter and arts aficionado who’s made the Point home for two decades. Like many locals, she’s made lasting friendships with visitors over the years. That includes some of the show’s longest tenured artists. Each year, roughly half of the artists return, with new talent flowing in from the region, Midwest and nationally.

“The Park Point Art Fair has always been something of a gathering of the clans, where we get to see friends who sometimes live far away,” says Warren Slocum, a New Richmond, Wis., artist who crafts stained-glass mirrors framed in oak. He’s been doing the art fair circuit for 50 years and thinks his first on the Point was in 1976. “Park Point has always had its own remarkable distinctions from other art fairs, and we participants have appreciated them.”

Denise Koch, at age 95, can look back at a lifetime of displaying her paintings here and quickly recall what she appreciates most.

“Each year the fair was usually held on or near my birthday and at the banquet the revelers would sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ and I’d turn around and moon them,” she recounts with a laugh.

To be clear, these were fully clothed moons. At least the ones I observed over the past 17 years at the invite-only, artist-and-volunteer awards dinner. The after-hours celebration gives everyone involved in the fair a chance to unwind and connect after a busy day. It’s one of the extra touches participants appreciate about the grassroots event. With 200 free-spirited artists and friends present, it’s also full of authentic and eccentric characters. Like Denise.

Originally from Belgium, the longtime Bayfield, Wis., resident can shift expression from earnest to playful at the drop of a paintbrush, much like her watercolor images. She exhibited at all of the Park Point Art Fairs during her 70-year career traveling to shows in large and small cities across the Midwest. While some shows focused more on making money for organizers, she says the Park Point event remains true to artists, showcasing their work “for the sake of promoting art.”

Denise retired during the pandemic and will be missed not just for her joie de vivre and generous moons, but as part of the event’s living history. Her daughter and grandson grew up doing art fairs with her, as did Denise’s life partner of 50 years, Lloyd Turner. For them and others, the Park Point Art Fair has always been a family affair.

“We’ve brought our families to the show with us while raising them, for decades, and some grandchildren even help out, when needed,” Warren says. “For many years, there were so many artists’ kids at Park Point that there were baseball games going on for most of the weekends of the show, with two full teams of artists’ kids. I brought the catcher’s mitt for many years, since my three sons were right in on the action.”

I can relate. Some of my fondest memories (and Carla says hers, too) are of holding our now 12-year-old son as a newborn baby while walking the fairgrounds or seeing our daughters, who attended from toddler age through high school, volunteering with their grandparents in the kids’ area while dancing to music and eating copious amounts of kettle corn.

“We saw your children grow up before our eyes,” Ellen tells me, “just like we saw Karen’s and others.”

For all of us lucky enough to be part of the tradition, we’ve seen the art fair grow up too. And along the way, maybe helped people feel a little more connected. n

Duluth writer and Park Point Art Fair volunteer Jake Kapsner has lived on Park Point for much of his life. Lake Superior, he tells us, keeps it fresh.

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Duluth writer and Park Point Art Fair volunteer Jake Kapsner has lived on Park Point for much of his life. Lake Superior, he tells us, keeps it fresh.