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Curated by mixed media and glass artist Patty Carmody Smith, this invitational exhibition showcases regional fine craft with an emphasis on working artists. Works represented feature a mix of functional and non-functional fine craft items in a variety of mediums including jewelry, metal, glass, textiles, ceramics, and more.
Reveal features the work of Hopkins Community Education adult students and instructors. Hopkins Community Education, a component of Hopkins Public Schools, strives to create meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning, connection, and engagement within our community.
This exhibition showcases work by local Iranian Americans whose creative work in the arts reflects or illuminates their rich heritage. This exhibition features artworks in a variety of mediums exploring a range of ideas: history, culture, immigrant experience, and pure aesthetics.
Layered imagery and mixed media converge in Mary Catherine Solberg’s mixed media artworks to explore the connection between present experiences and past memories. This series focuses on the faces of the next generation as symbols of hope and resilience, capturing the complexity of a world shaped by societal pressures, pandemics, climate crises, and uncertainty.
Painter Kathryn D’Elia uses articles of the everyday and pop culture icons to explore the real (and imagined) pressures of contemporary American life. These subjects are selected for their position as nostalgia staples and their evolving cult significance. She arranges these subjects to create humorous and cinematic compositions, often with subject behaving outside of the realm of possibility or intentionally leaving all grasp of their original function behind.
Annual fall show of work by Friends of the Hopkins Center for the Arts member artists. The 58 works on display were chosen by the jurors from 228 submissions. THANK YOU to all the Member Artists who participated in the competition. For more information, visit Members' Fall Juried Exhibition
Congratulations to the 2025 Award Winners
Best of Show: Lynn Tanaka, Spiral Zen Rock, sculpture
Awards of Excellence: Ellen Carlson, Lakeview, photograph; and Scott Zimmermann, On the Move, acrylic
Awards of Merit: Michael Jensen, Blueberry 3, oil; and Alex Hall, Ingrid, watercolor
Honorable Mentions: Susan Gangsei, Pat - Family Matriarch, handwoven tapestry; Pamela Sherlock, Restoration, digital photograph - archival ink on kozo over gold leaf on board; Nancy Punderson Parr, The Red Coat, pastel; Lumi Forbes, Polyphonic Sky, mixed media on canvas
Thank you to the 2025 Members' Juried Exhibtion Jurors:
Printmaker Jasper Duberry uses woodcuts to explore themes that encompass the Black experience - including pain, joy, excellence, healing, and resistance. Subjects include civil rights activists, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the power of community action.
Linda Campbell's work is inspired by the singular beauty of objects in the natural world. These unexpected found gifts from nature speak to the unique qualities of beauty and intricacy of the seemingly "ordinary'. The juxtaposition of space and object in her work is intended to draw one's attention to the object's unique and inherent beauty.
Sculptor Fred Cogelow, a.k.a., “fredgelow sum buddy” has been wood carving for over 40 years. He honors humanity in the portraiture of the ‘old cusses whose lives, faces and stories had entertained my mind and eye throughout most of my formative years’. Along the way are regular side trips into socio-political commentary, caricature, equine, acanthus, and spoon carving.
Photographer Carl Lee uses a macro lens to document the dynamic beauty of frost on window glass. In sharp linear pattern and shallow depth of field, he captures the fragility and elegance of the icy formations while exploring how the frost designs reflect and project nature yet can be dazzlingly abstract.
After decades as a ceramic artist, Lynne Sarnoff-Christensen began encaustic painting seven years ago, infusing her new medium approach with 40 years of experience in surface design. She builds up layers of wax to create transparency and depth with the goal to inspire through a synthesis of texture, color, and subject.
In work he describes as a realist fiction, painter Tom Maakestad combines surface treatment, created light, and color theory to suggest places that appeal to him. While they suggest an actual place or time of day, he does not attempt to create a copy of an event or location- allowing the image to thrive on its own as a cohesive composition.
Sculptor Wayne Potratz investigates how each subtle step of the fiery foundry process combines with the metaphysics of the spirit to make works that seek to be completely authentic. By the fire, both the art and the artist are refined, tempered, and transformed.
David Amdur’s paintings capture people at play in parks, recreating in scenic landscapes, celebrating festivals, playing music, or engaged in political action. His work hints at narrative through movement, gesture, and expression. Amdur’s paintings are rich in color and dynamic composition, drawing the viewer into worlds that are both familiar and deeply felt.
Álvaro Alejandro López’s photographic series "De Natura Libris" portrays the interactions we have with books: physical and abstract. He explores both the corporeity of a book through its structures, textures, forms and signs of use, as well as the experiential aspects evoked by content, the memories it awakens, and the aesthetic beauty of its parts.
In this series, Russell M. Hamilton explores ideas fundamental to religion, culture, language, and the fallacy of 'race'.
'The "Voice" is my own, full of conviction, ever questioning, developing, and rich with observation and personal experiences cinnecting me to my culture, my multi-layered ethnicity, my religious experiences, and to all of humanity'
The series draws additional inspiration from Voices from an Empire, a book written by the artist's father, Russell G. Hamilton, first published in 1975.
His process involves sewing and stitching, a skill he learned from his mother, and includes vintage fabrics and patterns produced by Vogue, Simplicity, and Butterick in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Albers' long-standing practice of self-portraiture is used here to examine aging and incredible loss. She combines images with words from her journals in a mix of realism and fantasy that explores the devastation, numbness, and even humor known by anyone who has lost a life partner.
Nathan Stromberg's imagery consists of instantly recognizable period objects built of dense collages of vintage magazines and books. In this body of work he navigates and comments on the historical space of post-war America.
Thank you to Award Jurors, Andrea Canter and Kar-Keat Chong, and congratulations to the following award winners.
Best of Show
Patricia Choffrut, Sydney’s Last Shift, watercolor
Awards of Excellence
Don Biehn, Lost in Story, oil
Genie Castro, Sea Monkeys, lithography ink monotype
Awards of Merit
Susan Liesch, Resonance, mixed media
Lynn Foskett-Pierson, Jazz Note (Collage #4) oil pastel on YUPO
Mary Ann Rolloff, It’s Not Spring Yet, oil and cold wax on paper
Honorable Mentions
Lynn Tanaka, Zen Rock, rock and bamboo caning
Timn Jacobs, An Ochre Burst, soft pastel
Nancy Punderson Parr, The Book Club, graphite
Lynne Mall, Ghost, archival inkjet print photography
Frances Phillips, Spring Thaw, acrylic
Chris Walton, The Friendly Ghost, ink on scratchboard, Dura-Lar & paper
For More information regarding participation, please visit: Spring Members' Show
Mixed media sculptor Layl McDill uses the sensation of stories to help make sense of the world. In sculptures crafted from found objects and polymer clay, she probes how art and science can intersect to learn more about human interactions with the environment to make positive change.
This biennial exhibition featuring artwork by Hopkins School District K-12 students celebrates creativity and the learning process.
Celebrating its 30th year, this highly competitive international juried exhibition showcases work by artists from throughout the United States and abroad.
Recent ANI exhibitions have featured work representing artists from Japan to Canada, California to Rhode Island, Florida to Washington, and more than 30 communities of Minnesota: from Redwood Falls to Woodbury, Savage to Two Harbors.
There is a wide range of mediums represented including acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings, sculptures, fiber & textiles, ceramics, photographs, and more.
Reveal features the work of Hopkins Community Education adult students and instructors. Hopkins Community Education, a component of Hopkins Public Schools, strives to create meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning, connection, and engagement within our community.
In this exhibition Marjorie Fedyszyn investigates the universal experience of loss and fragility from both a human and environmental aspect.
Sculptural forms, cast in muslin and handmade abaca paper, from a tree felled by Emerald Ash Borer serve as powerful metaphors for loss and vulnerability.
The emotional histories of Fedyszyn’s life guide her work. Her losses are distilled into powerful expressions resonating with universal human experience.
This exhibition showcases work by local Iranian-Americans whose creative work in the arts reflects or illuminates their rich heritage. It is an opportunity for viewers to learn about Iran’s history and culture through visual art.
Textile artist Susan Gangsei uses images and metaphors to explore facets of the aging journey. In woven portraits of women, she investigates the paradoxical nature of growing older: the rewards and losses, and the feelings of both gratitude and grief. She does this with the belief that in pondering the transition, one can come to a place of acceptance and celebration.
Bringing awareness to invisible disability, this exhibition depicts various stages of Gail Wallinga’s healing journey from Lyme disease. In paintings and sculptural installations, she demonstrates beauty and meaningful creations can emerge from arduous experiences.
Growing up on the sparsely populated plains of western North Dakota gave painter Linda Deg Lee a strong sense of the relationship between the land and the life within it. As constants in her vision, horizons, plowed fields, stream beds, stratified layers of rock and soil, and stretches of prairie grasses were inevitable influences on her work. Throughout her career she has sought the underlying structures that connect the physical and spiritual worlds around her.
In his delicate silverpoint drawings, Tom Hessel aims to capture some of the character and dignity that is a part of every person. His art means to express something more than a likeness- revealing something about an individual’s personality, or to capture a feeling of their situation at that moment in time. In this way the viewer might experience a universal and timeless connection to the image without personal knowledge of the subject.
Annual fall show of work by Friends of the Hopkins Center for the Arts member artists. The work on display is the result of a juried competition. For information on becoming a member artist visit Become a Member
For information regarding submitting work visit: Members' Juried Exhibition
As a photographer, Emilie Bouvier’s work is fueled by the physicality of historic photographic methods – utilizing its processes and incorporating unusual materials. This practice draws her to the edges of what constitutes a photographic image, bridging traditional film photography with sculpture, printmaking, and digital tools. This exhibition showcases the physicality and mystery of photographic image-making, inviting the viewer into a contemplative journey.
Ekaterina Kazachenko’s current work examines the mystical, magical, and mysterious alternative world of childhood. Balancing motherhood and her art practice, she reconnects with her own childlike wonder and imagination. In doing so, she discovers new ways of navigating through the ungrounded by seeing the magic in things.
Minneapolis painter Angel Wagner specializes in portraiture, symbolism, and painting women from the female gaze. Her art, informed by her experiences from fifteen years as a licensed counselor, focuses on self-healing and the heroine in us all. An intuitive painter, Wagner explores themes of equality, trauma, sexism, strength, and transformation in surreal imagery full of personal symbols.
Jeremy Jones’ work investigates the varied spaces of parenthood and seeks to enshrine the everyday moments of child rearing. As a parent/artist immersed in the trenches of helping to raise two young children, he finds the fleeting transformations of a child’s growth and development are both magical and bittersweet. Jones creates toy-like sculptures and assemblages that utilize clay, mixed media, found objects and digital technologies to physically and mentally preserve those moments that you can’t get back.
The Interfaith Artist Circle of the Twin Cities is nineteen visual artists pursuing art as a spiritual journey. In this exhibition the artists aim to present a dialogue about life and hope, now and for the future.
The Circle artists create art reflecting on spiritual themes including prayer, the soul, mysticism, creation, and mortality. At the launch of each art theme, members study with religious and secular scholars whose teachings inspire the resulting artworks.
Each of sculptor Dennis Kalow’s works is a message in itself, its own story, independent of literal or historic reference. While his subject matter generally evolves from an experience, it is, first and foremost, form, line, color, and texture juxtaposed in novel ways. Kalow seeks results that intrigue, fascinate, or exemplify beauty in ways that are relative to his life.
Kathy Snow Stratton’s paintings explore the spaces between the empty and full, the micro to macro, the now and then and darkness into light. Her process utilizes self-imposed limitations that she finds maximize possibilities rather than constrain them. Densely unified layers of paint result in optically charged, harmonious all-over fields that represent a union of ‘in between’ spaces.
Contemporary painter Nick Gadbois’ landscape work examines the offbeat, quirky, and playful side of the American spirit. He paints scenes from real life that appear surreal, amplifying the drama with a bold, saturated palette. Through his chosen subjects in this series, what he calls ‘American oddities’, Gadbois celebrates a uniquely American creative inventiveness and a Heartland to which he is deeply attracted.
In 2021 and 2022 photographers Catherine Lange and Michael L. Ruth captured images of water and woods in the same Midwestern locations but from their own unique perspectives. Using multiple time-lapse and long-exposure images, Ruth aims for photographs that aren’t ‘your standard snapshot of a river’ while Lange’s photos of still lifes in nature are meant to ‘create a sense of dreamlike perception.’
Annual spring show of work by Friends of the Hopkins Center for the Arts Member Artists. The 2024 exhibition includes over 260 art works. Many of the pieces are for sale, and visitors may vote for their favorite.
Congratulations to the following award winners, selected by this year's award jurors, Michael Borg and Lynne Sarnoff-Christensen.
Best of Show:
Awards of Excellence:
Awards of Merit:
Honorable Mentions:
Erik Jon Olson's unnatural medium is quilted plastic waste, which he uses to create art addressing effects of consumerism, mass consumption, and unfettered capitalism. His work examines the unnatural effects of human activity on catastrophic natural events and nature as a whole.
Loretta Bebeau's abstract, conceptual artwork has evolved over 30 years. This exhibition features paintings, drawings, and collages spanning from her early work to her current practice. A recurring theme is the importance of "health" across human cultures, as well as her own personal challenge of hearing loss.
This exhibition is a retrospective of James Burpee's work from the 1960s to today. It features social commentary, allegory, and personal experience to intimate nature images of serene and lyrical places. Burpee paints with vitality, accurate observation, improvisation, luminosity, and order.
In its 29th year, this highly competitive international juried exhibition showcases work by artists throughout the United States and from around the world. There is a wide range of mediums represented including acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings, sculptures, fiber and textiles, ceramics, photographs, and more.
Reveal features the work of Hopkins Community Education adult students and instructors. Hopkins Community Education, a component of Hopkins Public Schools, strives to create meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning, connection, and engagement within our community.
Sanjukta Mitra's work mixes realism and expressionism, vividly achieved through an abundance of mixed media and oil paints. Her paintings are rich with bold strokes, high contrast color schemes, glowing vibes and illuminating paints.
James Larson passed away in 2022 after 50 years of true dedication to his craft and passion for marble and bronze sculpture. His sculptures combine classic styling with imaginative abstract forms and landscape.
This exhibition showcases work by local Iranian-Americans whose creative work in the arts reflects or illuminates their rich heritage. It is an opportunity for viewers to learn about Iran's history and culture through visual art.
As a landscape painter, Catherine Hearding emphasizes the elements of color, shape, value and light, inviting the viewer to see the subject from a unique perspective. To accomplish this goal, she focuses on more intimate views of the landscape.
Douglas Oudekerk has always loved to draw. He grew up in an era saturated with great artwork: including illustrations in books, magazines, comics, and advertising. For Oudekerk, this is artwork that tells a story - images that augmented the written word in powerful ways.
Annual fall show of work by Friends of the Hopkins Center for the Arts Member Artists. The art on display is the result of a juried competition. For further information about submitting work for the exhibit visit: https://www.hopkinsartscenter.com/152/Fall-Juried-Show
As a photographer, Roger Nordstrom is attracted to lines, shapes, and form. The images in this exhibition were captured in travels from Northern Minnesota to the US Southwest, and explore the commonalities between disparate regions through the elements of Time, Water, and Earth.
‘These intimate black and white images of frozen water and desert sand show us the beauty of sameness in such opposites. They help us to see more clearly how the earth holds the memory of change allowing us to bear witness to our past and the prepossessing harshness that is the cycle of time made visible.’
David Strom’s paintings and drawings are how he explores, reflects on, and interprets the landscape in which he lives, and as he puts it ‘lives within him’. A combination of realism and fantasy, his artworks are about living in the fertile farm country of southwestern Minnesota. References include gray steel grain bins, elevators, wind turbines, round bales, roads, ropes, rows of crops in all stages of development and rest, and the abstract way that we define the land using maps, specifically plat maps of townships in six square mile divisions. He combines these elements into vignettes, connecting them together ‘much like one would make a quilt or illustrate a graphic novel.’
Artist Talk: Sunday, September 10 at 10am. If you wish to attend, please email Jim Clark
Ger Xiong's work reflects his Hmong American experience, identity, and stories through materiality, object, and adornment. While living in-between cultures, he looks at the navigation, negotiation, and reclaiming of his cultural identity within a dominant nation state.
In Continuous Thread/ Unraveling Insight, Gallo intends to mimic a meditative state, which promotes an overwhelming experience of sincerity. She aims to inspire viewers towards infinite potential by sharing her exploration, practices, and expression of this concept.
Artist Talk: Sunday, September 10 at approximately 11am (immediately following talk by Ger Xiong.) If you wish to attend, please email Jim Clark
Inspired by frequent trips to Paris, this exhibition of Linmark's photography, sketches, collages, assemblages and paintings is a collection of artists, writers, and ideas that resonate from the City of Light.
Based in northern Minnesota, self-taught artist Nikki Besser uses hundreds, often times thousands, of strips of rolled paper, glued and shaped together in various forms to create original, one of a kind artworks. Her paper quilled artworks capture positive life moments of joy, happiness, love, and beauty.
Assemblage sculptors, MaryAnn and Gary Carlson, use found objects to create sculptures that spark stories of the past and present. Their goal is to awaken the viewer to the extraordinary beauty of ordinary objects, and the potential of these objects to communicate beyond their former utility.
Polly Norman's work is rooted in movement and rhythm. Working in New Media, she blends and reshapes intersections of image, color, and form in active, sometimes frenetic picture planes. Sometimes languorous, sometimes ecstatic, again, the motion is always there, asking the eye, and maybe the heart, to follow.
Blair Treuer's work is an exploration into the role Native American traditional cultural and spiritual practices and beliefs play in shaping the way her family sees itself collectively and the influences or effect it's had on her own personal identity.
While Chuck + Peg Hoffman paintings are a study of edges, boundaries, and contrasts coming together, their continuing narrative inspiration is about bearing tension. Tension is a place where they sense the breath of Spirit moving and creating within and through each of us.
Keith's exhibition presents arboreal imagery as a symbolic language expressing community connection: not only community as the interrelation of heritage or proximity, but also community through idea exchange and a desire to help on another.
The annual spring show of work by Friends of the Hopkins Center for the Arts Member Artists. All members are eligible to show 1 to 2 pieces of work in this show. Works will be judged for awards and announced at the award presentation on April 8 at 7 pm. For more information about participating, please visit: Spring Members' Show
Formed in 1937, the Minnesota Artists Association is an all-inclusive organization welcoming members working in a variety of mediums. Throughout MAA’s history, their membership has boasted a veritable who’s who of art in our state. Celebrating its 86th year, this exhibition features a juried selection of work by current members.
Ubah Medical Academy presents work from their Photography, Visual Design, and Sculpture students. Their aim is to show their talent and passion through various mediums. This gallery is a sampling of what the students have accomplished throughout this school year.
This body of work examines and explores the delicious friction between organic growth and manufactured disruption. Inspired by discoveries of bush plane wreckage on barren high tundra, intrusive thoughts, F250s abandoned in woodlands, Darth Vader's paternal admission, irritated molluscs birthing nacreous gems, and stick framed barns caved in by giant's feet; these paintings are, in essence, bootleg interior & exterior landscapes. Like unauthorized recordings of Rock Gods, their authenticity is questionable but the spirit of fanaticism is earnest.
J Pony Allen lives and works in the area. He was born and raised in an interstitial space, a pocket universe between the IDS building and Amber Waves of Grain. He grew up in the wilds of Minnetonka where great mares once ran free, Dead Man’s Hill swallowed sleds, and the Swamp and Woods held great treasure. The woods and swamp have shrunk, fully plundered. The hill has been capped with gardens and Dishes. And the horses have scattered west and east, north and south.
In its 28th year, this highly competitive international juried exhibition showcases work by artists from throughout the United States and abroad.
Recent ANI exhibitions have featured work from 27 states, four provinces of Canada, and China. There is a wide range of mediums represented including acrylic, oil, and watercolor paintings, sculptures, fiber and textiles, ceramics, photographs, and more.
JURY & AWARDS More than $10,000 in awards are available, including Best of Show ($3000), 2 Awards of Excellence ($1000 each), 2 Awards of Merit ($500 each), and First, Second, and Third in media categories. Awards are subject to the discretion of the jurors. All jury decisions are final. Additional Special Awards ($100+ each) will be selected by the sponsors.
Reveal features the work of Hopkins Community Education adult students and instructors. Hopkins Community Education, a component of Hopkins Public Schools, strives to create meaningful opportunities for lifelong learning, connection, and engagement within our community.
Greg Lecker’s art transports viewers to natural & inhabited settings filled with motion, emotion, and color. Energetic chaos up close; then coming together as light & objects when viewed from a distance.
This body of work originated during artist residencies Lecker completed on both the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers. Funded in part by a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, he traveled across Minnesota painting the major watersheds: the Mississippi River, Lake Superior and the Red River of the North while engaging passersby. The resulting paintings embody the physicality of exploring water and its environment.
Josh Bindewald creates active, maximal images that reference natural and developed environments. Approached in playful and intuitive spirit, he composes prints, collages, and paintings that are a distillation of the splendor he finds in the natural world, the need for order imposed by humankind, and the resulting discord. This embedded contradiction reinforces the oft-conflicting emotions informing it. The resulting art contains the power to enchant, intended to separate the viewer from all context and provide an undefinable but beneficial type of nourishment.
Annual fall show of work by Friends of the Hopkins Center for the Arts Member Artists. The art on display is the result of a juried competition.
Susan Hensel makes sculptural textile work, transforming personal experience, private and public spaces, and experiences of beauty, through the alchemy of color, scale, lighting and placement. She combines mixed-media practices with fabric and embroidery across digital and manual platforms. Her desire to communicate ideas through art continues to be a powerful motivator.
Kar-Keat Chong’s life experiences have always been highly informed by the rich heritage and culture of his hometown. He grew up honing his sketching and painting skills on the vibrant streets of Penang, Malaysia, where multi-racial communities co-exist and live in harmony. Over recent summers, Kar-Keat has been out and about sketching landmarks and industrial relics in the Twin Cities he has called home since 1999. Working on location with fountain pens, watercolor and rice paper, he seeks to capture the atmospheric quality of these buildings and sites at a specific moment. As a result, the art he creates is his emotional response to this phenomenon - always striving to be honest and realistic in his interpretations. Through sketching and painting, it makes Kar-Keat pause and be present, truly observe with keen eyes, and understand his subject matter at a more refined level. He hopes through his artwork, he can inspire others to slow down from our fast-paced lives to pause and truly appreciate the beauty that surrounds us each and every day.
This exhibition showcases work by local Iranian-Americans whose creative work in the arts reflects or illuminates their rich heritage. It is an opportunity for viewers to learn about Iran’s history and culture through visual art.
Barbara Lidfors is a landscape and figurative painter who paints the allure of everyday moments and celebrates the significance of the people and places around her. Her nature paintings often incorporate the deeply symbolic and metaphoric possibilities inherent in the natural world to reference universal experience and meaning.
Recently returned to her Minnesota roots after decades of involvement in the German art world, she is enjoying rediscovering the specific beauty of Minnesota’s people and natural wooded areas. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Norwich University and has exhibited her work in over 100 solo and group shows throughout Germany, the United States and 5 other countries.