You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.
with our old friends, Dan and Katie, from Switzerland days
Dan and Katie, as it turns out, are fanciers of birds, and of birds in art, so here we are at the Birds in Art exhbition at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin. Since 1976 the Museum has been sponsoring this worldwide competition, welcoming 'the very best contemporary artistic interpretations of birds and related subject matter', and mounting selected entrants in this annual exhibition.
This is the 47th iteration, featuring this year 118 artists and running from 10 September to 27 November 2022, after which 60 of the exhibits will go on a national tour. Since joining Kristin in Wisconsin in the summers, we've been accompanying family members for early September's opening gala soiree each year from 2012 to 2019 (after which it was interrupted by the covid), which is clearly a major social event in Wausau's cultural life, accompanied by the town's arts and crafts weekend downtown.
The original house is a wonder and is put to good use by the annual Birds in Art and other smaller exhibitions, and it's been expanded by a glass tower-like structure (on the left behind Dan in the photo above). (Cousin Rob grew up in this house, by the way.)
Following each year's opening showing and dinner, many of the participating artists come along at the weekend for pontoon boat rides round our lake up north. This view is taken from the ground floor of the tower block; we've now been through the main exhibit and are on our way up to the Rooftop Sculpture Garden.
With free coffee. Though it's properly freezing up here.
This is one of our favorite exhibits in this year's crop. Each year, at the opening event (and by post since 2020), Birds in Art fans are able to purchase, as a fundraiser for the museum, original postcards created by the participating artists. We've got an uncountable number of them plastered all round a corner of our living room.
We're not authorized to properly reproduce works from the exhibit, but in order to give a flavor of the event, we've snagged some quick snapshots of a few of our favorites this year, with no attributions. Physical catalogues of all of the annual exhibitions, going back to 1996, are available for sale on the museum's website, and especially for the less current ones they're at very reasonable prices.
Our photos from some of the previous opening events since 2012, and of the Wausau arts festival, are available on this site; for example, here.
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All rights reserved, all wrongs avenged. Posted 16 October 2022. 
