Skip the chicken dinner and join us to experience our nationally recognized education programs and support inquiry-based STEM education. We’re setting up games and experiments all over the museum to show off what we do best – inspire innovators. We hope you’ll join us.
Brilliant is an excellent opportunity to share your interest in The Bakken Museum with your friends and colleagues. Proceeds from the event support our one-of-a-kind museum experience, equity-focused STEM education programming, and preserve our historic artifact collection at the intersection of fringe medicine and the life sciences. Plus, it’s going to be a lot of fun:
Meet and greet with members of The Bakken Museum’s staff and board, including President & CEO Alissa Light
Passed appetizers by Pimento Jamaican Kitchen
Access to the museum exhibits and gardens
Experiments and demonstrations presented by museum educators and curators
Fundraising games
Silent auction
Full cash bar and complimentary nonalcoholic beverages
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We invite you to wear festive attire. Please note that the green roof and gardens are grass; plan footwear accordingly.
American Sign Language interpretation will be available throughout the event.
Obon is an important Japanese cultural and family holiday, at which ancestral spirits are said to revisit their families for three days. Families pay their respects at grave sites and put out offerings of food and drink on a tray before household altars. They also light lanterns or small fires outside the house to symbolically guide the souls to the home. On the last evening of Obon, lanterns again guide the spirits back to their resting places.
The Obon Festival encompasses Japanese tradition—through music, dance, crafts, martial arts and lanterns. Entertainment on the main stage will include several taiko drumming groups, koto (Japanese zither), shakuhachis (bamboo flutes), traditional and contemporary dance and singing. Martial arts and a host of other cultural exhibits and demonstrations will line several paths through the grounds. Japanese food and culturally-related items will be for sale.
The day will culminate at dusk with the main event—the lantern lighting. Six stone lanterns and floating (on the water, not in the air) paper lanterns throughout the Japanese garden pond and the Frog Pond will create a vision of peacefulness and harmony to commemorate the dead.
The Como Park Japanese Obon Festival is produced by Como Park Zoo and Conservatory, Japan America Society of Minnesota, and Saint Paul.
The event will be selling ONLY ADVANCED TICKETS. They will not be able to take cash at the gate for admission. If you arrive without your advanced ticket, there will be QR codes at the gate for you to scan with your phone that will lead you through the ticketing purchase process. You will need a credit card for this process.
Admission is $5.00 per adult (13+), $3.00 per child (ages 3-12) and Seniors (ages 65+), free for children under 3
The Downtown Minneapolis Street Art Festival is a free and unique downtown art experience for residents and visitors that celebrates street art in all its forms. The festival takes place annually the second weekend in August and features chalk and spray art, murals, performance, craft, food and fun! We hope to see you, your friends and family for this inclusive and joyful experience in the heart of downtown Minneapolis!
Volunteers are critical to the festival’s success and provide hospitality support to participating artists and festival goers. All you need is enthusiasm for street art, our downtown streets and the diverse audience of festival goers. All volunteers will receive a coveted Downtown Mpls Street Art Festival signature t-shirt. Sign up for a volunteer shift here.
It’s a Barbie world, and Nicole Houff is living in it.
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StarTrib:The Minneapolis-based artist has made a specialty of posing dolls — Mattel’s most famous, to be exact — and photographing them around the state, in miniature midcentury modern sets and sometimes cheeky positions. (Picture a naked Ken doll with a strategically placed surfboard, or a holiday scene with Barbie posed on a couch with a martini in hand and nearby Ken tied up in Christmas lights.) She has even crafted a First Avenue Barbie and a State Fair Barbie.
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Renée Jones Schneider, Star Tribune
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Nicole Houff creates painstakingly detailed Barbie-sized scenes and photographs them, creating fun and retro-inspired photos that she then sells at art fairs. She was photographed in her studio in Minneapolis.
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Houff scours Etsy and eBay for the outfits, furnishings and accessories for the more than 100 Barbie dolls she owns. And then she builds a theme, creates a backdrop and positions them ever-so-delicately in her home studio.
We talked with Houff about her photographic homage to Barbie, Barbie’s big moment and why she’s not a diehard collector.
Q: Describe your art.
A: I do fine art photographs featuring Barbie and Ken dolls. In a nutshell, that’s what I do. I’ll have a general concept for a scene or a theme. Then, in my Minneapolis studio, what I do is I’ll pull together the doll accessories, anything that I need for the shoot, and I set them up, and then I design lighting around it.
Q: How long have you been doing this? A: Sixteen years.
Q: So, why Barbie? A: I think Barbie’s journey from 1959 to where she is now is incredibly fascinating. Not many toys are relevant 65 years later.
Q: How do you find the pieces to make these elaborate scenes? A: That’s really the most fun part. I have about 100 dolls, but finding all the little accessories and all the little details is like an adventure leading up to the actual shoot. I can use eBay and Etsy and Facebook Marketplace, anything like that. Even from Mattel, some of the stuff I use is directly from them, but way more stuff is made through a third party.
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Renée Jones Schneider, Star Tribune
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Nicole Houff creates painstakingly detailed Barbie-sized scenes and photographs them, creating fun and retro-inspired photos that she then sells at art fairs. She stores her dolls in an old card cabinet in her studio.
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Q: Are all of the accessories you have official Barbie accessories? A: There’s more than just Barbie stuff, because it’s the size that matters. There’s dollhouse scale, model train scale, and Barbie scale, a 1:6 scale. I can do searches for the right-sized items. Especially nowadays with 3-D printers, people make accessories that you wouldn’t have been able to find a few years ago, so the sky’s the limit.
Q: Are all of your dolls Barbie dolls? A: They’re all Barbie. I use a lot of reproduction dolls or vintage-inspired dolls because I like referencing the aesthetic from the 1950s and ’60s. I do have one doll made by Mattel that’s actually a Julie doll. She has the same face as one of the Kristy dolls, which is one of Barbie’s friends. That’s just me being a little overshare-y now.
Q: Please, overshare! Are you a Barbie collector on top of a Barbie photographer?
A: I get asked that all the time. I manhandle the dolls, I don’t have dolls that are still in the box and I use a lot of reproduction dolls. So, I wouldn’t be considered a classic collector, but I still do collect the dolls. I have around 100 Barbies and Kens in total, and some of them would be considered solid collector dolls, even if they’re out of the box.
Q: What is it like for a Barbie lover to see people go crazy over Barbie again? A: I do art fairs, and I’ve done them for around a dozen years. It’s one of my favorite ways to interact with people because people don’t tend to have filters at an art fair. You get to see some real emotions, expressions and reactions.
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Over the years, it’s been fun when people see my art and it spurs a lot of questions and excitement. This summer has been next level because Barbie is so in the ether and on top of the public consciousness. The movie has generated this newfound audience for me, which has been incredibly exciting.
Q: How did you make my favorites, Grain Belt Barbie and State Fair Barbie? A: What I do is I go to the location first, and I get the photo. Then I print it on a matte, non-reflective paper and hang it like a backdrop in the studio and set up the dolls so they look people-sized. Of course, it gives me a reason to go out and have some fun in our city.
Q: How do you get Barbie to do things like hold a drink?
A: There’s a lot of trickery, if you will. I can suspend things with a little bit of wire, because Barbie hands aren’t that functional. I get these little clear glue dots that crafters use. They’re very easy to hide. I don’t add things digitally to my photographs.
Q: What do you hope to see in the Barbie movie? A: It’s obviously well put together, very thoughtful, and the aesthetic is very over-the-top. I mean just the extra, extra, extra pink. I don’t do a ton of really pink pieces, but I’ve noticed this summer people are really gravitating to more of my pieces that have pink in them. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie to see if I’m inspired. I’m definitely going to make some new work on top of the pieces I already have.
The annual Grand Portage Rendezvous Days Celebration Pow-wow, sponsored by the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe), is an American Indian cultural gathering focused on dance, song and family celebration. The Pow-wow includes traditional foods, music, and craft stands along with other events in the community. Over 350 dancers participated in 2019’s Grand Portage Pow Wow. Mid-day Grand Entry Saturday and Sunday are particularly inspirational and colorful as U.S. and Canadian flags are raised to honor military veterans from Grand Portage. Staff bearers lead dancers, dressed in traditional regalia, into the Pow Wow ring. Through the Pow Wow, all people have the chance to experience Native American culture in a wonderful way.
