Wednesday, December 17 2008

This one-stop housing crisis center is offering mortgage loan counseling and foreclosure prevention services to individuals and families who have fallen behind on mortgage payments, or are facing possible foreclosure. Center hours: Tuesdays from 6-8 pm; Saturdays from 10 am – noon. Walk ins are welcome.

The center is located at the Minneapolis Urban League’s Glover Sudduth-Center, 2100 Plymouth Avenue N., Minneapolis, 55411. To make an appointment, call (612) 827-9299. (The center is a joint venture between the Minneapolis Urban League and Minnesota ACORN).

Toastmasters is the world’s largest organization devoted to developing communication skills. It now has some 200,000 members in 10,000 Toastmasters clubs in about 80 countries. In the Twin Cities and surrounding metro area, there are over 200 clubs!

Discovery Toastmasters Club meets every Wednesday at the Imation World Headquarters (Discovery) Building in Oakdale. For directions and more information about the club, please visit the club’s website at http://www.orgsites.com/mn/discoverytm. Meetings are open to the general public and there is never a cost to check out a meeting.

The countdown to the holidays is upon us and we at Nicademus Art are proud to announce our new show Home for the Holidays on December 13th 2008 starting at 7:00pm. John Grider (Broken Crow) and Mike Fitzsimmons (Paint Goggles) have been working steadily over the past year and are taking over Nicademus Art to bring you all fresh new art.

WHAT:
> Celebrating its first holiday season in Minnesota, Holiday Lights in
> the Park is a new community event that focuses on raising funds for
> local charities and providing an impressive and affordable means of
> holiday entertainment for people of all ages. Visitors will enjoy a
> spectacular array of holiday lights and animated displays as they take
> an evening drive through Phalen Park in Saint Paul. The delightful
> tour is approximately 0.6 miles in length along Lake Phalen and Phalen
> Golf course.

Andrea Carlson
EARTH DIVER

EARTH DIVER features new works from Andrea Carlson’s ongoing series that both challenges and champions issues of cultural appropriation, assimilation and consumption. Drawing heavily on contemporary museum studies, Carlson’s new paintings on paper reference cannibalism as a metaphor to describe the commodification of culture and cultural tourism in museums and on film.

Hours: Wednesday – Saturday, noon to 5 pm

With surreal beauty and deliberate ambiguity Megan Rye’s paintings encourage viewers to see the Iraqi War through the eyes of those who’ve witnessed it firsthand. Her works in “Long Night’s Journey into Day” explore her ongoing fascination with images taken primarily by her brother, Ryan Nosek, while stationed in Iraq as a U.S. Marine. Rye has based her work off her brother’s photographs since 2005, the year he returned from duty.

An exhibit of Polaroid photography by Sean Tubridy. Click here for details.

Explore the traditions associated with Saint Lucia, from her origins as a fourth-century martyr to the legends of her appearance in Sweden.

There are many legends associated with Lucia starting in fourth century Sicily. A young woman gave her dowry away to the poor and confessed herself a Christian. For this she was accused of witchcraft and put to death. Another legend tells of a famine in medieval days. A glowing figure dressed in white, Saint Lucia came across a great lake in the province of Värmland, Sweden.
She brought gifts of food to the starving people.

A major exhibit of contemporary art from India, at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Bethel University’s Olson Gallery pleased to present new works by Bethel University Associate Professor of Art Jeff Wetzig.

Jeff Wetzig’s collection of prints transform their traditional roots in Japanese woodblock prints to explore the medium as a means of installation. He investigates the idea of boundaries and borders as they relate to themes such as mass communication, repetition, and fear. The delicate nature of line and color in his woodblock prints are an interesting contrast to their subject matter.