Prairie Mosaic
Prairie Mosaic 1203
Season 12 Episode 3 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
Funky soul music, mosaic art, and more on this episode of Prairie Mosaic!
On this episode, we’ll explore hidden and unique places in the Northwest Angle of Minnesota with Joe Laurin, watch Elizabeth Rockstad of Ada, MN create mosaic art, celebrate the 100 year Anniversary of the Women's Suffrage Movement, and listen to the funky soul music of the Vistas, a Fargo-Moorhead based band.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Prairie Mosaic is a local public television program presented by Prairie Public
About the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund In 2008, Minnesota voters passed a landmark piece of legislation — the Minnesota Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment — which provided...
Prairie Mosaic
Prairie Mosaic 1203
Season 12 Episode 3 | 26m 46sVideo has Closed Captions
On this episode, we’ll explore hidden and unique places in the Northwest Angle of Minnesota with Joe Laurin, watch Elizabeth Rockstad of Ada, MN create mosaic art, celebrate the 100 year Anniversary of the Women's Suffrage Movement, and listen to the funky soul music of the Vistas, a Fargo-Moorhead based band.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
How to Watch Prairie Mosaic
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship(woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and by the members of Prairie Public.
Welcome to "Prairie Mosaic," a patchwork of stories about the art, culture, and history in our region.
Hi, I'm Matt Olien.
And I'm Barb Gravel.
On this edition of "Prairie Mosaic," we'll explore a unique part of Minnesota, watch a mosaic come to life, and listen to the funky soul music of a Fargo-Moorhead band.
[playing funky blues] It's amazing to think that just over 100 years ago, women couldn't vote in the United States.
The journey for equality proved long and hard, but well worth the fight.
An exhibit at the Hjemkomst Center in Moorhead provided background for the national and regional struggle that secured the right to vote.
(Emily Kulzer) Clara Lillian Darrow, Emma Bates, Helen DeLendrecie of Fargo, Those women that went out and fought for the right to vote, they rocked the boat a little bit, and if you rock the boat politically, you are not looked favorably upon.
(Ashley Ladbury Hrichena) This exhibit was created by the league of women voters of Minnesota.
It's a really fantastic traveling exhibit looking at women's suffrage across the country and also within Minnesota and the River Valley.
(Ann Braaten) 1848 is kind of the official start of the Women's Suffrage Movement.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she became incensed with how she was treated in the world.
In a 2-week time period she was able to organize hundreds of people coming for this convention.
There were just a long list of grievances she was interested in addressing, and they included women's property rights, abolition was another issue that they were concerned about, and then women's suffrage.
At that convention, the majority of the issues that were brought before the people were voted on unanimously, but the issue on granting women the right to vote, that was a split decision.
There was the National Women's Suffrage Movement, and the American Women's Suffrage Movement.
They split in part because of Susan B. Anthony lobbying for the federal amendment granting women's suffrage, and the other group saying we need to approach it state-by-state.
They finally mended fences towards the end of the 1800s and became the national American Women's Suffrage Association.
Both North Dakota and Minnesota had some early attempts to pass women's suffrage before it was passed on a national level.
In North Dakota they were able to pass some partial suffrage for women so women could vote for things like school board, but they weren't able to vote in national elections like for president or U.S. House or Senate.
Moorhead was a pretty typical prairie town, so if you're looking at the history of women's suffrage in Moorhead, you're looking at the history of women's suffrage all across the country.
So this is something that really ties Moorhead to the national narrative.
(Ann Braaten) With Fargo and Moorhead one of the things that happens in 1912 is that one of the militant suffragettes from Great Britain, Sylvia Pankhurst, she was in a lecture circuit in the United States.
She was approached by people in this area to come and speak in Fargo at the Grand Theater Sunday Lecture circuit.
It was standing room only, and while Sylvia Pankhurst was here in Fargo the North Dakota Votes for Women League was founded.
Helen DeLendrecie, she and her husband came to Fargo in the 1870s and started the DeLendrecie Department Store.
She was an active suffragette.
When the North Dakota Votes for Women's League was founded, she and her husband gave office space at the DeLendrecie building for that state organization to have a place to organize.
(Emily Kulzer) I admire these women because back in the 19th century there were these social contracts that didn't allow women to even work outside the home.
One of the suffragettes actually stated that she was raising citizens, so why does she not have a role in her government?
Why doesn't she get to vote?
(Ann Braaten) One of the things that anti suffragettes would say is that women didn't want to vote, or they didn't need to vote because their husbands or fathers would vote for them.
There was the concern that if women voted, that they would become he-men,they would lose their femininity.
If women had the right to vote, then men would be the ones raising children and cleaning houses and cooking.
Men were the ones that were deciding whether or not women had the right to vote or would get the right to vote.
So it was trying to scare men into thinking that they would become lesser.
(Ann Braaten) To think about half the population of your country not having the right to vote and not being involved in decision-making really does seem ridiculous to us.
It's been a long time for all people in our country to have that right to vote.
20 million new voters were basically created with the 19th amendment in the United States.
To us now, women having the right to vote seems obvious and fundamental, but at the time it really was not.
It's a place where all Americans are equal.
A lot of people in their regular lives, they don't have as equal access to voice or opportunity as some other people do, whereas voting is a place where we all have the same voice to make our values and opinions known.
Mosaic artist Elizabeth Rockstad of Ada, Minnesota is on a mission to teach everyone who comes to her studio, how to create their very own piece of art.
Elizabeth's mosaic art ranges from large-scale windows to intricately detailed commissions for the community.
(Elizabeth) Art is important for everyone, no matter your age, no matter anything.
Art is one of those things that your body is going to be able to do your whole life.
My name is Elizabeth Rockstad, I'm in Ada, Minnesota, and the studio is Studio 4:13.
My family is very encouraging as far as art goes.
I had grandmothers who were painters, and my mother is very creative; we just always kind of made stuff as a kid.
In school I kind of enjoyed it, and it took off from there.
That's what actually got me into teaching art as well.
I went to Moorhead State, and I got my K through 12 art education degree.
I taught for about 15 or 16 years.
I opened the studio in 2011.
The business came about because I was actually with some friends at a little resort.
The lady had a very small paint room pottery, a little studio.
So we went in and each made something small.
I just remember after that kind of always having that in the back of my head.
Studio 4:13 comes from Philippians 4:13, which is "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."
that's my verse for life in general, so I thought it was quite fitting for starting up a business and putting my trust there.
It worked out real well.
What drew me to mosaics, I started it in college, once I opened the studio I just was able to have more time to work on it.
The mosaic process is creating a design, creating artwork using-- just fill in the blank.
You can use just about any material.
I used primarily glass, ceramic tile and now a little more beads and some stonework too.
It's cutting the tile and then gluing them on.
I'll attach my glue to the surface, then attach my tiles to the glue.
Once that glue dries, then you grout.
It's like frosting a cake.
You just kind of smear it over everything, wipe off all of the grout, and the tiles come through.
Depending on the pieces, there's a lot of cleaning and shining and buffing and all of that stuff that you can do later on.
In fact there's some pieces when I've honestly clocked more hours cleaning than I did making it.
Then depending on where it's going, you seal it or you don't seal it.
That's basically it What draws me to the mosaic is more the physicality of it.
I love to work with my hands; it's the tactile part of it for me.
I love texture, I love color, and with mosaics you get everything.
I like the idea of reusing things, things that people maybe discard or don't see as important or don't see the value in.
With mosaics you can use it.
I kind of joke, that's the good and bad thing with mosaics-- you can mosaic almost anything, you can mosaic with almost anything-- bad side, you can mosaic almost anything, you can mosaic with almost anything.
I tend to collect, because everything I see, or if something breaks, I think where I can use it.
When you're working with all of those things and being blessed to be in a small town, at least once a week if not more, someone comes in and tells me I have this that we're just going to throw away.
Do you want it?
That idea of reusing is important to me.
One of my favorites is probably a four seasons window.
I did an artist in residency at West Acres in 2019.
I think I like it because when I started it I didn't like it.
I just kept going with it, then as it progressed, I liked it more and more.
When I finished it, it's kind of one of my favorite pieces now.
The piece I'm working on now is a commission piece that is going up in Crookston, at RiverView Clinic.
I'm making 10 large-scale mandalas.
I call them like lollipop flowers.
So there's a stem, then a mandala for the flower on top with leaves.
It's probably the largest project I've done as far as commission-wise.
The commission work I have done have been windows.
I started out mosaicing, it's called glass-on-glass mosaic windows.
Those are just old barn windows or a window from great grandma's farm home.
But now I've done everything from a deer head, not a huge one but just, I had never really done a 3-dimensional animal, so to speak.
And honestly, like the challenge in coming up with the idea, and coming up with a way to create it, I wouldn't say I like more, but that is an aspect of commission work that I do enjoy.
I don't want to say I'm a people pleaser, but when it comes to commission, it's important to me.
I want them to look at it and just feel joy from it.
I think because I feel like I've done it all my life, it's almost second nature, so just kind of feels natural.
It just kind of feels like that's what I was made to do, meant to do You hear stories and you know people who go to a job and don't enjoy it, and I just thank God, thank you thank you so much that I get to do what I get to do, because I can't imagine doing anything else Though it's frequently touted as a fishing destination, Minnesota's Northwest Angle is so much more.
It's an area rich with history, spectacular views, and oddities.
Joe Laurin shares over 20 years of experience exploring and researching this magnificent place.
[vibraphone & synthesizer play softly] People think of Lake of the Woods as a fishing lake.
It's sure a lot more than that.
14,000 islands on the lake, it's just amazing some of the stuff that no one's ever seen.
My wife Anita and I have been coming out to the Northwest Angle for 20 years, and she is a real outdoor person.
We kind of have a complementary interest where she loves to fish, and I love to explore.
I was just exploring things from old maps, old newspaper articles, just anything I could find.
Over the years, 20-some years of exploring, I've had all this information.
Over time I thought, why not share everything, and let other people enjoy it?
So I created a Lake of the Woods exploring app.
If you want to see gold mines, if you want to see cool waterfalls, if they want to see good shore lunch spots, if you want to find good fishing spots there was one place to go, and it kind of added another dimension to people's vacation.
Each year I build on it, probably have about 300 places to see on Lake of the Woods before I'm near complete.
When you have over 50 gold mines on the lake, and there's so much there between the shaft and what they left behind, the elevators, some of them when you look in the rock you can still see the gold specks.
Yup, that's what they were interested in, and just all the work that had to be going through to put a hole in the rock just 10 feet.
I can't imagine all the labor that went into that to create that.
The mines are definitely quite interesting, there's so many of them.
There are 3 sunsweeps that have been created by David John Barr.
He's an artist from Michigan, and what he wanted to do, he wanted to bookend each side of the border between the United States and Canada.
So he created a sunsweep in the state of Washington, one on Lake of the Woods, then one in Maine.
On the first day of summer, you'll actually see a reflection of the sun on the stone.
It follows the contour of the artwork.
I know several different groups go out on the first day of summer and check them out.
It's a pretty neat artwork.
Cheerio Beach is very special.
It has stones that have holes in the center that basically look like a Cheerio.
No one really knows how they're formed.
A lot of people like to go there and create necklaces and bracelets.
It's kind of a cool place to visit.
You can never really leave there in less than a half hour because you find so many interesting things.
It's pretty fun to go check out A lot of people would come up to the Northwest Angle and try to take a picture.
Oftentimes the picture was next to a road sign or something that really wasn't meaningful.
So a local group got together and looked at different options, and one of the things they looked at was the Key West Bouy.
Key West has a buoy that symbolizes the most southern spot of the U.S.
The idea was have a similar buoy up in the northern part.
The people that come up to the Angle just to take a picture, the most northern spot, that seems to be the best place to take the pictures from, what we've had in the past.
The Native Americans have a lot of history on Lake of the Woods.
For instance, a lot of the petroglyphs that were created hundreds of years ago are still symbolic where the different groups will go there, and they'll leave offerings such as a coin, tobacco, different things to honor the legacy they had.
What was the message back then that they were trying to send with the different bird symbols, maybe medicine man, handprints.
There's some, like even the pictograms in my app, I'll look at, one's called the Long Journey.
It shows a man and a squiggly line, and you look at Lake of the Woods and how you really can't go straight because there's so many islands.
Does that mean the long journey?
Or what did that mean?
Everyone has their own interpretation, and I think that's what's kind of fun about the pictographs.
It's a language that people don't understand.
You look at it, and you're saying boy, what does that mean to me?
People up here want to do something different besides fishing, you know, add a little variety to their vacation.
The Vistas are Fargo/Moorhead band who have become well known for their unique funky soul sound.
They performed some of their favorite tunes on our series Prairie Musicians.
[guitar intro with tremolo setting on] ♪ ♪ [playing in syncopated funky blues rhythm] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It was about 2 a.m. after a long summer night ♪ ♪ It was so hot in that tiny bar ♪ ♪ I just couldn't quite unwind ♪ ♪ Waiting around for a ride uptown ♪ ♪ But to my surprise a pair of pretty eyes ♪ ♪ Came and sat right down ♪ ♪ She had me at a "hey" and you know by the time ♪ ♪ She said "how's it goin'" my heart was racing ♪ ♪ Doin' double time ♪ ♪ It must've been the moonlight that helped me to see ♪ ♪ It could've been the starlight that brought her to me ♪ ♪ You know I've been waiting for such a long time ♪ ♪ For a love like you to walk my way ♪ ♪ You know I've been waiting for such a long time ♪ ♪ For a love like you to wanna stay ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I could feel it in the cool air when the sun began to rise ♪ ♪ I was greeted with a smile ♪ ♪ And that same pair of pretty eyes ♪ ♪ I struggle through the day just to get back to the night ♪ ♪ It could just be I'll have a chance to see her ♪ ♪ This time I'll do it right ♪ ♪ If we meet again I don't wanna be her friend ♪ ♪ It seems to me like I could just be the one ♪ ♪ Whose love you'll tend ♪ ♪ Bathin' in the moonlight keep my feet close to the ground ♪ ♪ I'll keep on movin' till I find out where ♪ ♪ My sweet love can be found ♪ ♪ You know I've been waiting for such a long time ♪ ♪ For a love like you to walk my way ♪ ♪ You know I've been waiting for such a long time ♪ ♪ For a love like you to wanna stay ♪ [guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It's just a feeling that I get ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ It's just a feeling that I get ♪ [guitar solo] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ You know I've been waiting for such a long time ♪ ♪ For a love like you to walk my way ♪ ♪ You know I've been waiting for such a long time ♪ ♪ For a love like you to wanna stay ♪ ♪ ♪ [playing blues-rock] [instruments only; no vocals] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [instruments only; no vocals] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [lead guitar tremolo setting on] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [guitar tremolo setting off] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ If you know of an artist, a topic or an organization in our region that you think might make for an interesting segment, please contact us at... (Matt) You can watch this and other episodes of "Prairie Mosaic" on Prairie Public's YouTube channel, and follow Prairie Public on social media as well.
I'm Matt Olien.
And I'm Barb Gravel.
Thank you for joining us for another edition of "Prairie Mosaic."
[guitar, bass, & drums play in bright country rhythm] (woman) "Prairie Mosaic" is funded by-- the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on Nov. 4th, 2008; the North Dakota Council on the Arts, and by the members of Prairie Public.
Support for PBS provided by:
Prairie Mosaic is a local public television program presented by Prairie Public
About the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund In 2008, Minnesota voters passed a landmark piece of legislation — the Minnesota Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment — which provided...