Journalling club looking for folks up for a scrap

On any given Monday evening this summer, Katie Borgfjord could be found scrapping and yapping with friends and strangers alike, building community one collage at a time.

Borgfjord is the creative force behind Scrap and Yap, a local journalling club that hosts workshops and drop-in events that launched in January. This summer, she set up shop at the weekly Riverview Community Centre’s Monday Markets, inviting visitors of all ages to pull up a chair and get crafty for a while.

“We have magazines, stickers, scrap paper, glue, scissors, stamps, anything you might want to just let your creativity out,” Borgfjord, 26, says.

“It’s different every time. Usually a few people will drop in, some will stay the whole time. My favourite is when people just drop in who have never heard of us before. I hope that it helps spark some creativity.”

Art gallery ready to play with clay in WAG Studio Pottery Throwdown

For fans of fast-paced reality competition TV shows, there’s no need to keep watching the action through a screen.

Library opera shows let kids take control of the action

Virtually everyone would choose a treat over a mouldy sandwich. But the youngsters attending Rufus and Rita in Winnipeg libraries often choose the latter.

Winnipeg team behind national LGBT monument spent six years bringing it to fruition

The Winnipeg team behind a national monument recognizing the LGBT Purge were in Ottawa to celebrate its official unveiling Friday.

Thunderhead is the work of local artists Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Liz Wreford and Peter Sampson of Public City Architecture, and knowledge keeper Albert McLeod, who served as cultural adviser for the project.

The team beat out 31 international submissions for the project, which is permanently located at 201 Wellington St. in Ottawa along the Ottawa River, in view of Parliament.

“We are a beacon internationally around the world of what democracies can do about inclusion, about human rights,” McLeod said.

Wooed by wood, Cedarella founder takes pride in handcrafted designs

Marina Bulan is the founder of Cedarella, a two-year-old venture that turns out eye-catching wood products such as jewelry, kitchen decor, children’s toys and, most recently, metre-high outdoor planters that double as home street-number indicators.

Ahead of immigrating to Winnipeg a decade ago from their native Russia, Bulan and her partner thought it would be prudent to conduct some research on their soon-to-be new home, a city they knew next to nothing about.

Imagine their surprise as they were viewing the 2007 surrealist film My Winnipeg, which comically blends historical facts about our burg with what Winnipeg-born writer/director Guy Maddin has termed “mystical hypothesizing.”

(For instance, there is no proof that, as reported in the award-winning flick, Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world, and that residents keep keys to their former abodes on their person in the event they turn up there during a bout of somnambulism.)

Rural councils work hard, plan big to build local arts scenes

BEAUSEJOUR — Brittany Wurch has always been drawn to art. She fell in love with illustration and animation as a kid, but growing up near Beausejour meant she had to travel elsewhere to satisfy her creative interests.

“I had to go to a different community to take art,” says Wurch, who chose to study in Selkirk, about a 30-minute drive west, for its high school’s superior art program.

As an adult, she’s determined to make art more accessible in her community.

A smiling red barn and a tall water tower greet visitors on the way into Beausejour. The cute, compact town is located 50 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg and is home to 3,300 people. It’s surrounded by farmland and situated within the RM of Brokenhead, where agriculture and sports have historically reigned supreme.

New exhibition offers up 125 different ways to look at Canada

As a curator and head of collections and exhibitions at WAG-Qaumajuq, Riva Symko has been contemplating landscapes in art for a long time. But living in an ever-changing and ever-threatened one has altered her perspective on them.

Before coming to Winnipeg, Symko and her husband lived in Anchorage, Alaska. One day, seven or so years ago, they were out hiking when a sudden thunderstorm rolled through — “which is very unusual in Alaska,” she says — sparking a forest fire that ended up raging out of control. That summer, the whole city, save for the ocean side, was surrounded by fire and blanketed with heavy smoke. Climate change was viscerally visible.

“And since then, I really haven’t been able to look at a beautiful landscape the same,” she says.

With Terra Cognita/Incognita, a new exhibition opening at WAG-Qaumajuq Wednesday night, Symko wants to inspire and challenge viewers to look at landscapes differently, too.

Don’t delete organ concert tickets when scrubbing digital life

We all have digital footprints of varying sizes and, in the future, grandma’s proverbial china set will be replaced by terabyte hard drives and social media accounts.

Célébrer des employés qui mettent la main à la pâte

L’immigration francophone joue un rôle grandissant dans la vitalité de Saint-Pierre-Jolys. À la Boulangerie Saint-Pierre, des employés venus de plusieurs pays contribuent à la croissance de l’entreprise tout en s’intégrant à la vie du village. Une diversité que l’entreprise souhaite célébrer avec une nouvelle murale.

La Boulangerie Saint-Pierre, à Saint-Pierre-Jolys, connaît une importante expansion depuis quelques années. Pour Jocelyn Gagné, propriétaire de l’entreprise familiale, cette croissance repose largement sur le travail de ses employés, dont plusieurs sont des immigrants francophones. C’est pour souligner leur contribution que la boulangerie, en collaboration avec l’artiste franco-manitobain Gérald Laroche, a entrepris la création d’une murale qui ornera bientôt sa façade.

Jocelyn Gagné, qui travaille dans l’entreprise depuis l’âge de 13 ans, alors que ses parents étaient propriétaires, constate bien que la société a changé à travers les années. “On est rendu dans près de 150 magasins, on a grandi pas mal vite dans la dernière année. On a beaucoup plus d’employés que dans le temps de mes parents.” Avec une telle croissance, le besoin d’engager davantage de main-d’œuvre est venu naturellement.

Un Folklorama à l’année longue

Creepy, poignant graphic novel a small-town coming-of-age horror story

If you’ve been to Sackville, N.B., you might have wondered what’s inside the huge, windowless, white steel cube on the edge of this small town of 6,000.

The fact that “the Sackville Cube” is a huge cold storage facility for frozen fruit, and has the unremarkable name of the Atlantic AutoCold facility, does little to diminish the strangeness of this landmark that seems straight out of a science fiction movie.

So when Jon Claytor’s creepy and poignant new graphic novel, Nowhere, begins with the arrival overnight of a giant white cube on the edge of a small town called Beauséjour, it is natural to assume this is a thinly disguised version of his hometown, and that this coming-of-age horror story bears some resemblance to his own experiences of the weirdness of small town life.

Claytor is a U.S.-born, Sackville-based painter, illustrator, graphic novelist and writer and one of the founders of Sackville’s acclaimed SappyFest independent music and arts festival.

An elegy for the smalls

Dad's darkroom was a place of alchemy: dark except for the one red light that wouldn’t spoil the photographic paper, trays of developer and fixer and rinse water, the enlarger with its timer, a quiet darkened patch of peace.

Rainbow Stage’s Legally Blonde a lovely legal musical

Omigod, you guys! Rainbow Stage kicked off its penultimate summer production Thursday with a high-octane joy machine bathed in a sea of pink.

Inspired by the 2001 Hollywood film starring Reese Witherspoon, and Amanda Brown’s same-titled novel, the award-winning Legally Blonde: The Musical — featuring a book by Heather Hach, with music/lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Nell Benjamin — opened on Broadway in April 2007, followed by a subsequent West End run.

The tale — equal parts cheesy rom-com and potent siren call for female autonomy and empowerment — focuses on quintessential Cali-girl Elle Woods (a pitch-perfect Claire Mac Master). A proud daughter and president of Delta Nu sorority house, she enrols at Harvard Law School to win back her upwardly mobile ex-boyfriend, Warner Huntington III (Duncan Cox).

Laser-focused on marrying a “Jackie, not a Marilyn,” Warner dreams of becoming an American senator, latching onto uber-preppy fellow pupil Vivienne Kensington (Julie Davis), who becomes Elle’s arch nemesis.

Picasso etching stolen from Milwaukee art gallery in 2018 found by landlord in vacant apartment

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Bill DeLind thought the Picasso print that was stolen from his Milwaukee gallery in 2018 was gone forever. But then police called last week and asked him to look an artwork that a local landlord found while cleaning out a vacant apartment.

DeLind immediately recognized the stolen “Torero” print, one of 30 known to exist signed by Picasso.

“I was overwhelmed,” DeLind said Friday. “I was at a loss for words. It was an overwhelming moment for me.”

The sticker from his DeLind Fine Art Appraisals was still on the back of the framed print, just as it had been placed there in 2018.

Federal government still missing 111 Indigenous artworks from its collection

OTTAWA - The federal government still can't locate 111 Indigenous artworks missing from its collection — nearly two years after an internal audit found it couldn't account for 132.

The Indigenous Art Centre's collection — established by the federal government in 1965 to protect, preserve and promote Indigenous art — consists of more than 5,000 works from First Nations, Métis and Inuit artists.

The collection, which is valued at roughly $14.4 million, includes works by such renowned artists as Christi Belcourt, Elisapee Ishulutaq, Kent Monkman and Norval Morrisseau.

An internal audit of the collection, dated November 2024, was posted last October on the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada website. It tracked the operations of the department’s Indigenous Art Centre from April 2019 to August 2024 and said the centre could not account for 132 items in the collection.

Rainbow Stage star relates to Elle Woods’ perseverance

Nearly 9,000 aspiring barristers and solicitors cross their fingers and send in their LSAT scores to Harvard University each year, but less than 10 per cent of applicants wind up on campus in Cambridge, Mass.

In Legally Blonde, the musical opening tonight at Rainbow Stage, Elle Woods (Claire Mac Master) defies the undercutting judgment of her blue-blood boyfriend Warner (Duncan Cox) to earn a spot in the Ivy League, leaving her doubters aghast and crimson-faced.

“What?” asked Elle — played by Reese Witherspoon in the 2001 film version — “Like it’s hard?”

The New York-born Mac Master never had any aspirations to pursue a law career, but can relate to her character’s plucky self-determination based on her experience at Toronto Metropolitan University’s undergraduate acting program, which accepts 25 applicants each year from an international pool of hundreds.

A Winnipeg home with a mountain view? You won’t find a real one, but AI-generated visual suggests otherwise

Manitoba’s mountain range peeked out behind a Scotia Street home.

At least, it did in a photo attached to a real estate listing for 232 Scotia St. in Winnipeg’s (flat) Seven Oaks neighbourhood.

Another picture — now removed — showed a cartoon cityscape viewable from the bungalow’s front porch.

Both photos had tags in their bottom left corners: “AI-generated content.”

Winnipeg pooches get time in spotlight in Rainbow Stage production of Legally Blonde

On stage and screen there are no small roles, but there are small actors.

And then there is Lil’ Beast, a spunky, wild-haired performer who weighs in at 1.5 kilograms (3.5 lbs).

“You think of a small dog, and then he’s even smaller,” says his owner Britainy Jasper.

In April, when the beast was only six months old, he was encouraged by dozens of dog park acquaintances to tap into his creative side and audition for his first professional acting gig.

Memories of East Selkirk evoked on Zoon Monkman’s new album

At the dawn of the MP3 era, an adolescent Zoon Monkman didn’t have the money for an iPod or a Microsoft Zune, the short-lived competitor to Apple’s revolutionary personal-listening device.

What the recording artist from Brokenhead Ojibway Nation did have in his backpack was the catalogue for the Scholastic Book Club, where only one product demanded attention: an AM-FM radio pen that scoured the airwaves for connection with every click.

For Monkman — a Polaris Music Prize-nominated musician who records as Zoon and pioneered the “moccasingaze” genre, which blends the dreamy textures of shoegaze with the rhythms and energies of Indigenous song — his mother’s gift of the ballpoint pen was a means of both self-discovery and the development of his musical taste.

During lonely days as an elementary student at East Selkirk’s Happy Thought School, the device was also a recess-hour tether to distant worlds, where artists such as Feist, Avril Lavigne and Broken Social Scene were introduced by the enthusiastic voice of a man who called himself Ace Burpee.

À Granby, le Manitoba francophone au micro

Bercée par la musique depuis l’enfance, Mercédès Beaudry sera la seule représentante du Manitoba à Jamais Trop Tôt, le volet jeunesse du Festival international de la chanson de Granby (FICG), au Québec. Le 16 août, l’auteure compositrice-interprète de 17 ans montera sur la scène du Palace de Granby aux côtés de 19 autres artistes de la relève francophone venus des quatre coins du Canada.

Mère, père, frère et même ses chats : à peine sélectionnée, Mercédès Beaudry s’est empressée de leur annoncer la bonne nouvelle. La jeune artiste se trouvait avec un ami quand le téléphone s’est mis à sonner : “Pour la première fois dans ma vie, je dois prendre un appel,” s’amuse-t-elle. C’est avec un grand enthousiasme qu’elle a accueilli cette sélection.

Après le dévoilement public de la cohorte, la nouvelle de sa participation s’est vite répandue dans son entourage. “Il y a des personnes qui m’ont textée et qui ne savent pas forcément en quoi consiste Jamais Trop Tôt, alors je dois expliquer ça à tout le monde.”

Au programme du FICG, qui se déroulera du 13 au 23 août, Jamais Trop Tôt n’est pas une compétition, mais un projet musical pancanadien avec un spectacle à la clé. Vingt interprètes de la relève francophone venus des quatre coins du Canada, dont près de la moitié du Québec, passeront cinq jours à l’Université Bishop’s, du 11 au 15 août, pour suivre une formation vocale et scénique. Ils se produiront ensuite en spectacle le 16 août à 19 h 30 au Palace de Granby.

Why celebrities from Zendaya to Kylie Jenner are wearing Fecal Matter

The brand name behind recent showstopping fashion moments isn’t quite as delicate as their romantic and otherworldly looks. When asked what an ethereal Zendaya was wearing for the “Odyssey” premiere in New York, her stylist Law Roach responded: “Fecal Matter.”

Zendaya’s angelic strapless gown with feathered white wings was the work of Matières Fécales — yes, in English, Fecal Matter — the Paris-based, high-end fashion house founded in Montreal over a decade ago that’s, seemingly suddenly, everywhere.

Why Matières Fécales is called ... that

The design duo behind Matières Fécales, Steven Raj Bhaskaran and Hannah Rose Dalton, have aimed to subvert beauty with their own alien-like personal style, including dramatic white makeup, shaved heads and eyebrows, and skin boots made to look like realistic feet.

Winnipeg artist RYAN AD's ambitions growing as work reaches Paris

RYAN AD is Jamaican-Grenadian, lives in Winnipeg and receives iPhone notifications in French.

One of these notifications recently gave the photographer (who goes by his artist name) good news: a prestigious Parisian art gallery was interested in featuring two of his photographs in one of its exhibitions. One was captured in Manitoba, the other in Jamaica.

“I felt a constant sense of community in Jamaica. You’ll walk down the road and people will talk to you,” he says. “Here you have to be buying something to exist in most places.”

One photo, entitled Born Underwater, is a gentle depiction of Lake Winnipeg, reminiscent of Wanda Koop for its symmetry and pastel-like softness. The other, Myself When Young, shows a man leaning on an old car with its hood popped, a glimpse into Jamaica’s culture of repair and resourcefulness.

This organ will play one composition until 2640. It’s redefining how slowly music can be played

HALBERSTADT, Germany (AP) — A small organ in eastern Germany is the headliner of the world’s slowest concert. It has been playing the same piece of music by composer John Cage at a glacial pace for nearly 25 years.

A rare chord change on Wednesday — from seven notes to eight — represented the completion of about 4% of the 639-year endeavor of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt.

It was a historic moment inside the medieval Burchardi Church, in Halberstadt, Germany, that reflected the past, present and future of the project, as well as those who are following its — albeit very slow — progression.

“As fast as our world is developing, I think it’s a wonderful place to be and to come to yourself and just to be touched by this ‘being there,’"said Anneli Borgmann, chairwoman of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt’s board of trustees.

‘Sewing angels’ come to Folklorama pavilion’s rescue after Ghana dancers’ costumes stolen

Parents and volunteers had tears in their eyes when dozens of young dancers took to the stage for their opening performances at Folklorama’s Ghana pavilion Sunday night.

Duelling symbols: Alberta and Canada flags creating division ahead of referendum

EDMONTON -

Sarah Batchelor says it started a few weeks ago when a large blue flag bearing Alberta's shield of arms appeared on her neighbour's window in Airdrie, a city north of Calgary.

The 49-year-old music teacher, who has lived in the province for most of her life, says she would not have been bothered if her neighbour put it up a couple of years ago.

But now it irks her because of its widespread use by separatists.