Boat Show and Show Boats

By Michael Black
Contributing Writer

One would not readily think that these two disparate events could have a commonality but somehow I managed to ferret one out: Beer. The Red River Valley Boat & Marine Show has the numbers in this match-up. Cenaiko Productions has been staging shows like these for 47 years. Nick Cenaiko Sr., who recently passed at the age of 79, started presenting the Fargo Sportsmen’s Show in 1956—his first ever. The 47th will be held March 3rd-4th at the Fargodome.

Art on the Plains (AOP) XI is a regional juried exhibition in it’s 11th iteration, held sporadically rather than annually. The last AOP was 3 years ago and, as Juror/Curator Hesse McGraw notes in the Gallery Guide, they were a “...singular and tumultuous period…” We saw the global economy crater under the misguided greed of Wall Street hoggery. Along with that crash, we saw every market from housing to stock to art collapse with it. Tough times, indeed.

You wouldn’t know it today, though, walking the aisles of The Boat Show with personal water craft starting around $10K to Bennington Party Barges pushing $60K and everything in between. I saw a lot of negotiating and paper signing in my 4 hours of Nautical Nirvana. Crop prices are high, farmers are flush, and water sports make sense again.

Going directly from the Fargodome to the Plains Art Museum took some equilibrium. From brats to beef chignons, Schlitz to Summit, and pontoons to pastels, without a life preserver, it is not for the weak of heart—It was a jolting juxtaposition.

The 48 Midwestern Plains State Artists, chosen from a field of around 200, painted a broad swath across the art world canvas. From Gretna, Nebraska, Jamie Burmeister’s top rated The Music Within My Head (2011) and its’ eight televisions triggered by the motion of a rocking chair (“Sit On It!”) to his Vermin.Me (2011), small clay figures secreted throughout the galleries, you know you are in for a wild ride. Minneapolis’ Marc S. Manke’s I Carried It With Me and Placed It Here (2011), using paper seed corn sacks, thread and cotton batting, firmly planted the idea that these artists and their Muses originate right here on The Great Plains. They may end up in SoHo or SoCal, rich & famous someday, but their germination took place right here on the ancient fertile sea bed of the Western Interior Sea which stretched from the Rockies to the Appalachian Mountains in the mid-late Cretaceous Period.

Larry Bollig, International Falls Hall of Fame Fisherman and Electronics Wizard, tells me that often times the return signal on his depth finder is a false echo. Sometimes even the best detectors can be fooled by those pesky walleyes. So he recommends you go to the “manual” mode, not the default settings, on your detector. I found myself going to my own settings—switching to manual and recalibrating my art sonar. As an Old School oil on canvas man I had to understand that these emerging artists are making art in 2012, not 1962 or 1542. So, I will go back to The Plains again, without the Beautiful People and Hipsters milling about, sipping wine and noshing on lavosh. I will go to my manual settings and re-echo their work and see it for what it is: Art in 2012.

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