Flock Fest: A feather past an Art Fair

Flock ArtFest calls itself part art festival, part festival festival, and that’s not marketing cuteness — it’s an accurate diagnosis. Yes, there are the tents. Rows of them, filled with work by real artists you can actually chat up and support with purchases that will brighten your spaces.

But then Flock keeps going.

Start with the provisions, because I always do. Around ten food trucks, plus beer, wine, cocktails, and a legitimate lineup of non-alcoholic options — because nothing sharpens the eye for art like a full stomach, and everyone deserves something good in their hand while they browse. This is not one sad popcorn stand. This is a fleet of food trucks.

Then there are the installations, which is where things get gloriously strange. There will be a hanging of a 20-foot-by-20-foot dichroic film piece — that shimmery, color-shifting material that turns plain Duluth daylight into something you’ll photograph forty times and still not capture.

There’s a big crate bird, which is exactly what it sounds like, and I refuse to explain it further because some things you should meet in person. Giant inflatable letters spell out FLOCK ARTFEST — four feet tall, stretching some 26 feet wide — so if you lose your people in the crowd, congratulations, you’ve got a landmark.

And the art won’t stay put on pedestals, either. David Sundaram — chalk artist, illustrator, and painter — will be onsite all weekend making chalk art at Bayfront, which means the ground you’re standing on is a work in progress. Watch a blank stretch of pavement become something on Saturday, then come back Sunday to see how far it’s traveled.

Nor is this a look-but-don’t-touch affair. SOLCA is running free art projects for anyone who wants to get their hands moving. There’s a graffiti wall waiting for your contribution, paint donated by Renew Resources — who are also running the Arts & Craft Supplies Swap, and this one deserves your attention now, not just festival weekend. In the weeks leading up to the event, they’ll be collecting donations of gently used supplies: fine art materials, fiber arts, paper crafts, pottery tools, printing supplies, instructional books, hand tools, organizers, and more (drop-off locations TBD). Then at Flock, the whole haul opens as a free store — and no, you don’t have to donate to take things home. So haul down the half-used watercolors haunting your closet and trade them for someone else’s abandoned ambitions. It’s the circle of craft. The full list of accepted items lives at ResourceRenew.com/ArtSwap.

Now. The puppets. I was going to say only “there’s a puppet experience” and let the mystery do the work, but the details are too good to withhold. Two puppeteers, improvising, and you choose your interaction from an actual menu:

Learn What Bird You Are. A short series of questions, administered by a puppet, culminating in the revelation of your true avian identity. You’ve taken worse personality quizzes for less.

Life Advice From A Bird. Bring your decisions, big or small — the job offer, the haircut, whether to text them back — and receive counsel from a wise bird puppet with absolutely no stake in the outcome. Honestly, that’s better than most advice.

Compliments From A Bird. A bird puppet showers you in compliments until you walk away feeling confident and loved. That’s it. That’s the whole thing, and it’s perfect.

A Tarot Reading From A Bird. Using an avian tarot deck, the puppets will pull you a one-card reading — and here’s the crucial choice: you can request a good puppet (supportive, kind) or a bad puppet (a little snarky, a little sassy, still technically rooting for you). Choose the bad puppet. You know who you are.

Kids and families get their own corner of the flock, too: a community puppet booth stocked with puppets to grab and play with, plus a bucket of scene suggestions on slips of paper for when the creativity needs a jump-start. And there’s a prize wheel to spin, loaded with donated treasures — custom art-promoting buttons, finger puppets, candy, stickers. Every kid leaves with something; most adults will pretend they’re spinning “for the kids.”

There’s also a giant cribbage board, because this is Minnesota, where we are contractually obligated.

Textile artist Sadie Ward is coming up from Minneapolis to kick off Superior Memories, a memory quilt in the shape of Lake Superior. Sadie works in upcycled, pre-used fabrics to raise awareness of the environmental toll of textiles, and like her Mississippi Memories quilt before it, this one gathers memories written on cloth and stitched together, one by one. Her hope is that in a world of climate instability and water insecurity, we can literally hold onto our memories of the waters we love.

So here’s your homework, and it’s the good kind: bring a memory of Lake Superior. The first time you saw it and understood the word “inland” was doing a lot of work in “inland sea.” The dog who swam out too far. The smelt run. The ice stacks. The sunrise that made you late on purpose. Write it down, hand it to Sadie, and become a permanent stitch in the story of our lake.

That’s Flock ArtFest: come for the art, stay for the cribbage, get your fortune read by a sassy bird, leave as part of a quilt.