Exhibit Dates

July 17 through August 29, 2025

SMAC Gallery

509 W Main Street, Marshall, MN 56258

(Mailing address: PO Box 55)

Regular office hours are:  Monday-Friday 9am-12pm and 1pm-4pm

Event Opportunities

•In-Person Reception

Thursday, July 17th, 2025 from 5-7 pm with light refreshments available

With special musical guest Caroline Koska on harp

•Virtual Artists Talk

Thursday, August 14th at 5:30 pm

This event is virtual on Zoom. Please email info@swmnarts.org for the link to join.

Pictured left: Composition of Pipestone Central School by Mark Thode

Featuring the works of 8 artists

Please help SMAC welcome our next gallery exhibit featuring the art of Southwest Minnesota Arts Council Staff Members and Board Members (recent past and present)!

Each artist was invited to exhibit up to 4 pieces.

More about the artists (in alphabetical order)

Nicole DeBoer

Nicole describes herself as a doer and a dreamer: an out of practice visual artist who believes everything can be renovated – including people. As the Executive Director of the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council, DeBoer enjoys meeting and helping artists and organizations who produce and support the arts. She has been at the arts council, which serves 18-counties and 2 sovereign nations, for over 15 years. There isn’t an artform she won’t try – but most of all prefers to see others succeed in sharing their art. 

This series of photography and watercolor were made during a week-long Boundary Waters Canoe Area trip in 2024. [Day 1 included brushing past a black bear on a trail!] The views are astounding and inspired both digital photo captures and the more personal watercolors. Painted sitting on the shoreline, the liquid used for the watercolors came right out of the local waters. Profits from the sale of these artwork combinations will be donated to “Save the Boundary Waters”, a program of Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness (NMW). NMW was organized in 1997 by residents of the Ely, Minnesota region to protect the integrity of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW). 
 
When not promoting the arts in rural MN, she enjoys DIY projects around her 1880s house and working on rescuing old buildings, artifacts and native prairies on her ancestral property along Cetan Wakpadan. If she had a tattoo it would either say “If 2 Be/Up 2 Me” or “Stick to the Plan!” 

M E Fuller

Artist Statement 

M E Fuller paints in the abstract style. Her work is intuitive and depicts movement and sensations experienced through the act of creating art. Sometimes beautiful and soft, sometimes hard in the spirit of climate and social upheaval, each piece tells a story of the artist’s inner (mindscapes) and outer (landscapes) worlds. 

Fuller uses acrylic inks, pencils, charcoal, and other mark-making tools for gestural marks that allow her to move into the painting. This follows with applications of acrylic color layers and textural marks that help define the subject and blend elements into a cohesive visual experience.  

Bio

M E Fuller is a self-taught practicing author, visual artist, and workshop facilitator living in rural SW Minnesota. After early retirement, Fuller restarted her creative career, encouraging others to do the same. At 70, she successfully transitioned from traditional and illustrative art to abstract forms, exhibiting her work in galleries, juried group shows, and solo shows throughout the state. In December 2023, she organized the first fine arts market event in Montevideo after bringing 17 local artists out of the shadows. 

Fuller’s solo exhibits include K. K. Berge Gallery, Watermark Art Center, The Smallest Art Gallery, Crossing Arts Alliance, Owatonna Art Center, and Pump House Art Gallery (WI).  She is the featured artist in the Summer 2022 edition of Shark Reef (online), Fall 2023 Blue Earth Review, and The Scop: Literary and Fine Arts Magazine for King’s College, as well as the cover artist for The Passionfruit Review, August 2024.  

In 2021 Fuller received an emerging artist support grant from the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council (SMAC) funds. Thank you to the Minnesota state legislature for its support of the arts in our state.  

Fuller facilitates both painting and writing workshops and is available for one-on-one mentoring. She is a self-taught artist and writer. 

Anna Johannsen

Artist Statement 

“Be brave! Expand your experiences by asking yourself, “What if…?” Make art an adventure by trying something different.”

Bio

I am a self-taught quilter and fiber artist. As a retried teacher of Art and home Economics, I have more time to experiment with fibers, techniques, colors, and textures. I started the art program and the food program at the Alternative Learning Center.  My students won in the Student Art Show in the Remick Gallery almost every year that I taught there. I retired in 2015. No I experiment with hand dyeing cloth and see what the fabric tells me what IT wants to be. I create 3D quilting using 3D classes and certain colors.

Solo Exhibitions:

Marshall Area Fine Arts Council – 2020

Business, Arts & Recreation Center (BARC) (Windom) – 2016

Nobles County Art Center (Worthington) – 2013

Quiltistry (New Ulm) – 2013

Remick Gallery (Windom) – 2008

Awards:

Cottonwood County Fair Sweepstakes – 2018, 2015

Windom Farm & Home Show – 2nd Place 2007 Wall hanging category

Jackson County Fair – 2nd Premium, 2007

Windom Farm & Home Show – 1st Place 2006 Wall hanging category

Minnesota State Fair – 2006

Caroline Koska

Caroline Koska is a musician with a current focus on traditional Celtic music for harp and voice.  She has been enjoying learning old tunes from other musicians through experiences like the Ohio Scottish Arts School, composing new tunes in traditional styles, and finding and arranging songs with interesting melodies and storytelling.   

With a degree in vocal performance, Caroline loves to sing and also plays piano and flute.  She has taught piano lessons, provided music for church and community theater, and also acted in community theater productions.  

Caroline lives in Marshall with her husband and spends her free time sewing and reading.  

Krystl Louwagie

Artist Statement  

Portraits have dominated my artistic work for the better part of two decades. Though I experiment within 2-D visual mediums, my subject matter always depicts figures and portraits that call forth narratives. I work in a variety of forms ranging from simple line comics to more complex portraits focusing on linework, shape and pattern. My bold lines and narrative qualities are often reminiscent of what drew me to art even as a child: illustrated fairy tale books and super-hero comics. 

For this show I have four portraits from my Astrology series, which was inspired by Xia Hunt’s The Nameless One Tarot Grimoire, which lays out the 12 astrological signs with specific animals, colors, crystals/stones, and plants and I let these be the boundaries of my portraits. All the portraits in this series are people I know personally, and all of them match up to the astrological sign portrayed.  

Biography 
Krystl Louwagie graduated with a liberal arts degree in Studio Art (minor in Art History) from Hamline University in Saint Paul in 2009. She received two separate scholarships to study art abroad (the Genevieve Rust Ehlers Scholarship) in 2008 and 2009. In 2019 and 2023 she received an employee grant from Southwest Minnesota Arts Council to go towards art supplies and framing her artworks. In 2021 she received a Minnesota State Arts Board Creative Support for Individuals grant to create a new series chronicling the pandemic through mask portraits, to establish an artist website to share her work, and to showcase her auto-biographical short comics about her day-to-day life. In 2024 she was featured in season 15 of the PBS Postcards show. 

Louwagie works full time as the Accessibility & Marketing Coordinator for the nonprofit Southwest Minnesota Arts Council in Marshall, MN. She works part-time as an artist taking commissions, a professional face painter, a petting zoo assistant and pet sitter, and as a Fitness Instructor at the Marshall Area YMCA. 

Her interest in art began early in life through illustrated fairy tale books, super-hero comics and animated cartoons. She’s also very enthusiastic about reading (especially graphic novels), exercising, hiking and snowshoeing, theatre (especially musicals), music, scary movies, and animals (especially cats)! 

Website: ArtByKrystl.com    Socials:  www.facebook.com/ArtByKrystl       www.instagram.com/ArtByKrystl 

Mark Thode

Artist Statement 

From a very young age, I knew I wanted to be an artist; encouraged especially by my grandmother. I just didn’t know how to make a living at being a visual studio artist – so I decided the convergence of technology and visual art was the path for me: graphic design. A unique color palette, creative layouts, a quirky glyph, and rad typography have now become my daily, spiritual practice. I initially became a graphic designer because I wanted to create movie posters. While in high school, being part of the design team that created a poster concept for the next Steven Spielberg or James Cameron movie was so inspiring to me, it motivated me to study the graphic arts. I have spent a lot of time standing alone outside of a movie theater, gazing at the design of many movie posters. The structure of all the thematic images that make up the composition juxtaposed to the hierarchy of the billing typography intrigues me.

I have yet to create a poster for James Cameron, but… I have harbored this interest in creating posters and marketing materials for community theater. Like a good movie trailer, the poster aims to pique audience interest without answering all the questions. Fall short, and a poster doesn’t get noticed. Go too far, and a poster doesn’t leave any room for curiosity. The end goal, after all, is to drive an audience into the theater. And what better way to do that than to make people think and be intrigued by the visual representation of a piece? Creating “key art”, the visual representation of a musical or play used in marketing, is THE crucial step in the process of promoting a show.

I have been creating posters for community theater for over 15 years now – mostly for the community theater and performing arts venue in Pipestone, MN. I have learned that my job as the graphic designer is to interpret what the playwright is saying in a two-dimensional image, what the director wants to project to the audience, and how the producers want the show to be perceived. I have learned that you have seconds to grab someone’s attention. While as an artist I may want to embellish and imagineer, but as someone who has experience in advertising… I observe that simplicity can drive the message home more effectively.

This body of work is a sampling of what I have created for various community theater events, and also some titles that are on my “wish” list. This collection of posters is my portfolio of “creating identities for stories & projects of the stage” as a skycloth creative.

Creative Bio

Mark Thode is a print and identity designer with an introverted disposition and a love of the theatre. Long before getting his degree in Graphic Design from Bemidji State University, he began his career in theatre working behind the scenes in community theater productions. Fast-forward to the present, he’s worked for a newspaper, owned a portrait photography studio for 12 years, has collaborated as a freelance graphic artist on many projects, and has been the director of a performing arts venue for many years. In his spare time, he loves learning and experiencing with theatrical light design, serves on the board of two different non-profit arts organizations, and loves spending time with his two Cocker Spaniels: Kirby and Bailey. He’s fluent in Lorem Ipsum.

John White

Bio

Somewhat retired after a long award-winning career in newspapers (Wisconsin State Journal, Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, Denver Post and a country weekly, the Clara City Herald). Free lance photographer and writer with credits in more than 70 magazines. Editor with various Webb Publishing magazines in St. Paul, and a five year stint as editorial director at Miller Meester Advertising. 

Eunice Woodberry

Bio

Eunice began sewing at age 9 making clothing until she was an adult.  She and friends decided to take a quilting class so the Dad’s would have to take care of the kids. Over the last 35 years she has created many traditional quilts but now is focusing on artistic wall hangings including fabric collage and creating her own designs. She also dabbles with crochet and watercolor painting.