The Green Room

Spencer McQueen says looking at his art isn’t enough. He wants you to feel his paintings. “It’s just this little extra ability that you can give someone to connect with you and the things that you created,” he says.

In the early 1800’s, American painter Edward Hicks began painting “Peaceable Kingdom," a series of 62 paintings inspired by a verse in the book of Isaiah. The verse says, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them.” In Traverse City, two different art galleries are bringing that concept to the art world.

For the last 10 years, Karen Anderson has been writing weekly essays heard on Interlochen Public Radio. The essays are vivid, personal, and relatable. Karen takes time to notice the little details and experiences of everyday life.

Michael Moore has hired Joe Beyer as the new executive director for his Traverse City Film Festival. Joe replaces Deb Lake, who resigned last December. “It’s like we found our long-lost soul brother here for Traverse City in the being of Joe Beyer,” says Michael. Joe Beyer returns home to Michigan after working for the Sundance Institute for over 14 years.

A couple years ago, Chris Andrews, a senior at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, realized he was addicted to his smartphone. “It was something I was using as a crutch,” he explains. “Something that I was using in moments of boredom, moments of anxiety, or a moment of silence in a group of friends – we’d all reach for our phones.”

Ambrosia Sipping Chocolate is a brand new, gourmet hot chocolate that’s made in Traverse City. It hits the market on April 15th. “It’s literally like you’re drinking chocolate bars because that’s exactly what it is,” says co-owner Matt Shepler.

The Dennos Museum in Traverse City has almost three-thousand works of art in its collection. At any given time, around 280 of those works are on display, including Inuit sculptures, contemporary paintings and modern photographs. But on April 14th, the museum wants visitors to ignore most of these works and just focus on a handful of them.

Edward Beebe was a popular photographer in northern Michigan in the early 1900s. He created postcards with his photos but often deceived people regarding the location of the shots. “I think a lot of these cards were intended to take advantage of tourists and visitors,” says local author Jack Hobey.

The Boardman Review is a quarterly publication founded by brothers Nick and Chris Loud. They recently published their third issue, a winter edition.

When Anders Kelto listened to sports podcasts, what he usually heard was a couple of guys sitting around bantering with each other. “There was no good audio sports journalism in the world, at least that I had been exposed to,” he says. Anders is changing that. Today, the Traverse City native is out with his own podcast — it’s a sports documentary series.