MANITOULIN—Manitoulin Fine Arts Association (MFAA) president Christie Pearson Anderson doesn’t pull any punches on how this year’s 23rd annual art tour is shaping up. “It’s going to be great,” she said.
With over 100 artists awaiting visitors at 24 locations across Manitoulin Island there will be plenty of art to suit every taste. While a lot of the artists displaying their work will be familiar to those taking the tour, there are also a number of new artists with works to peruse.
Ms. Pearson Anderson is quite the MFAA Art Tour veteran herself, having been there at the very beginning. “Yes, I was around in 1994 for the very first Manitoulin Art Tour,” she admitted with a laugh. “I was with the Chamber of Commerce at the time.”
The Manitoulin Art Tour began as a brainchild of the chamber. “I was on the board,” said Ms. Pearson Anderson. “The chamber ran it for a few years and then they presented it to the MFAA.”
In recent years, the job of organizing the event has been performed by the folks at LAMBAC.
“This is my very first time organizing the Manitoulin Art Tour,” said LAMBAC’s Stephanie Pepin. “We have some new artists this year and some new locations, like the Flower Hutch, the new flower store in Gore Bay, and the Edgewater Pharmacy in Little Current.” There are a lot of Island businesses that take part in the Manitoulin Art Tour each year and it provides a great opportunity to move around and discover the Island, she notes.
The Manitoulin Art Tour 2017 brochures are now available and contain a listing of the artists, their locations and a map of the Island indicating roughly where most of the artists are located. Maps are available at locations across the Island and can be found on pages 9A and 10A in this edition of The Expositor.
