Lake Street Studios Center Gallery claims autumn

Photo features Naomi Call

By Katie Dunn

Sun contributor

Early September in Northern Michigan has a particular soundtrack: Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer.” It carries the unmistakable ache of summer fading away—its opening lines sound like a dispatch from Glen Arbor.

“Nobody on the road.”

A lyric that could almost have been written for M-22 when the high season begins to recede. All summer, the iconic highway that winds through Glen Arbor and around Leelanau County demands vigilance. RVs, pickups and Subarus stream toward beaches, trails and villages; bicycles hug the shoulder; motorcycles sweep around its curves. For runners like me along the stretch through Port Oneida, it means staying well onto the shoulder, eyes trained on the steady procession approaching ahead. A favorite part of those summer runs is when a squadron of Harley riders comes rumbling toward me, hands going up as we exchange high fives and peace signs in passing.

Then, almost imperceptibly, the traffic thins.

“Nobody on the beach.”

Thoreson Beach is measurably quieter. The sunbathers, paddleboarders and Petoskey stone hunters have dwindled, the bright patchwork of towels and beach chairs has dissipated—allowing long stretches of shoreline to open again to the big lake. Even the endangered piping plovers that spend their summers along these shores have begun their migration south. In Leelanau, it seems, September is a season of departures.

“I feel it in the air.”

There is simply a shift. The change is real, but hard to locate, harder still to articulate. You simply feel it—not just in temperature, but in atmosphere. Subtle, yet somehow palpable. Even Big Glen seems changed, its familiar blues taking on a slightly different cast in the late-summer light. Nothing announces autumn just yet; you simply sense that the season is beginning to turn.

“The summer’s out of reach.”

It is a universal sentiment: that peculiar September realization that summer, so consuming only weeks ago, has suddenly drifted out of reach. Another Leelanau summer is already becoming memory.

And part of that transition is distinctly human. Summer here is bound up with friendships—with folks whose lives converge in Leelanau for a few glorious months before the annual migration begins. Mary Raines heads back to Philadelphia, Berry Kendall to Atlanta, Mike Chedester and Dave Vavra to Palm Springs, and Pat McEvilly returns to Lake Orion.

Across the county, similar goodbyes are taking place as summer friends scatter in different directions. The unmistakable sense that something shared has ended for another year.

“Empty lake. Empty streets.”

Big Glen, after a summer punctuated by the incessant buzzing of gnat-like jet skis and the graceful glide of sailboats from the Glen Lake Yacht Club, is now nearly still.

The intersection at Art’s Tavern—where driving through only weeks ago felt like an exercise in strategy—is suddenly navigable again. Lake Street, that summer jumble of pedestrians, bicycles, strollers, golf carts and cars, has cleared. The village has indeed reclaimed its quieter rhythm.

And then there is the line that may be most poignant of all: “The sun goes down alone.”

At Sleeping Bear Bay, the changing sunset is an astronomical marker of the season. Earlier in summer, the setting sun made its way toward South Manitou Island, washing the bay in that glorious golden light that can make a Northern Michigan evening seem suspended in time. Now its path has retreated southward, toward Sleeping Bear Point. The crowds that gathered nightly along the shore have largely dispersed.

Among those unmistakable signs of summer’s departure—aside from the re-emergence of the “soup island” in the deli department at Anderson’s Market—is the conclusion of Lake Street Studios Center Gallery’s annual summer series of Friday night art openings, stretching from June to August.

This summer, across 10 successive Fridays, beginning with Charles Murphy and concluding with Ruth Kitchen, an extraordinary range of artists brought varied mediums, practices and perspectives to the gallery. Taken together, their work reflected the remarkable breadth of artistic expression that has long defined Center Gallery.

Begun in 1990 by venerated artist Suzanne Wilson, the series marked its 37th season this year, and has long been woven into the cultural fabric of Glen Arbor.

Happily, the conclusion of Center Gallery’s summer exhibitions no longer means the end of art here in Glen Arbor. Summer may be out of reach, but art defies seasonal boundaries.

Center Gallery’s fall program, launched as an experiment in 2024, has steadily evolved into a tradition of its own—not an extension of summer, but a distinct autumn exhibition season.

That year, Center Gallery owner Allison Stupka and gallery manager Christine Deucher introduced a new format. Unlike the traditional summer series, this model was different, featuring one opening, multiple artists and a multiweek exhibition. The inaugural show was titled See You in September.

“It’s an experiment, and if it works then I believe it will become a part of our season and extend the artistic reach of Center Gallery,” Deucher said at the time.

See You in September proved to be more than a trial run. “The first fall show was definitely a success,” Deucher says, “and at that moment became something that the gallery would continue to do every fall.”

Claudia Buchmann, Margo Burian and Joe Lombardo comprised the 2024 exhibition. The gallery returned to the idea in 2025 with Falling with Friends, featuring Mark Mehaffey, Lauren Everett Finn and Sarah Bearup-Neal. Now, in its third iteration, Falling Into Art features Judith Tummino, David Giordan and Naomi Call.

Even the titles of the exhibitions bring a touch of levity. Deucher, a former librarian with a love of words, said the inaugural See You in September was “a nod to what was to come and that we weren’t closing our doors.” Last year’s Falling with Friends reflected the kinship among its three artists. This year’s Falling Into Art, she said, is “both a nod to the season and the idea that having art in your life is something that draws you in.”

With each fall exhibition, Deucher has refined her vision of what the show could be. For the first, she chose Buchmann, Burian and Lombardo, artists whose work she knew and admired and whom she knew would be “dependable and would be easy to work with as we tried out this new idea.” The experience also taught her that she wanted greater variety—something she now sees as a particular strength of the fall format. Where the gallery’s summer shows allow visitors to take “a deep dive into the vision of one artist,” the fall exhibition offers a range of perspectives at once—“more points of view represented which speak like a chorus of voices.”

Last year, she put that idea into practice, pairing landscape painter Mehaffey with the exuberant flowers of Everett Finn and the textiles of Bearup-Neal. “I will admit, as I accepted all the work and saw the differences, I had a moment of thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, what did I do?’” Deucher says. But when she walked into the gallery the following Saturday morning and saw the work hanging, “It was just such a joyous show that I felt good about my instincts.”

That experience shaped this year’s exhibition. Deucher again sought artists whose work would be distinctly different, believing that the contrast encourages viewers to look more intentionally. “When the work is different people look more carefully,” she says.

This year’s artists approach their work through markedly different materials, methods and artistic sensibilities. Tummino works in oil and pastel, Giordan in watercolor, while Call incorporates found and repurposed objects. Yet despite those differences, their work forms a surprisingly cohesive whole, with each artist’s work complementing the others while retaining its own unmistakable identity.

The value of the fall exhibition extends beyond the work itself. Fall remains a time when people are visiting Glen Arbor, often drawn to its slower pace and less crowded landscapes. When Center Gallery is open, Deucher says, it also draws people into the two adjacent spaces, North Gallery and Forest Gallery. “Those open doors just call people in.”

Saturday night’s reception—held September 5 of Labor Day weekend, rather than on a Friday—offered the first opportunity to see that conversation among the three bodies of work fully realized.

The gallery filled with the familiar energy and vibrancy of its summer Friday night openings, as artists, longtime patrons and visitors streamed through the space.

Among the familiar faces were artist Stephanie Schlatter, Mary MacDonald, Page Stoutland, Margaret and Randy McElrath, Lynn Uhlmann and ceramics teacher John Huston—figures who have become nearly as much a part of these openings as the art itself. This time, there was food, too: Huston contributed hand-rolled sushi, accompanied by an assortment of other nibbles, while wine flowed and conversation carried throughout the gallery.

For Schlatter, the exhibition reflects the year-round creative life of Glen Arbor. “Our creativity doesn’t stop when the tourists leave,” she says. What fall offers instead is relief from the frenetic pace of exhibitions, events, framing and shipping. “I’m still painting every day, but there’s space around it.”

Fall also brings the focus back to community. “When the summer crowds fade, it is our local community that sustains us,” Schlatter says. “We as a community return to each other. And that is everything.”

And at the center of it all is the art.

Landscape is at the heart of Tummino’s work in Falling Into Art, including two paintings of Basch Road rendered at markedly different degrees of abstraction.

In Houses on Basch Road, an oil on panel, the houses and surrounding landscape remain readily recognizable even as their forms are simplified. House on Basch Road, an oil on canvas, pushes considerably further into abstraction: shapes and colors begin to take precedence over realistic depiction, yet the suggestion of a house within the landscape remains.

That interplay between the recognizable and the abstract is central to Tummino’s approach. Although she paints directly from observation, she does not necessarily reproduce what she sees literally. “I tend to simplify the shapes and colors and sometimes my work appears quite abstract,” she says. Solitude is important to that process, allowing her the time and space, as she puts it, “to absorb the beauty” around her.

Tummino first discovered the Sleeping Bear Dunes while attending a Glen Arbor plein air event years ago. Since then, she has spent considerable time in Leelanau County, returning to the dunes that are now “highly prevalent” in her work.

More recently, Tummino has “fallen in love with pastels,” a medium now prevalent in her work. And she is particularly attuned to what happens to the landscape as one season gives way to another. “I love the change of seasons and look forward to each day with a tinge of anticipation as well as sadness when I see a lovely time pass,” she says.

For Tummino, fall embodies that duality. It arrives with “anticipation of brilliant colors,” but also with certain days that seem “smothered with subtle grays and white.”

Where Tummino abstracts the familiar, Giordan scrutinizes it. His work is highly representational, characterized by meticulous observation and a precision that can approach the photographic.

A graphic designer, illustrator and watercolor artist, Giordan has worked in watercolor for many years and calls it his favorite—despite watercolor historically being considered by some, he notes, “a lesser way of working.” He is drawn to its “vibrancy,” its “translucent quality” and “the immediacy that it has.” Watercolor, he says, “allows me the capacity to express myself clearly.”

Giordan’s connection to Northern Michigan is especially rooted in the Port Oneida Historic District, where he has returned for years to paint its preserved farms and buildings, drawn to both its landscape and its history. “The history and the landscape keeps me coming back to make paintings,” he says. The changing seasons offer another source of inspiration, allowing him to capture “what is special about Northern Michigan.”

Giordan has long admired American artist Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) for his ability “to render a place in a way that captures its story and puts you, the viewer, into that place.” Giordan’s own work is “very representational and somewhat objective,” he says. Giordan has experimented with painting more loosely and abstractly, but once he understood how paint, paper and water work together, he found himself returning naturally to greater precision. “It’s just how I see things,” he says.

That precision is perhaps most striking in Barn Door Detail, a watercolor depicting a close-up of the hardware on a sliding barn door. The subject is ordinary—a metal rod and mechanism running across weathered wood—but Giordan’s execution is so controlled and exacting that, at first glance, the painting can be mistaken for a photograph. It is an exercise in close observation: something utilitarian and easily overlooked becomes worthy of sustained attention.

Yet there is an intriguing departure from literal representation within his approach. Giordan recognizes that interpretation begins with the artist’s decision about what merits attention. “The subjectivity comes from what I choose to render,” he says. He does not always show the entirety of what he paints, instead isolating details and allowing them to become “an abstraction for the viewer.”

Barn Door Detail demonstrates that idea particularly well. By removing the door from the larger barn and concentrating instead on one fragment of its construction, Giordan transforms a recognizable object into a composition of line, shape and color.

That tension, between faithful representation and selective observation, allows Giordan to do something akin to what he so admires in Wyeth: use the particularities of a place to suggest a larger story.

If Giordan looks to the landscape to capture a place and its story, Call finds her materials within that landscape itself. A lifelong maker who has worked in ceramics, mixed-media collage, fiber and photography, Call never planned on working with driftwood. After moving to Michigan nine years ago, however, she walked miles of shoreline throughout the Lower and Upper Peninsulas and became enamored with it. “I simply love to create,” she says, and driftwood now seems especially fitting for what she calls the “silvering” moments of her life. “The driftwood and I have things in common.”

Call’s work is driven by what she describes as her “profound reverence of nature.” Rather than imposing a predetermined form upon the driftwood, she responds to the form already there—its hollows, curves, knots and irregularities shaped by nature and time. Throughout the exhibition, she pairs driftwood with an assortment of other found and natural materials, including branches, reeds, Pacific Coast palm fibers, bone and corkscrew stems.

In The Long and Winding Road, driftwood and branches come together in a sculptural composition dominated by the naturally twisting path of a branch. Elsewhere, two pieces of found driftwood have been transformed into sculptural vessels, their existing contours providing natural spaces for flowers. The individuality of the found object remains central to the finished work: each is both artifact of the natural world and sculpture in its own right.

Call loves “bringing new life to what has been cast away” and honoring “the wonder of trees at every stage of their existence.” Each piece of driftwood, she notes, is unique—“there will never be two pieces alike”—and she is grateful for the opportunity to show people how incredibly diverse it can be. Her work also brings a markedly different visual and tactile presence to Falling Into Art. “Showing with two painters who will bring in color is very exciting!” she says.

For Call, the arrival of autumn carries both a sense of loss and an invitation to turn inward. “Autumn brings my last barefoot beach walks and the opportunities to find treasures on the shores before they become laden with snow or ice, which I never feel truly ready for.” But the season also “brings a welcome shift to an inner focus.”

What she hopes viewers take away from her work is “an ever deeper respect, and care, for the nature around us,” along with a willingness “to see beauty in new places and unexpected ways.” And, perhaps, “to take some of that beauty home with them!”

It is a fitting invitation for Falling Into Art, and perhaps for autumn in Leelanau itself: to look a little more closely, to find beauty where we might not have expected it and, if we are lucky, to carry some of it home with us.

Falling Into Art remains on view at Center Gallery through Oct. 11. The gallery is open Thursday through Monday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and closed Tuesday and Wednesday.