Save the Dates! 2025 Arrowhead Arts Awards
Save the dates! The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council would like to invite you to join us in celebrating Karen Savage-Blue, Joan Farnam, and Giizh (Sarah) Agaton Howes at the 2025 Arrowhead Arts Awards ceremonies. This year, there will be two separate events to allow our award recipients to celebrate with their communities! All award recipients will be celebrated at both ceremonies.
Friday, May 9, 2025
5:30–7:30 PM
Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College
2101 14th St, Cloquet, MN 55720
Friday, May 30, 2025
5:30–7:30 PM
Johnson Heritage Post Art Gallery
115 W Wisconsin St, Grand Marais, MN 55604
Official invitations and RSVP details to follow.
About the 2025 Arrowhead Arts Award Recipients
Karen Savage-Blue (George Morrison Artist Award)
Karen Savage Blue, is an artist and a teacher. Karen has been an art teacher for over 30 years and has taught in the K-12 system and she’s currently teaching at the college level. “I love creating and teaching art. I remember telling my teachers in grade school that I wanted to be an artist and that has never changed,” said Karen.
Karen grew up in Duluth, Minnesota and is an enrolled member of the Fond du Lac Ojibwe tribe where she lives now.
Karen’s works with multiple mediums of art including beading, but her favorite is painting. Karen has worked with many types of paint including acrylic, egg tempera, gouache, watercolor and her ultimate favorite, oil paint. When Karen paints with oils, she enjoys the challenge of working with palette knives and testing the different effects of the knives versus her paint brushes.
The biggest challenge Karen gave herself when she began working with oil paints was when she decided to complete one oil painting a day for a whole year. Karen’s goal was to paint even when she didn’t feel like it and become a better painter because of her dedication. “It was fun but it was mostly hard, some days I did not want to paint but I did anyway. I did it because I wanted to become a really good painter, and it worked!” said Karen.
Karen said, “I guess its safe to say that a person can become good at whatever they put their mind to but also whatever you put your time, talent, heart and soul into. I look forward to doing my art, its what I have come to depend on to bring me joy and contentment. Its nice to know that I can reach that with the touch of a brush or palette knife.”
Joan Farnam (Maddie Simons Arts Advocate Award)
Joan Farnam was born in Duluth, MN, and grew up in Sept-Iles, Quebec, a small seaport on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, 500 miles from Montreal. After graduating from high school, she attended colleges in Ohio and California, earning a BA in history and an MA in cultural anthropology.
She began her career in journalism at a weekly newspaper on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and worked as an award-winning reporter/photographer for the Lakota Times, (now Indian Country Today) under Native American publisher Tim Giago. She was a reporter and/or correspondent for the Rapid ‘city Journal and the Topeka Capital Journal before moving back to Duluth and working for the Budgeteer News in 1999.
It was here that she began seriously writing about art and artists in her column, Duluth ArtScene, and crafting full-page photo stories in the Budgeteer. The column and features became a mainstay for Duluth artists at the time because the only other Duluth newspaper refused to cover the visual arts at all.
When Joan moved to Grand Marais, she continued her dedication to arts coverage in local newspapers, changing her column’s name to NorthShore ArtScene and eventually going online with it as a blog. It has become the go-to place for residents and visitors who are looking for information about the arts and arts events in Grand Marais. For more than 15 years she has been tireless in contacting artists, photographers, musicians, writers, art galleries, and others, to find out what’s new and happening to share on her blog, northshoreartscene.info.
She is also an accomplished potter and co-founder of the Ceramics Studio at the Grand Marais Art Colony, where she taught for more than a decade. She helped launch the Empty Bowls fundraiser in Cook County as well as organized several exhibitions to showcase local potters’ work.
Joan is a recent cancer survivor and has partial loss of eyesight, but she has persisted in putting out her blog every week. She pulled together a team of local talent to help her.
In short, Joan has had, and continues to have, a significant, positive impact on the Cook County arts community, and is happy to have helped make Grand Marais one of Minnesota’s premier arts destinations.
Giizh (Sarah) Agaton Howes (Award for Transformational Art)
Giizh (Sarah) Agaton Howes is an Anishinaabe creator, artist, organizer, and CEO. Her Contemporary Ojibwe Design brand Heart Berry brings together traditional stories and aesthetic with pieces for every day. Her work around cultural revitalization focuses on the building a community of makers in the moccasin tradition. She collaborates with artists and organizations to create design from logos to large scale art installations. Heart Berry’s lifestyle brand is an Inspired Natives Collaborator with Eighth Generation taking back Native entrepreneurship, production, and most notably the wool blanket.
