Forging a New Identity

The arts renaissance in Sturgeon Bay

by Tom Groenfeldt photos by Brett Kosmider

Jeremy Popelka and Stephanie Trenchard fire glass at their studio in Sturgeon Bay.

For years, Sturgeon Bay residents have rolled their eyes at the visitors who think Door County doesn’t start until you reach Egg Harbor. But as the city evolves, that impression is changing.

The biggest part of this evolution may be the growth of the arts in Sturgeon Bay during recent years with the opening of several galleries and studios on South 3rd Avenue and new galleries and studios across the bridge on the west side of the city. Sturgeon Bay has often been dismissed as a hard, industrial, blue-collar town on the way to the more picturesque little towns that Door County is famous for, said Jeremy Popelka, who founded Popelka Trenchard Glass fine-art gallery and studio on 2nd Avenue with his wife, Stephanie Trenchard, 24 years ago.

“We used to bristle when visitors stopped and said they were on their way to Door County, but eventually you wear such disparagement as a rusty badge,” Popelka said. The biggest concentration of art power in the city is the SŌMI Gallery, at 45 S. 3rd Ave., which opened in 2021. It’s a joint venture between Popelka Trenchard Glass, which is behind SŌMI on 2nd Avenue, and Karen Hertz-Sumnicht, an abstract artist and the owner of Avenue Art & Co. in Appleton, which now has a new branch in Sturgeon Bay. Right behind the street-facing gallery is The Third Room, a venue for temporary exhibitions by guest artists.

(Top right) Popelka Trenchard Glass. (Above) The city has embraced its new creative energy.

The building also houses studios for Melissa Resch, an abstract artist who displays work at Idea Gallery in West Jacksonport; and Mac Schueppert, a pastel painter of landscapes, town scenes and lakers, who shows at Fine Line Designs in Ephraim.

Seth Taylor bought the building sight unseen while he was in South Korea, where he had been living and running a school for 13-plus years with his wife, Christine Hong. He does ink painting with India ink, as well as watercolor and pen-and-ink portraiture, and Hong does traditional Korean painting.

The other storefront on the north side of the building has become the home for Avenue Art on 3rd, a Door County extension of Hertz-Sumnicht’s Appleton gallery and framing shop. It displays work by artists from Door County and the Fox Valley.

Sturgeon Bay Mayor David Ward said the city is seeing the results of efforts that started 20 years ago: parks and walkways along the water on the east and west sides, for example.

“Part of it is as simple as the signage that has gone up all over,” he said. “I can’t tell you the number of people, both locals and folks living out a ways, who say how much easier it is to find things in Sturgeon Bay.”

It Starts with Artists

But nothing happens without the artists. Ward said that establishing the creative district – bringing visual, musical and

theatrical arts together, driven by the local artists – has created a larger scene.

“A lot of people don’t see the personal and individual energy that goes into these ideas and projects,” Ward said.

Popelka said that he and Trenchard didn’t envision becoming – with the Holiday Music Motel, Steel Bridge Songfest and Miller Art Museum – what Ward called one of the driving forces of redefining Sturgeon Bay, but Popelka is pleased to see it happen.

The Miller Art Museum, founded almost 50 years ago, is the peninsula’s only fine-art museum. It’s open year-round, with a main gallery that features regularly changing exhibitions.

Across the street from the SŌMI Gallery is Two Bridges Gallery, with cold-wax paintings by Julia Redwine and prints by Dale Vanden Houten, who often fashions his prints into 3D sculpture. Farther down 3rd Avenue toward Oregon Street is The Pearl of Door County, which displays paintings by several Sturgeon Bay artists, including Ernest Beutel and Andrea Naylor.

The Originators

The area, which the city has designated the Steel Bridge Creative District, may appear to have sprung to life in 2021, but Popelka Trenchard Glass will soon celebrate its 25th anniversary on 2nd Avenue, where it was the lone gallery and glass works for most of those years.

The street gained added vibrancy in 2014 when Margaret Lockwood and Allin Walker sold Woodwalk Gallery in Egg Harbor and opened the Lockwood Gallery on the corner of 2nd Avenue and Michigan Street. It features her large, abstract paintings, plus sculptures, jewelry and ceramics by other artists. The building also has a performance space on a lower level with an entrance on 1st Avenue.

Sturgeon Bay native Audrey M. Off has run AMO Gallery & Framery on 3rd Avenue for 20 years, mixing traditional landscapes and seascapes with abstract work and photography – her own pieces, as well as works by several other artists.

“Having grown up in Sturgeon Bay, I’ve seen great changes in the art scene,” she wrote in an email. “Recently, in spite of world events, creativity here has exploded! It’s wonderful to be a witness to history and the infusion of energy with each generation.”

Next door to her shop is Novel Bay Booksellers, which shows large prints by Luke Collins, a city resident who also operates a gallery and studio business in Baileys Harbor. Another block north is Artists Guild, which carries an extensive inventory of art supplies. Popelka also cited Third Avenue PlayWorks, which has just undergone a $3.5 million renovation and has a small lobby gallery where local artists’ work is on display. Across the street, the Door County Community Foundation also has a gallery with shows that change about four times a year.

For years, the Holiday Music Motel on 2nd Avenue and Michigan Street, and the Tambourine Lounge next door, have promoted music and visual arts. Several artists have studios in the building, and the Tambourine Lounge features open-mic nights, live performances and songwriting retreats that have led to more than 1,500 songs being written and recorded.

Visitors Support the Arts with Money

But the arts are not merely a cultural phenomenon in Door County: They also have significant economic impact. A 2017 study by the Peninsula Arts & Humanities Alliance showed that local nonprofit arts organizations generated $24.7 million in economic activity annually, resulting in nearly $2.5 million in local and state tax revenues, 632 full-time-equivalent jobs and $12.2 million in resident income.

Sturgeon Bay’s growing role in the arts comes as a bit of a surprise to a city that has long been better known for shipbuilding and sophisticated

(Above) Musicians pat mAcdonald and melaniejane.

(Below, from left) Popelka Trenchard Glass, Margaret Lockwood Gallery, Two Bridges Studio & Gallery, SŌMI Gallery, Tambourine Lounge.

(From left) SŌMI Gallery, Popelka Trenchard Glass.

manufacturing than for art. Popelka credits Pam Seiler, the recently retired executive director of Destination Sturgeon Bay, for garnering wider recognition for the potential of the city’s arts community.

“She was a conduit to the common council, and all that was good,” Popelka said. “Pam was like the first person who really knew that disparate voices needed to be heard in the community – you have to bring them together. She took the Holiday Music Motel seriously when a lot of people just looked the other way or thought they were a bunch of eccentric hippies.”

The arts enjoy support from the mayor and council members, several artists said. The evolution has shown that the city’s strong industrial roots can not only coexist with the arts, but can complement and inspire them as well.

Like Popelka, who thinks the city’s industrial base gives it a strength that many tourist destinations lack, Ward likes the views of tugs, barges, lakers and cranes.

“We keep talking about the working waterfront,” Ward said. “Now that we have walking paths across the water and across the bridges, you can see the elements of the city’s working waterfront, from the Coast Guard to Roen Salvage, to the tugs and marinas. We have over 650 slips in the city – that is true scale.” The city’s growing art scene has certainly impressed Hertz-Sumnicht, who has spent much of her career in the arts business in Appleton. She said her experiences working with Popelka, Trenchard and Taylor have been remarkable, especially compared to operating a framing business and gallery in Appleton.

“In the 35 years I’ve been in Appleton,” Hertz-Sumnicht said, “there’s been almost no one else who tried to open anything even resembling a gallery, so the fact that we’ve got what we’ve got here in our little downtown is amazing.”

Music is crisscrossing with the visual arts, she added, and she can see it when SŌMI has openings, where she’s met a variety of people through Trenchard.

“This vast, diverse group of people – it’s not just a bunch of visual artists who are stepping in, and it’s not a bunch of rich patrons,” Hertz-Sumnicht said. “It’s just people who are just really involved in the arts, and what a gift that’s been.”

Some Northern Door Artists Are Looking South

Lockwood confirmed what Popelka and Trenchard saw two decades ago: that Sturgeon Bay had potential for the arts. Now she looks at the new galleries, both on 3rd and across the bay, and thinks they’re just the beginning of what Sturgeon Bay is becoming. New developments, including refurbishing the Door County Granary and opening a new One Barrel Brewing Company location on the city’s West Waterfront, will soon link the districts more tightly.

“The Granary and One Barrel on the Westside Waterfront will change everything,” Lockwood said. “In three years, Sturgeon Bay will be the place. It will be much more fun; people will be coming all the time. They have already started coming down to Sturgeon Bay for the day and then going back north. They like the food; they like the art galleries.”

Add public art to the mix, such as the fountain at Graham Park and the woolly mammoth sculpture that now sits at Bay View Park, and you’ve got a city on the brink of a new identity, said Helen Bacon, a member of the Sturgeon Bay Common Council who also leads the Sturgeon Bay Local Arts Board.

“We have private donations providing public art, which is a nice combination,” Bacon said. “We would like to have a sculpture walk along the water, from Stone Harbor across the bridges to Sawyer Park.”

With the pace of the city’s evolution into an arts hub, that may not be so far away.