Tour to the Swedish American Institute and Weisman Museum w/ Gary Block Tours

Volkommen! Join Great River Arts and Gary Block Tours on Thursday, August 17th, when we depart Little Falls at 8:30 a.m. from the northeast corner of the Wal-Mart parking lot. Our comfortable Andy’s Charter Service motor coach will also pick up in Royalton, Rice, St. Cloud or any other city along the way. We’re headed first to the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a museum, a cultural educational center, a café, a destination store, a historic mansion and more. We’ll start off our time with a delicious smorgasbord lunch in Paulson Hall that includes Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, Lingonberries, beet & cucumber dill salad with rye bread and butter. After lunch, you’ll have a chance to tour what is lovingly dubbed “The Castle”. The Turnblad Mansion, on the ASI campus, is unique and massive in scale. This is an impressive structure, with a towering turret, steep-pitched roof, hand-carved gargoyles, decorative lions and Mansion’s stories façade carved out of Indiana limestone embedded with million-year-old fossils which were mined from the same quarry as the stone used in the Empire State Building. The Turnblad Mansion was built between 1904 & 1908 and is one of only eight remaining structures during Park Avenue’s heyday during a time when the street was known as Minneapolis’ Golden Mile. The Mansion is a labor of love and features 33 rooms and a paneled glass Visby Window that oversees the Grand Hall, both unique and a vital connection to Swedish culture. Exhibitions in August include “Leaving Your Mark: Stories in Wood.”

Around mid-afternoon, we travel to the Weisman Art Museum. The Weisman is the most unique building in the Twin Cities. This is a beautiful abstract structure like you’ve never seen as is located on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. The building presents two faces, depending on which side it is viewed from. To the south and east, it presents a brick façade that blends in with the historic buildings along the Northrop Mall. To the north and west, it is an abstraction of a fish and waterfall in curving and angular brushed steel sheets. The construction of the 8,100 square foot expansion was completed in 2011 and has nearly doubled the size of the galleries for collections and enhanced its role as a cultural resource for the state’s many visitors. Several exhibitions are now on view including: Doug Argue: Letter to the Future; Locally Grown: Documentary Photography of Minnesota Communities; More Various, More Terrible and More Beautiful, plus many never-before-seen-contemporary works, including a number of new acquisitions. We should be returning to Little Falls around 7:15 p.m. Give us a call and sign up today.

To register, call (320) 632-8632 or email mgaryblock@hotmail.com. For more information, visit www.garyblocktours.com