In April, the Cultural Center Gift Store proudly announced its “Artist of the Month” program which features a new Gift Store artist each month with special deals and activities. The program’s intent is to bring attention to the myriad of talented local and regional artists and specialty product makers who enhance the assortment in the Cultural Center’s Gift Store. Additionally, the program provides an opportunity for members of the community to come and connect with the featured artist or maker, participate in a class or observe a demonstration, and take advantage of special discounts on artist-made creations. The Cultural Center is committed to featuring a new artist each month and offering special events and an opportunity to meet the artist and purchase their artwork with special discounts.
Jon Solinger
Photographer
Jon Solinger was born in 1959 in Pelican Rapids, Minnesota. He received his BA in art with photography emphasis from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 1985, and currently resides with his wife and their four-year-old daughter in Lida Township, Otter Tail County Minnesota, maintaining a studio there and working as the third generation owner of Solinger’s Resort on Lake Lida. 
Solinger’s recent photographic work involves rural places in his region, observing how physical and human geographies shape each other, and making photographs in response to subtle and ordinary beauty.
In 2000 the North Dakota Museum of Art commissioned him to photograph extensively the shelterbelts on the Red River Valley’s agricultural lands. The Museum mounted an exhibition of the photographs, which subsequently toured for two years, and has become part of the Museum’s permanent collection.
His most recent project, Working Land, lyrically documents people’s attachment to a place through work. Through these photographs he seeks to discover the meaning behind the rural visual landscape, employing both portrait and landscape images to explore the integration of work and land in rural life.
Solinger has exhibited regionally, including the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks ND, the Rourke Art Museum in Moorhead MN, the Plains Art Museum in Fargo ND, and galleries in Minneapolis, Fargo, and Fergus Falls, MN.
Join Jon at the Cultural Center on
Sunday August 7th @6pm
for an
Artist Talk & Book Signing
“Like many artists, photographer Jon Solinger is a story teller. His portraits of people, places, and things from Otter Tail County, Minnesota tell the story of lands settled by immigrants. Immigrants from 19th Century Scandinavia. Immigrants from 21st Century big cities. Those who immigrated away, but have returned, following the call of the land. … With poetry and lyricism, Solinger has captured a pivotal and transitional moment in our region’s rural history. In these photographs, art and history intertwine not only to celebrate rural life and work, but to preserve it for future generations.” -forward to Working Land, written by Tania Blanich
