MARTINSON

8-18 Media Reporter

Special to the Journal

MARQUETTE — Does the Upper Peninsula’s chilly weather have you and your children stuck inside?

Carie Roberts, exhibits manager at the Upper Peninsula Children’s Museum, flexed her creative muscles and brought the great outdoors inside the museum with the new temporary exhibit “Winter Woods Wonder.”

The temporary exhibit features a small forest of evergreen trees surrounded by snow and icicles. Kids can test their igloo building skills, twirl and whirl on an “ice skating rink” in their socks, and then sit around a play “campfire” with pretend S’mores. The exhibit also features two wintery-themed sensory tables.

When designing fun new exhibits for the Upper Peninsula Children’s Museum, creativity and artistic talent is a must. Roberts said she loved creating art from an early age.

“I was a weird kid, I guess. I spent a lot of time by myself, so I doodled and looked at books and would try to draw whatever I was looking at in books when I was a kid. And I didn’t realize that it was who I was or that it was what I wanted to do until I was much older,” Roberts said. “Around high school, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I’m good at, I’m going to go to college for art.’ So I actually got an associate’s degree in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

Her journey in life brought Roberts to the Upper Peninsula, where she continued her art education at Northern Michigan University. She graduated from NMU in 2019 with a bachelor’s of fine art degree in art, with a concentration in sculpture. Roberts was then hired by the museum and started to put her degree to use.

Being a designer for a children’s museum is a pretty unique career and can be both challenging and rewarding.

Roberts said the most challenging part is weighing what projects are doable, logistically and tangibly.

Through her work at the museum, she has also been challenged to embrace a bit of chaos.

“The other thing that I have learned here is you just have to let it be,” she said. “It is what it is. The museum is its own crazy little creation. It’s unlike any other museum that I’ve been in.”

Roberts explained that one advantage of her position is that she is allowed to make mistakes and try again.

“I have creative freedom in a way to just kind of try things and test them out and see if it works — and sometimes they don’t,” Roberts explained. “A lot of jobs are you go in, do your thing, get out. It’s not the same as coming here and trying something out and (realizing) ‘Oh, that didn’t work,’ and then having the opportunity to try it again a different way.

“It is kind of funny that I actually picked the hardest career ever. I think being an artist is one of the hardest career paths you could ever choose. And being able to actually have a job where I am using my degree is one of the perks of this place.”

Every artist has his or her own creative process, and Roberts said that her method differs depending on whether she is creating personal art or creating for the museum.

Roberts joked that her personal art is “unsellable art,” yet she has sold many pieces to buyers who appreciated her artistic innovation.

“Personally, when I make art for myself, there is definitely a process that I go through,” she said. “I come up with an idea, either via a dream or I see something or I already own something, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m going to put that into a piece of artwork.’

“When I start to make something with that idea, I kind of have to collect my materials and whatever tools necessary. Sometimes I don’t have the tools. And that kind of really puts a hindrance on making something if you don’t have the right tool.

“And that definitely carries through to the museum, trying to do things without the right tools. I think the similarities between personal art and making art at the museum would be that I collect the materials, I gather everything I need and slowly work on things so it is similar.

“But the ideas, I suppose, are what are different, like the idea process. What I do at the museum is a completely different style of work than I would make for myself. As far as creating at the museum goes, usually that starts with a need for something or a fix, something is broken.”

The exhibit “Winter Woods Wonder,” was created to meet a need at the museum.

“Winter for children, especially young children, it is just way too bitterly cold to be outside. So there is a need to have activities to do inside, and I think we see that with a lot of our guests who are repeat guests,” she said. “And it was just a thought for those people, who come to the museum all the time, to have something new and different entertaining them. And of course, it’s the ice fishing, and sock skating, those are outdoor activities and young little ones might not get to experience those things until they are older, so it gives them the prerequisite to actually doing the real-life activity.”

Will the museum continue to create temporary exhibits? Roberts shared her hopes for the future.

“I definitely think it is something we should continue. I think we will stick with having a temporary winter exhibit because I think summer months are much busier at the museum and that way in the winter months there is something extra here to bring folks in.”

The temporary Winter Woods Wonder exhibit runs from January through March. Visit the museum’s website at www.upchildrensmuseum.org for more information in regards to purchasing tickets to take your kids into the museum to see the exhibit before it “melts,” this spring.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Annabella Martinson is a junior in high school in Marquette. She plays varsity tennis, is a member of the National Honor Society and is in chamber chorale.