Proposed iron mine overshadows Penokee art project

An educational art project about Wisconsin’s Penokee Hills moves from Madison to Ashland this weekend. The exhibit can’t completely escape the political controversy of a proposed iron ore mine

20 northwoods artists and writers are involved in the project, which is called “Penokee: Explore the Iron Hills.” There will be an opening ceremony at Ashland’s Northern Great Lakes Visitors center on Saturday. Naturalist John Bates will read his poem about the coming of spring at the site of the proposed mine.

Late April when the sun’s rays suddenly warm,

the snowmelt comes fast

and then we’re awash in water,

the little streams gorged,

spilling over banks, into the woods, the wetlands,

a spring tsunami of water pulsing everywhere.

Bates says he worries that the “spring tsunami” could harm the region’s Bad River watershed if the iron mine goes in, “There’s going to be somewhere around 900 million tons of tailings and overburden stashed along the side of this mine, and all this rain and all this snow is going to filter through there and down will come whatever material is out of that rock.”

Like many of the artists involved in the Penokee project, John Bates is concerned about the iron mine. But coordinator Terry Daulton says politics is not the focus of the art exhibit, “The individual artists are making their own statements. Some of them might verge on the political but many of them are just expressions of things that struck them as worthy of interpreting for the public. A lot about the heart and soul of people who live in the area and things they think everyone should be thinking about as we consider the future.”

“Penokee: Explore the Iron Hills” also looks at the geological and economic history of the region, including iron mining. Terry Daulton’s earlier art exhibits examined climate change and the ecology of northern lakes.