“Where’s home?” was never really a question Amy Moorefield could answer growing up as a Naval officer brat. But by age 7, the answer became clear: Her home was in museums. Her mother would take her to art museums in each community where they landed, and Moorefield saw her future. By her sophomore year of college at Virginia Commonwealth University, she had already gained experience creating children’s arts programs and interviewing Holocaust survivors. The impact she could make through museum work was clear.
“When you’re having that conversation around a work of art, it’s a real precious sense of who we are as humans,” Moorefield says. “That really excited me.”
In September 2020, her career took her from Pennsylvania to Neenah as she became executive director of the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. “I fell in love with Neenah,” she says.
Amid the pandemic, the travel she would typically do to meet artists and collectors in the specialized field wasn’t possible. But Moorefield leaned on Zoom, and she used the opportunity to focus on another important aspect of her role: connecting with the local community and talking about how to increase accessibility.
Museum admission is always free in honor of Evangeline Bergstrom, who gifted the lakeside home and glass collection upon her death in 1958. But, Moorefield says: “We want to give people a taste of why glass is magical outside the museum.”
The “Mini Dragon” is a new mobile furnace capable of blowing up to 15 pounds of glass that the BMMOG team is excited to take out into the Fox Cities community. A recent “Art After Dark” event attracted more than 500 visitors, and the museum’s popular studio classes offer hands-on art for all ages taught by glass artists, including team-building activities for professionals. Moorefield says increasing corporate outreach will be an emphasis in 2022.
To appreciate glass art, Moorefield says it’s important for people to understand the art form is highly collaborative and intensely detailed. For young people in particular, the “largest paperweight collection on public view” may not sound sexy — until one appreciates that it was made with fire.
“These aren’t vanity objects,” Moorefield says. “They’re miniature sculptures.”
bmmglass.com
— Kate Bruns
A biathlon experience in Brillion
AriensCo in Brillion has broken ground on the Ariens Nordic Center, a 200-acre recreation facility adjacent to Round Lake Farms that chairman and CEO Dan Ariens says he hopes will become a future training site for Olympic biathletes. AriensCo is a sponsor of the U.S. Biathlon Team, which in 2022 boasts two Olympians from Northeast Wisconsin.
While Ariens and U.S. Biathlon President and CEO Max Cobb both say they hope the facility will inspire interest in biathlon, the center will also be a year-round recreational opportunity for the public, with access to cross-country skiing, running, hiking and roller-skiing. Construction kicked off in November 2021, and the grand opening is slated for December 2022.
ariensnordic.com
Tourism shot in the arm
Three New North organizations are among 27 beneficiaries of Wisconsin’s $21.9 million Tourism Capital Investment Grant program, including a much-needed $2.5 million toward the ongoing effort to construct the first-ever stand-alone visitors center in Green Bay, a community that attracts 6 million tourists annually. Gov. Tony Evers announced the grants Feb. 2; others include $1.75 million to support the Jim Kress Maritime Lighthouse Tower at the Door County Maritime Museum’s Sturgeon Bay location and $250,000 toward a new parking lot for the Paine Art Center and Gardens in Oshkosh.
experiencegreenbaywi.org
Indexing equality
A record 36 Wisconsin LGBT Chamber members earned perfect scores in the Human Rights Campaign’s 2022 Corporate Equality Index, including Kimberly-Clark, MilliporeSigma and Michael Best & Friedrich LLP in the New North region. In addition, Baker Tilly, Oshkosh Corp., Kohler and Thrivent all scored 85 out of 100 or higher. The index is the national benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer employees.
hrc.org/resources
