Friday, January 30 | 6:30p - 10p | Minnesota Marine Art Museum

Tickets: $20 | MMAM Member Rate: $15

Kick off 2026 - which happens to be the Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s 20th anniversary year - in style at MMAM’s New Look Preview Party.  Celebrating the launch of our 2026 theme, Making Waves - marking two decades of genre defying artists pushing the boundaries of what marine art is, and can be - and three new exhibition projects that usher in the new year: Splish, Splash, Story: Selections from The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Robert Gonzalez: Mystical Waters, and Water | Craft.

This memorable night out at the museum features enlightening artist conversations, drink specials and light bites by the Waterbar Cafe & Provisions culinary team, and a world-premiere live performance of Glacial Spatial—an immersive sound experience created by Trever Hagen and Josh Berg in collaboration with the Winona Symphony Orchestra, curated in partnership with Liquid Music.

Tucked along the frozen bluffs and backwaters of the Mississippi River, the New Look Preview Party brings together the best Winona, Minnesota has to offer - great art and the great outdoors.  MMAM partners with the Winona Ice Fest, a collaborative annual event between the City of Winona, the Recreation Alliance of Winona, and Big River Climbing Guides - staged to become one of  the largest ice climbing events in the country.  

From the mixed drinks to the artist conversations to the hypnotic sonic sounds of shifting ice flows, MMAM’s New Look Preview Party promises to be the not-to-be missed event this winter.  Usher in a new year, celebrate twenty, and get your tickets today before this event sells out.  

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Run of Show

• 6:30p | Doors Open. Waterbar Cafe & Provisions Open. 

• 7:15p - 8p | Staged Social: Welcome To Winona

• 8p - 9p  |  Live Performance: Glacial Spatial

• 9p - 10p  | Dance Party: Featuring DJ BOS'N

• 10p  |  Doors Close

• 10p+  |  Afterparty at Two Fathoms Brewing Company

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Food + Drink

Waterbar Cafe & Provisions New Look Preview Party Specials

6:30p - 10p | Atrium

Enjoy a wintry mix of artist-inspired cocktails and light bites, savory and sweet, presented by MMAM’s new Waterbar Cafe & Provision creative culinary team.  Artist inspired cocktails by La Crosse Distilling Company. 

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Staged Social

Welcome to Winona

7:15p - 8p  | Gallery 3

Bruno Basari (Winona, MN), professor emeritus Winona State University, in conversation with Isabel Ruiz Cano, Associate Curator at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (Amherst, MA), Robert Gonzalez (San Antonio, TX), exhibiting visual artist, curator and musician, and Nicole McLaughlin (Yarmouth Port, MA), exhibiting ceramic and fiber artist. 

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Glacial Spatial

Live Performance

8p - 9p  | Manoogian Gallery 

Curated in partnership with Liquid Music, this world-premier musical experience was created for the Winona Ice Festival, a reimagining of shifting ice flows through spatial sound, inviting Minnesota Marine Art Museum guests to wander through frozen sonic landscapes.  Josh Berg (Eau Claires, WI) and Trever Hagen (Eau Claires, WI), members of Terminal Habitat Collapse, teamed up with Erik Rohde, artistic director, Winona Symphony Orchestra, to create this piece.

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Dance the Night Away

DJ BOS’N

9p-10p  | Atrium

DJ BOS’N (Boston, MA) returns to Winona after a knock out 2024 performance at the base of Winona’s Ice Wall.  He takes center stage in the museum as we close the night down with a dance party not to miss. And yes, bosen = the person in charge of a ship’s rigging, anchor, cables and deck crew. Get ready. 

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Water Tasting

Water Bar, Minnesota Humanities Center

6:30p - 10p | Atrium

Your chance to sample flights of water!  Yep, our friends from the Minnesota Humanities Center are our “water bartenders” for the evening,  creating a one of a kind experience to spark  conversations about water quality, our shared connections to water and how individuals and communities can partner to protect it. Stop by the ‘other’ Water Bar to spark wonder! 

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Transportation

Free Shuttle Transportation

6p-10p | MMAM Front Doors + Two Fathoms Brewery Shuttle Pickup Site (3rd and Center Street) 

Park your car downtown, and don’t worry about it.  The evening features FREE Shuttle Transportation, courtesy of Winona Ice Festival, to and from downtown Winona. Shuttle departs MMAM on the ½ hour every hour, (dropping / picking near Two Fathoms Brewing Company - Winona Ice Festival HQ. Learn more!

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Afterparty

New Look Preview Party Afterparty

10p-1a | Two Fathoms Brewery

And if that’s still not all enough, you can wind the night down afterwards in downtown Winona, Minnesota at Two Fathoms Brewing Company - Winona Ice Festival Head Quarters. Plan your stay at Hotel 44 North, next door to the Two Fathoms Brewing Company, Winona’s newest waterfront boutique hotel experience. 

Featured Guests 

Terminal Habitat Collapse

Terminal Habitat Collapse is a sound art project by Trever Hagen and Josh Berg expanding the language of ecological crisis via music, sound, noise, and space.

Josh Berg: Grammy award winning audio engineer and producer with a knack for wrangling large scale productions and hybrid creation/performance/recording situations. Technical Audio Director for artists and collectives such as PEOPLE, Mac Miller, Kanye West, and Sunday Service.

Trever Hagen: Trever Hagen has collaborated with a range of musicians and ensembles from Bon Iver to Mouse on Mars. As well, Hagen holds a Grammy nomination, a PhD and is an Oxford Press author. He has given talks and masterclasses on sound, music, noise and trumpet at universities and conferences in the US, Europe and Asia. 

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Bruno Bosari

Bruno Borsari is a native Italian and Professor Emeritus of Biology at Winona State University. He earned his Doctor of Agricultural Science degree (D.Ag.Sc.) from the University of Bologna in Italy in 1986 and his Ph.D. from the University of New Orleans in 2001. With 32 years of experience in habitat restoration and sustainable agriculture, he taught and practiced ecological farming, agroforestry and habitat (prairie) restoration in various countries (mainly west and central Africa). He consulted Italian farmers to transition from conventional agriculture to Integrated Pest Management (IPM) and assisted them to pursue organic certification for their farms. In the U.S. Dr. Borsari served in the board of the Louisiana Organic Association (LOA), was President of the Cajun Prairie Restoration Society and was part of the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SSAWG). Prior to his relocation to Winona in 2005 he was an Assistant Professor of agroecology at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania and an active member of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA). He maintains membership with The Land Institute in Salina, KS and the Rodale Institute in Kutztown, PA. His publications record demonstrates his research interests in prairie restoration, agroecology, biology/science education, sustainability, agricultural education reform and local foods. Gardening, raising honeybees, cooking, learning foreign languages, playing music and singing are his main hobbies.

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Isabel Ruiz Cano

Isabel Ruiz Cano is an Associate Curator at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. She holds a Masters Degree in the History of Art from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a B.A. from Smith College. Growing up in El Salvador as the granddaughter of an artist and as the daughter of a fifth-grade teacher, she learned to appreciate visual storytelling from an early age. As a curator, she hopes to inspire curiosity and connection across all cultures through art.

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Robert Gonzalez

Robert Gonzalez is a visual and performance artist, curator, and musician born in Laredo, Texas. He holds a B.A. in Painting from Trinity University (1978) and a B.B.A. in Management from the University of the Incarnate Word (1980). For more than five decades, he has been dedicated to the practices of painting (since 1972) and performance art (since 1974).

Gonzalez’s paintings were recently exhibited at Trinity University’s Neidorff Gallery and at the UTSA Southwest School of Art’s Rodgers Galleries as part of the NYFA Courage exhibition, which he co-curated with Huakai Chen. His most recent performance work took place in June 2024 at The Contemporary at Blue Star for the Xicanx International Exhibition.

A curator since 1982, Gonzalez has organized more than two hundred local, regional, and national art exhibitions. He is also an active musician with five albums available on iTunes under the name Xivero. His artistic career has been shaped by extensive travel throughout Brazil, Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Canada.

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Nicole McLaughlin

Nicole McLaughlin was born and raised in Massachusetts but spent much of her early childhood in Mexico. As a first generation Mexican-American, she is heavily influenced by her multicultural upbringing and her childhood memories of visiting her mother’s home town of Cuernavaca, Mexico. Nicole received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. She has exhibited nationally, internationally and her work is included in several private collections. Nicole is currently working from her studio in Yarmouth Port, MA and is represented by Anderson Yezerski Gallery in Boston, MA. Nicole continues to draw inspiration from Mexican ceramics, textiles, and cultural traditions in hopes of showing how her life has been shaped by a collision of two cultures.  

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Erik Rohde
Artistic Director 

Erik Rohde maintains a diverse career as a conductor, violinist, and educator, and has performed in recitals and festivals across the United States and in Europe and Asia. He is the Director of Orchestral Activities at the University of Northern Iowa and the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Winona Symphony Orchestra. He teaches violin in the UNI Suzuki School and serves as the assistant conductor of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony. He has recorded several albums, primarily of new music, on the Navona label including “Here at the River,” released in 2024. He and his family live in Cedar Falls, IA.  More at erikrohde.com.

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BOS’N

Hailing from Detroit, MI, Winona Ice Festival’s ice wall DJ returns to Winona for an hour-long set at the New Look Preview Party.  

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Presenting Partners:

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Support comes from:

This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

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This event is part of MMAM’s January New Look Weekend, a weekend celebrating the launch of the 2026 exhibitions around the theme, Making Waves.

Upcoming January New Look Weekend Events