Steve Stolee's video: STEVE STOLEE 2019 Island Treasure Award

STEVE STOLEE, 2019 Island Treasure Award. Born in a blizzard in 1950, I was raised in a house that was built before statehood on the banks of the Red River of the North in the college town of Grand Forks, North Dakota. I could see Minnesota from my house! My parents weren’t participants in the arts, but they were enablers for my two sisters and me. From the old upright piano in the den that we all took piano lessons on, the phonograph and stacks of records, to the big console radio—eventually replaced by a TV—there was no want of entertainment at home. The university where my sister was an art student was a regular source of cultural engagement. Many people might be surprised by the existence of an artistic climate in North Dakota, but robust school and parks systems offered sports, recreations, music, and arts in all seasons, and I took part in them all - juggling hockey, band, rock groups, chorus and theatre all through high school. When I enrolled at the UND in the exuberant era of 1968, I lasted exactly one semester as a ‘pre-law’ major, due to taking an advanced figure drawing class (taught by the very same professor my sister had): I simply concluded that drawing was more important than legal advice, so I became an art major and never looked back. Two years later I was drawn away, as so many of my generation, to seek adventure on the road, one that led to Alaska, in search of the storied, high-paying summer jobs fighting forest fires. It was, however, a summer of no fires, no hires, and found me crashing with a dozen or more similarly inspired seekers from across the continent in an abandoned house near Fairbanks where we cooked macrobiotic rice, bathed in a sweat lodge, played guitar, sang songs into the night and sampled a variety of herbs and fungi. Nobody was looking for work. A decade in Fairbanks saw me living in a miscellany of strange and exotic lodgings (tent, trailer, tool shed, attic) often without the benefits of electricity or water. I transited through a colorful assortment of identities: traveling-job-seeker-cum-hippie, itinerant musician, land surveyor, art student, Teamster on the Alaska Pipeline, co-founder of the Solstice Music Festival and, my favorite job, administrator for the Alaska Association for the Arts—at which I put all my skills to work on every aspect of the exhibits, performances, and events the council presented. In my last year in Fairbanks, I returned to the smell of greasepaint as one of the reprobate denizens of a seedy brothel in Brendan Behan’s The Hostage with the college theatre department. After moving to Bainbridge in late ’79 I fell into the theatre crowd with BPA, acting in plays and musicals, a stint on the board, and co-founded Without A Net Improv, all while building a house and returning to art school at UW. In 1988 while playing Danny Zuko in Susie Glass Burdick’s GREASE, I was introduced backstage to a Russian named Edward by Louise Mills and a year later, I was singing a part in a joint US/USSR original musical and touring Russia with 20 kids and 12 other adults. Louise was also the stimulus when we cofounded Island Theatre in ’94 out of the cast of The Play’s The Thing. My father mustered us into family picture poses frequently. And that, as much as anything, has ingrained in me the importance of photographic documentation, which has been a primary focus of my artistic pursuits (evidenced by my boxes of contact sheets dating back to 1968). It was easy to add video when equipment became accessible in the 90s, first to record the stories of my parents’ lives, but expanding to reach for all the stories around me that have sparked my curiosity. For the last six years I have created the video profiles of the Island Treasure Award recipients. This year, I have made one about myself. And that. . . is a very strange and curious thing, indeed.