Bay College announces, The Wilding Hours, an exhibition in the Besse Gallery featuring artists Erin LaBonte and Don Krumpos. The reception and artist talk will take place in the Besse Gallery on Thursday, November 20 at 2 pm. The gallery is free and open to the public.
The Story of Yonder
Yonder is a brick-and-mortar storefront and creative space in Algoma, WI. Co-founded by Don Krumpos & Erin LaBonte in 2019, Yonder is run by artists dedicated to enriching the regional and local art experience through mural arts, workshops, exhibition opportunities, puppetry performance, and more.
Rooted in storytelling, materiality, and community, Yonder exists at the intersection of the deeply personal and the collective narrative. Through sculpture, ink, wood, found objects, and performance, artists explore the symbols, myths, and histories that shape us. The work traverses the realms of folklore, femininity, and the surreal, balancing the raw with the refined, the absurd with the intimate.
Yonder is an evolving experiment—one where art is participatory, where creativity is a conversation, and where every object, every mural, every performance is an invitation to engage with the world in a new way. Whether through public art, immersive storytelling, or the hand-wrought and deeply personal, Yonder is a space where the past, present, and mythic converge to create something alive, something seen, something felt.
Bio
Erin LaBonte received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and her Master of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She has participated in artistic residencies in Costa Rica and Argentina and has exhibited nationally and internationally. Erin practices many artistic mediums in her own studio work. She is an advocate for bringing art to public spaces and for community engagement. Erin is dedicated to inspiring and educating young artists in their personal explorations. She served as associate professor of art at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc, WI for nine years, and is currently a middle and high school art teacher in Kewaunee, WI. She and her partner, Don Krumpos formed Yonder, an art space, in Algoma, WI in 2019.
Don Krumpos grew up on a century-old hobby farm in Northeast Wisconsin cobbling together inventions from his father's cast-iron machinery and developing a kinship for bric-a-brac and found objects. He is an art educator and makes work that embraces the spectacle of live performance and the participatory nature of the artmaking and viewing process. He also runs Yonder, a studio and gallery in Algoma to showcase artworks by regional and national artists that create meaningful and accessible art-based experiences for the public.
Artist Statement
Erin LaBonte
This body of work reflects my life—its cycles, changes, and quiet moments. It began one summer, lying in my garden, taking photographs. The next summer, I returned, laying cyanotype-soaked fabric to imprint memories of the year before. Now, this summer, I sit in the same garden preparing to exhibit the work.
Working with fabric and embroidery felt instinctively feminine, rooted in tradition. My mother sewed the edges of each piece, her hands finishing what mine began—an intimate collaboration across generations.
As I’ve moved through womanhood, motherhood, and now middle age, my awareness of time and presence has deepened. I believe art is inherently political. Sharing female perspectives is not just personal—it’s a quiet resistance. This work is part of a larger act of collective world-building, where process and presence are both political and empowering.
This exhibit, The Wilding Hours, is shared with my husband and shaped by our shared sense of restoration—of self, nature, and time. The concept of wilding—restoring natural processes so that life can thrive without constant intervention—resonates deeply with my artistic practice. In this sense, returning to the garden, to slow work with fabric and sun, becomes a kind of rewilding. These hours are untamed and honest, a soft rebellion and a return.
Don Krumpos
It began with walks—along limestone bluffs, through cedar groves, beside marshes stirred by cranes and wind. In those quiet, attentive hours, I walked without a map. The creatures in these watercolor studies are not imagined inventions. They are kin of fog and field, met with ritual, solitude, and the wild quiet of place. They are what remain when you walk long enough to fall out of ordinary time.
Widdershins is a living archive of spirit-beings, folk relics, and ecological memory gathered in the borderlands of my home bioregion. It is part reliquary, part bestiary, part field notebook of the unseen. Named for the old word meaning “to walk counterclockwise,” the project is an attempt to go against forgetting—to turn backward through the spiral of land and story and recover what might still be alive beneath the surface of things.
This installation presents a fragment of that ongoing archive:
a naturalist’s wagon, overgrown and half-abandoned, where drawings are pinned like field notes. The objects and images act as specimens in a kind of animist science—a tender, poetic taxonomy of what remains when land is listened to as alive.
My practice is shaped by bioregional animism, poetic ethnography, and grief as method. I draw not to categorize, but to keep memory company. Each image is a glyph in a larger, unfolding cosmology—one that resists enclosure, favors mystery, and insists on the presence of spirit in place.
About Bay College
Bay College is the community’s college with a mission of: Student Success, Community Success. Culture of Success. Bay is devoted to each individual’s achievement in the classroom, on-campus, online, in the community and into the workforce by providing certificates and associate degrees, transfer credits to universities, and workforce training programs which develop skillsets and advance careers. #BayIsTheWay