Winter Arts Snow Sculpting Festival 2025

The Winter Arts Snow Sculpting Festival offers a free, family-friendly gathering with hands-on activities, food and beverage vendors, and People’s Choice voting in Washington Park and inside the Dubuque Museum of Art from 12-4 PM. Activities include a community snow sculpting area with preformed blocks of snow and tools provided for anyone to try their hand at snow sculpting.

Throughout the week, teams of professional, amateur, and collegiate sculptures will compete for a $1000 prize by carving giant snow creations from 6x6x8 blocks of solid snow. All teams will have the chance to be crowned the People’s Choice Award-winner on Sunday, which comes with a $300 cash prize.

The Winter Arts Snow Sculpting Festival is an annual celebration of community creativity, and coincides with more than the Super Bowl this year. The 2025 festival also serves as the closing event for DuMA’s landmark exhibition, Dubuque by Design: Celebrating 150 Creative Years. That exhibition inspires this year’s theme: Creative Community. We believe the act of creating together inspires us to push the boundaries of art, strengthens our community, and is just good fun.

Winter Arts is a community festival produced by the Dubuque Museum of Art (DuMA) in partnership with the City of Dubuque’s Office of Arts and Culture. For more info, visit www.cityofdubuque.org/winterarts or call 563-581-6988.

Dubuque by Design Opening Celebration

Celebrate 150 creative years with free family fashion and design activities, conversations with artists, and local brews, bites, and music inspired by our exhibitions this season.

Family Celebration
10 am–1 pm
Free with Museum admission

Family fashion and design workshops kick off our Opening Day. In the morning, families are invited to collaborate and design fashions inspired by Dubuque icons, from Lange ski boots to H. B. Glover pajamas (immortalized by Richard Bissell on stage and screen as The Pajama Game). Design your own Dubuque factory, Millwork building, or new museum, all to help us create the city of the future. For those who need a little more of a prompt, collaborate with baristas from Bob and Lou’s to design a new custom coffee drink.

Fill Your Factory!

Grab a piece of folded paper
On 1 side design the outside of your factory.
You can include doors, big vents, billboards and advertisements.
Then Flip it over and show what’s happening on the Inside of your factory.
What does your factory build? Do people make your product or do machines? How does your factory run?
Try practicing collage techniques by using magazines, cut out shapes, and colorful paper to bring your factory to life.
When you’re all done you can add your factory to the art museums tiny factory district.

Chair Challenge!

Imagine creating a one-of-a-kind chair, designed totally by you! Use recycled materials and your imagination to make a unique functional chair.
When designing your furniture try to think about who is sitting in your chair. A toddler? Maybe a astronaut? What about a cat or a dog? Furniture is designed for people to sit in. Thinking about who will use your chair is important to make them comfortable.
Try to think about what it’s made of. Is it strong? Or is it meant to be soft and comfy, What about lightweight for east traveling?
Each chair has a job. Thinking about what job your chair does will make a successful design! Get creative and make something amazing!
You can even take it home for your toys to sit in and then post a pic on our Facebook page!

Artist Conversation
3 pm–4 pm
Free with Museum admission

Join artist Hieyler Pimpton inside the Kris Mozena McNamer gallery for a conversation about her exhibition I Have Told You 50 Times. She’ll talk about her artistic inspirations and her journey to create the 50 collages on view. You’ll appreciate her warmth and humor—and we don’t expect she’ll have to repeat herself.

Opening Reception
4 pm–7 pm

$15 for members of DuMA
$20 for guests
$10 for guests under 21
Free for 1874 society

Toast the past and the future with local craft beers, music, mocktails, and food inspired by Dubuque by Design.

Registration required for the 4 pm reception. Click here to purchase tickets.

DuMA Baseball Exhibition Farewell

10 AM – 12 PM: Baseball themed games for the family.

Celebrate summer and the final days of the exhibition, Picturing America’s Pastime, A Snapshot of the Photo Collection at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

There will be popcorn and baseball themed games which test your skill at pitching and catching.

Outdoor games will take place in Washington Park, across from DuMA. Washington Park was important in Dubuque baseball history as it was the site of many early games.

1:30 PM: Dr Ashley Brown’s talk.

Celebrate and honor Juneteenth with author and historian Dr Ashley Brown, Assistant Professor and Allan H. Selig Chair in the History of Sport and Society, University of Wisconsin-Madison, who will speak about athletes breaking racial and gender barriers at a time when American sports were still deeply segregated.

Title of talk: Behind and Beyond the Bobbleheads, Caps, Movies, and Video Games: The Cultural and Social Significance of Negro League Baseball and the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Description: In recent decades, Hollywood, the video game industry, and product manufacturers have embraced the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League and Negro League Baseball. Consumers have enthusiastically purchased tickets and bought merchandise, engaging in nostalgia and demonstrating their interests in these trailblazing athletes. In this talk, Professor Ashley Brown addresses the origins, daily realities, complexities, and legacies of the leagues. As Professor Brown asserts, the impact and meaning of both businesses were alternately priceless and mixed with the problems of the past.
Dr. Brown is a historian of the twentieth-and twenty-first century United States whose research and teaching focus on the history of sport, African American history, and women’s history. Dr. Brown received a PH.D. from George Washington University

Please RSVP to Dr. Brown’s talk using this online form

Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso by Bob Lerner August 29, 1951, courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

(SOLD OUT)Youth Architecture Workshop

This workshop has sold out, however you may call the Museum front desk to be put on a wait list. The drop in pumpkin decorating and mask making workshop is free and open to all at 10 AM.

Is your child interested in architecture, buildings, and designing things? DuMA’s Community Day begins at 10 A.M. with a free children’s architecture workshop with Az Rashidi and Paul Schulhof, the architects designing the new museum campus.

Participants will share their ideas for the new Museum with Az and Paul and build their own models that describe their vision. Admission is free but advanced registration is required. Space is limited. Ages 9-13.

To register, click here: https://dbqart.square.site/product/youth-architecture-workshop-for-ages-9-13/1846

Community Day

Celebrate the bounty of fall, the power of community, and the opening of four new exhibitions. The day includes family architecture workshops, artist conversations, and a block party. Admission is FREE with donation of a non-perishable food item to the Dubuque Food Pantry.

Come downtown and celebrate the past, present, and future of our community.

10 A.M. – 1 P.M. Children’s Workshops

1 P.M. – Gallery conversation: Roberta Condon, Lorraine Ortner-Blake and Beth Hoffman

2:30 P.M. – Gallery talk with Katie Schutte

4–6 P.M. – Block party and community workshop with DuMA’s architects, Paul Schulhof and Az Rashidi. Live music and food trucks hosted with the Bluff Street Neighborhood Association, on 7th Street

(SOLD OUT)Community Day begins with a children’s architecture workshop with Az Rashidi and Paul Schulhof, the architects designing the new museum campus. Participants will share their ideas for the new Museum with Az and Paul and build their own models that describe their vision. Space is limited for this free workshop and advance registration is required.

Also at 10 A.M. is a drop in pumpkin decorating and mask making workshop, which is open to all.

At 1 P.M., join Long Time Passing artists Roberta Condon and Lorraine Ortner-Blake inside the Falb Family Gallery for a conversation with Beth Hoffman, author of Bet the Farm. The three women will discuss the changing rural landscape, the struggles and joys of life on the farm, and how their experiences inspire their art. At 2:30 P.M., artist Katie Schutte will discuss Distorted Recollections in the Kris Mozena McNamer Gallery.

Also opening are the Dubuque Camera Club’s Rural Life and a showcase of work by students from the University of Dubuque’s Department of Digital Art and Design.

The afternoon culminates with a block party from 4-6 P.M. on 7th Street that includes food trucks, a community workshop with Schulhof and Rashidi, live music by Joie Booth Wails and DJ Charlz, and autumnal décor from local farmers.

Community/Family Day

This free event will also feature live performances by two Dubuque arts and cultural organizations, along with guided tours of the exhibition, refreshments, and hands-on art activities. The lineup and schedule includes:

-Performance by Dubuque’s Dreaming Allegiance: 1 p.m.

–Junior Famous Dead Artist Matinee: Renee Tyler performing as artist Elizabeth Catlett, 2:15 p.m. A glimpse into the life of African American artist Elizabeth Catlett who explored themes relating to race and social activism in her sculpture, paintings, and prints. Catlett was a student of Grant Wood and among the first MFA graduates from the University of Iowa, which recently named a dormitory hall in her honor.

-Performance by the Dubuque Dream Center Gospel Choir & Dance Troupe: 3 pm

The exhibition and Free Community Day are sponsored by American Trust & Savings Bank and their Junior Banker program. Additional support was provided by Runde Auto Group, which is sponsoring free admission to the DuMA on Saturday mornings during the Dubuque Winter Farmers’ Market.

African American Art in the 20th Century continues at DuMA through April 21, 2019.

Loïs Mailou Jones, Moon Masque, 1971, oil and collage on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of the artist.

Community Day/Smithsonian Museum Day Live

Community Day – Women Making History

Join us in celebrating the opening of the exhibition Just to Live is Holy: Women Religious and a Tradition of Art, Faith and Justice and Smithsonian Day Live. This year’s theme is “Women Making History”.

Visitors will enjoy:

FREE admission all day (10 am – 4 pm)
Staff and docent-led tours of the exhibit Just to Live is Holy
“Women of Dubuque” portrait project pop-up exhibit in the Museum Lobby
Viewing and celebrating the new outdoor sculpture Irene
Viewing and celebrating community mural project, created by Little Luxuries and artist Chelsea Tapia

10 am-Noon

Complimentary coffee and donuts

DONATE

community day