Boise's First Thursday

Last night I was lucky enough to attend one of Boise’s Avant Garde celebrations that we like to call First Thursday. First Thursday occurs (you guessed it) on the first Thursday of every month. It’s a chance for local artists to display and show their work in our local coffee house, the Boise Art Museum, the Idaho Historical Museum, and a few other buildings. These buildings are located all around downtown Boise and feature different artists each month.

Since the first Thursday in November fell so close to Halloween, the Mexican and Spanish portions of our town made special altar displays honoring their ancestors at the Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead celebration. Since the weather is getting colder and I’m getting lazier, I decided to attend two of the displays; the Boise Art Museum—lovingly known to us Boiseans as the BAM—and the Idaho Historical Museum. 

The BAM featured a few new exhibits that I was excited about. Unfortunately, out of respect and copyright issues we weren’t allowed to take pictures, so I have no original photographs for examples of the works. The most popular section featured was Comics at the Crossroads, a display of forty Northwestern comic and graphic artists. The comic books ranged in size, shape, design, and color. Some were spreadsheets meant to show the process of making a comic book and others were simple drawings removed from actual issues. One wall even featured a comic painting of a man with a tree growing out of him—way bigger than life size.  There was another exhibit by Mike Rathbun—The Situation He Found Himself In—in which an enormously crafted piece of wood is wrapped in a crescent around the BAM’s eighty foot sculpture court.

The Dia de los Muertos altars were celebrated in the Idaho Historical Museum with interactive print making and detailed explanations of each family’s altar. The altars ranged in size; one was composed of a giant stack of trolls with their faces painted white and black like skeletons, another was a mountain crafted from hundreds of colorful paper flowers, and the largest (and my personal favorite) was a gigantic skull shaped from mounds of corn, black beans, and rice. Each brought their own unique and honoring qualities and I can only imagine the dedication to these elaborate altars.