About Us
Forest Gallery offers fine craft as a part of Lake Street Studios in Glen Arbor. The success of Forest Gallery is due mainly to its extraordinarily knowledgeable, well-trained and experienced staff. The gallery grew out of Forest Flowers, which were sculptures created by the Bricker family from the early 1970s to the early 2000s.
In 1971 Ben Bricker completed his MFA at Western Michigan University and moved his family from Muskegon to take a faculty position at Nazareth College in Kalamazoo, teaching, among other things, jewelry and ceramics. This allowed his wife Ananda to abandon her career as a florist and return to her original love of ceramics, transforming her passion for nature into porcelain flowers. Concurrently, Ananda’s eldest daughter had developed her metal sculpting skills. These two, separately and together, took their sculptures to art fairs around the Midwest. Some of the more notable shows were Charlevoix, St. Joseph and The Ann Arbor Street Fair. In the mid 1980s the idea of combining the two struck and Forest Flowers were first created. These were porcelain flowers with copper stems and leaves. In the late ‘80s, Ananda’s youngest daughter, Beth joined the pair as a painter of the sculptures.
It was around this time that Ananda, Midge Obata and Suzanne Wilson purchased the Wescott property on Lake Street in Glen Arbor and formed the Lake Street Studios. Within a few years, the old garage was renovated enough to house both the Center Gallery and a small retail outlet for Forest Flowers and other work made by members of the Bricker clan. Forest Flowers stopped production in 2002, and the retail space became Forest Gallery.
ANANDA BRICKER
Born in 1924 to Frank and Alice Dillon, pre-eminent commercial artists and illustrators in early 20th century Chicago, Ananda grew up in Winnetka, Illinois. After her studies at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts, she married Ben Bricker in the ’40s. She made porcelain jewelry in the 1950s and porcelain flowers for over thirty years. She founded, in chronological order, the Tuesday morning artists breakfasts, the Glen Lake Artists,Lake Street Studios and the Glen Arbor Art Association. Ananda died in January of 2010. Ken Scott tribute to Ananda Bricker.
BEN BRICKER
Born in 1922 in Cuba, Illinois, Ben also grew up in Winnetka. He studied at the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University. Ben was the fine arts chair at Nazareth College until his retirement in 1987. He then joined the Peace Corps and spent his tour at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, Africa. Ben is a founding member of the GAAA and the Lake Street Studios
CHERRIE BRICKER STEGE
Born in 1944, Cherrie is the eldest Bricker daughter. A past board member of the GAAA, she is an accomplished metalsmith who works primarily in copper. She has studied blacksmithing, metalsmithing and stained glass construction. Her functional and spatial expertise gave Forest Flowers the sculptural balance they were known for. She continues to use these skills in her current works in copper, glass and beach stones
BETH BRICKER
Beth was born in 1961. She studied fine arts in many diverse settings all over the country. She is an active painter, and offers classes in watercolor and acrylic. Beth currently sits on the GAAA board and is chair of the children’s classes and co-chair of the art accessibility committee.
Alice Goss Dillon 1887-1965
Mother of Ananda Bricker & Barrie Riday.
Grandmother of Cherrie Bricker Stege and Beth Bricker.
Born in Peoria Illnois in 1887. She attended Bradley University and graduated from the Chicago Art Institute in 1909 where she met artist, Frank Dillon. They were married in 1911.
Alice was a successful commercial artist. Her detailed, imaginative watercolors were featured regularly in St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine. She used her husband’s name as well as her own to facilitate selling in what was then a man’s field.
Alice Dillon gave up painting entirely after the birth of her first child, giving over completely to being a wife and mother; however she left a legacy of artist’s spirit in the lives of her family.
