Local artists inspire Lincoln School students with book, India trip

Lincoln School students got a close-up look at how a book is made, and how travel can shape art, when Fergus Falls artists Blayze Buseth and Desiree Logan visited the school to share their new project and talk about a 70-day residency in India.

The visit brought local creators into a building that serves some of the district’s youngest learners. Lincoln School is home to kindergarten, Otter Preschool, Early Childhood Family Education and Early Childhood Special Education for Fergus Falls Public Schools, which serves about 2,500 students in west-central Minnesota. For children just beginning to connect reading, drawing and storytelling, seeing working artists from their own community turned those lessons into something tangible.

Buseth, a Fergus Falls native, works in clay and has built a career as a potter, sculptor and illustrator. Logan joined him to talk with students about Tom’s Adventure to India, the couple’s creative journey that blends art, culture and storytelling. Creation Shop, the Fergus Falls workshop Buseth operates, says its mission is to give the local community access to the arts.

The project grew out of time Buseth and Logan spent at Art Ichol in Madhya Pradesh, India, where they completed a 70-day artist residency. The book’s first professional print run is limited to 100 signed, hand-numbered first-edition copies, giving it the feel of a small-run local publication rather than a mass-market release. That kind of scale fits the kind of art-making Buseth has pursued for years, including residencies in New Harmony, Indiana, and Jingdezhen, China after he closed his studio in 2017.

The visit also connected Lincoln School to a broader arts network already taking shape in Fergus Falls. Kaddatz Galleries has featured Buseth in exhibition and artist-talk programming, showing that his work has a place in the region’s cultural life beyond the classroom. At Lincoln, that larger artistic path came back to the youngest students in town, who saw that books are not just read in school but made by people who live, work and create nearby.

For Otter Tail County families, the message was plain: creativity is not something far away. It is being built in Fergus Falls studios, carried into local galleries and shared in classrooms where children are first learning to imagine what they can make themselves.