1. The Grand Rapids Art Museum is celebrating the opening on their new Creative Learning Center with an open house on Saturday, June 17. The event runs from 10am to 2pm and will include tours of the space, hands-on artmaking and interactive activities, free admission to the galleries, and complimentary refreshments and light snacks. As part of the Creative Learning Center expansion, the GRAM will have the capacity to serve three times the number of school groups each year.
2. Van Andel Institute Purple Community and Pure Barre announcing the return of Pure Barre on the Blue Bridge for the 10th anniversary. Come out on Wednesday, September 6, for an evening of fun and fresh air, while supporting research at VAI to fight Cancer, Parkinson's and other diseases. They're also debuting the Pure Barre summer series featuring three rooftop barre classes on Sunday mornings in June, July and August. To learn more and to get tickets, visit vai.org/events.
3. Equest Center for Therapeutic Riding is looking for volunteers to help with their summer camps. Opportunities include sidewalking with riders, leading horses in class, greeting people at the welcome center desk, unloading hay and more. Summer riding camps start on June 12. The center, located north of Rockford, has been serving the community for 33 years. To sign up to volunteer or learn more go to equestcenter.org/volunteer.
4. NASA wants you to get in on its Europa Clipper mission by adding your name to an original poem penned by US poet Ada Limón, titled "In Praise of Mystery: a poem for Europa." The poem will be aboard the spacecraft when it blasts off in October 2024. The spacecraft will then travel billions of miles away to Jupiter's moon, Europa , where it will investigate if the ocean thought to lie beneath Europa's icy crust could support life. names received before 11:59pm on December 31, 2023, will be stenciled onto a microchip with the poem before the spacecraft takes off. You can sign, read the poem, and hear Limón recite it in an animated video at go.nasa.gov/message in a bottle.
5. An explosive, first-of-its kind event will light up the Northern Michigan sky later this year. Traverse City tourism announced the first-ever international fireworks championship will be held at Turtle Creek Stadium on September 9. The unique event is modeled after similar competitions held in Europe, Canada and Mexico. It will include four world-class shows with teams from the U.S.., Mexico, Spain and Germany competing for the top prize. The competitors create unique fireworks displays with music, which will be formally judged.
Only a handful of fireworks competitions are held in the U.S., with the closest being staged in Missouri. The competition will be a ticketed event. More details will be announced when they're finalized.
