Host Manda Aufochs Gillespie was joined Kaia Bryce (piano, melodica, vocals) and Adrian Esau (guitar, harmonica, vocals) – Lasqueti islanders with big hearts and a big sound! They played a lively genre-bending show full of creative time-feel changes and rural island sentiments.
Continue reading Kaia Bryce and Adrian Esau play at the new pavilion in Mansons Landing
July 4, 2025 saw the launch of the Village Commons Music Series, a simultaneously live and live-broadcast show, happening on Fridays from 1 – 2:30pm on the new Pavilion stage.
Host Manda Aufochs Gillespie was joined by Denise Wolda, Owyn Pengelly, and Thomas Aerie, 3 local musicians who sat together on stage for an intergenerational in-the-round style performance, swapping songs, stories, and jokes.
Continue reading Folk U at the Village Commons Music Series 2025: Denise Wolda, Owyn Pengelly, and Thomas Aerie
The Creative Spaces Garden and Studio Tour is Saturday June 22, from 10 am to 4 pm. This is an annual fundraiser for the Cortes Island Museum, as well as a showcase of some of the island’s hidden gems.
“It’s a great opportunity to feature creative talents of people on the island, and it’s a self guided tour of studios and gardens that takes you all the way around from Whaletown, down to Smelt Bay, and Cortes Bay. We’ve got painters, textile artists, weavers, spinners, ceramicists . We’ve got a number of potters and pottery studios that are participating. And then some beautiful spaces with gardens that range from low bluff to high bluff. You pick up a map, which includes a button, and you just go around the island visiting people with talents you may not have known about, or see spaces that you were curious about but never had an opportunity to actually walk into. Walk through the gates and see what people are growing there,” explained Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Cortes Island Museum.
Continue reading The 2024 Creative Spaces Garden and Studio Tour On Cortes Island
A new exhibition in the Cortes Island Museum looks at the island’s housing from pre-colonial times up until the present. ‘From the Ground Up: Cortes Island Dwellings And Their Histories’ combines photographs and artifacts from the museum’s collections, stories and images from the community and a display from the Cortes Housing Society. Melanie Boyle, Managing Director of the Museum, took Cortes Currents on a tour of the exhibit.
Continue reading From The Ground Up: The Story Of Cortes Island Dwellings
Public consultation around plans for the next five years of timber harvesting got back underway on Saturday, March 23, with a tour of the Larsen’s Meadow cut block led by Operations Manager Mark Lombard. Two more public tours are currently scheduled: March 30 in the Carrington/Coulter Bay area and April 20 in the Green Mountain area. These outdoor tours are part of the follow-up to an initial public meeting in the Spring of 2023, when maps and preliminary plans were presented.
Lombard works for the Cortes Forestry General Partnership (CFGP), which holds the tenure (right to log) for the Cortes Community Forest, comprising much of the Crown Land on Cortes Island. CFGP is a partnership between Klahoose First Nation (KFN) and Cortes Community Forest Co-operative (CCFC).
Continue reading Cortes Community Forest Five-Year Plan Update: Tour of the Larsen’s Meadow Cut Block
