Lake Sakakawea
— a river held for one long breath.
Not only on a wall.
Lake Sakakawea, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Lake Sakakawea is the Missouri River backed up behind Garrison Dam, stretching about 178 miles across central North Dakota. It carries the name of the Lemhi Shoshone woman who walked the country with Lewis and Clark in 1804, and the water it covers is the bottomland the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara farmed for centuries before the dam closed in 1953. Walleye boats work the bays from May through October; the shore goes quiet by November.
The place, in three passes.
Lake Sakakawea is a reservoir on the upper Missouri River, formed when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers closed Garrison Dam in 1953. It runs about 178 miles end to end, with a surface area of roughly 368,000 acres at full pool, making it one of the largest reservoirs in the United States by area. The lake is named for Sakakawea, the Lemhi Shoshone interpreter who travelled with the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery; the North Dakota spelling follows Mandan-Hidatsa usage.
The reservoir is a working walleye fishery, regularly ranked among the strongest in the country by the North Dakota Game and Fish Department. Northern pike, smallmouth bass, and chinook salmon also hold in the lake, with salmon runs in the cold tailwater below Garrison Dam each autumn. The shoreline runs about 1,300 miles, longer than the California coast, and the water sits roughly 1,850 feet above sea level at full pool. Most public access points lie on the south and east shores, near Garrison, Pick City, and Riverdale.
The water the lake covers is the historic homeland of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, whose villages and bottomland farms along the Missouri were inundated when the dam closed in 1953. The MHA Nation has documented the loss in its own historical record and continues to mark it. The lake itself runs an annual rhythm: ice-out by mid-April, walleye spawning runs through May, the summer recreation season into September, the salmon run below the dam in October, and a winter draw-down for downstream flood control.
