Bellingham local Brad Bergman, who competed on the Fox competition show Lego Masters, builds his Lego model of the Whatcom Museum’s Old City Hall building. Bergman will be on hand at the museum’s Lego + Libations event to show participants how to assemble the Lego set.
Courtesy of Adrienne Dawson
You might think of the Whatcom Museum as one of Bellingham’s go-to family-friendly destinations. But for one night every three months, that’s going to change.
On Thursday, Nov. 21, the museum is reviving a series of 21-plus events it calls Artful Pairings. Each event will let participants take part in a craft of some sort, alongside craft drinks.
“Artful Pairings was a program previously run at the museum and I wanted to bring it back on a quarterly basis to give people more ways to engage with art,” Bridget Girnus, the museum’s education manager, said in an email to the Bellingham Herald.
Girnus estimates that the museum last held Artful Pairings events in 2017.
Lego, beer and wine event at Whatcom Museum
November’s event is called Lego + Libations. Participants will get a chance to build the Lego replica of the museum’s Old City Hall building that was introduced at an event in April, alongside drinks from Welcome Road Winery and Kulshan Brewing Company.
Brad Bergman, a Bellingham local who appeared on the Fox competition show “Lego Masters” and designed the Old City Hall replica, will be at the event to walk participants through assembling the Lego building.
According to Adrienne Dawson, the museum’s director of marketing and public relations, their April 2024 Lego event was so popular with adults that staff wanted to host an adult-only Lego event.
“The idea for Lego + Libations, specifically, came after our popular April Free First Friday event, which was all about Lego and community building. We had a Lego-building competition that local Lego Masters TV contestants Brad Bergman and Mike Tarrant judged, and it was so popular – especially with adults,” Dawson said in an email. “Even our Lego pit had adults building right alongside their kids, and we thought, what if we could have a Lego workshop just for adults?”
Participants will have a chance to build a replica of Bellingham’s Old City Hall at the Whatcom Museum’s Lego + Libations event. Courtesy of the Whatcom Museum
How to buy tickets
Tickets aren’t cheap – admission costs $200 for museum members and $225 for non-members – but you’ll get to take home your Old City Hall Lego kit. Girnus said that the goal was to charge $150 for admission, but the cost of the custom Lego kits drove the price up.
According to Dawson, in order to find enough Lego bricks in the right shade of red to assemble the kits, Bergman had to hand-source individual pieces. In many cases, he could only find the right pieces from second-hand Lego vendors. As a result, some individual Lego bricks cost up to $3.50.
Admission includes one drink, and additional drinks are available for purchase. You can purchase tickets on the event’s webpage. Dawson said that half of the tickets the museum made available have already sold.
When, where is the event?
Lego + Libations runs from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the museum’s Lightcatcher Building, located at 250 Flora Street.
After the event, the museum plans to run its next Artful Pairings program in February 2025, followed by events in May, August and next November.
What about the Old City Hall Lego model?
Along with April’s event, the museum submitted the Old City Hall design to Lego Ideas, a program where the company crowdsources ideas for new kits. If a submission passes the review process, it’s turned into a Lego kit that’s available for purchase.
In order to advance to the next phase in the process, the Old City Hall design needs to get 10,000 votes. Currently, it has just under 3,000 votes, with 376 days remaining to pick up the remaining 7,000. You can vote for the design on its page on the Lego ideas website. If it receives enough votes, it will go before a review board that will decide whether or not Lego will start producing the set.
This story was originally published November 13, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
Daniel Schrager is the service journalism reporter at the Bellingham Herald. He joined the Herald in February of 2024 after graduating from Rice University in 2023.Support my work with a digital subscription
