Garrett Neese/Daily Mining Gazette Cynthia Coté’s exhibit “Requiem for the Overlooked” debuts at the Finlandia Gallery in the Finnish American Heritage Center Thursday and runs until April 3. An opening reception will be held from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday.

HANCOCK — Rags, branches, leaves, rusty nails — the things many people might pass by or discard provide the inspiration, and sometimes the source material, for Cynthia Coté’s art.

Coté’s exhibit “Requiem for the Overlooked,” will be shown at the Finlandia Art Gallery from Thursday to April 3.

Coté’s been making art since she was a child. She was born and raised downstate before making the first of her moves to the Upper Peninsula in 1980. It stuck for good in 1992, when she moved to her house in Osceola Location near Calumet.

She is a founding director of the Copper Country Community Arts Center and its steward for the past 32 years.

“About 10 years into it, I realized I wasn’t going to be very happy unless I was pursuing my own art,” she said. “Because I was giving so much and I didn’t want to forget who I was as an artist.”

The exhibit contains pieces from several of Coté’s bodies of work. While she often advises artists to “pick something and get good at it,” her own work spans a variety of media. Inside the gallery are drawings, collage, beadwork, and fiber art constructions, displayed alongside a collection of objects that inspired the work.

“I have a lot of supplies, and I’ve had a lot of interests over the years,” she said. “I just feel like they maybe lend a different voice to my inspiration.”

Despite the disparate forms, they illustrate a throughline, Coté said: a regard for the humblest of things, and the honoring of things that are lost and forgotten.

One series, “Lost Relatives,” is inspired by vintage photographs of unknown Copper Country residents. She took the figures from those snapshots and placed them in new settings.

“In a way, I was giving those photographs another life even though we don’t know who these people are — hence, lost relatives,” she said. “But I find that a lot of people identify with them, because there’s this familiarity. They recognize those relatives that were standing stock still for those old photos.”

A sequence along the east wall shows the commonalities of Coté’s work. One display has what Coté calls “kinetic books” — pieces made from old books and reassembled in a grid. Next to it is a quilt. After making it, Coté noticed it features the same traits of squares, repetition and found objects — in the case of the quilt, copper flakes she’d found and fabrics from her collection.

“Then when we were hanging the show, we realized that they also reflect the way these pieces are,” Coté said, pointing to the “Lost Relatives” series. “They’re small pieces put up in a grid that also show this rhythm of repetition.”

The newest works are along the back wall, a collection of pen drawings Coté made after she was invited to have an exhibition. She hadn’t started to draw until about 10 years ago. For the past five, she’s made it a daily routine.

Her latest drawings were inspired by the things Coté found last fall after she took a workshop on foraging materials for basket weaving. The drawings are interspersed with materials she found, like root coils.

“It’s just one of those maybe pursuits, but I became enthralled with the materials,” she said. “And these are beautiful all by themselves before they’re made into something else.”

An opening reception will take place at the gallery, located at the Finnish American Heritage Center, from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday. Coté will also give a talk starting at 7:20 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.