Arts and Culture : Development News

A design has been drawn up for a memorial to the 13 people who died three years ago when the Interstate 35W bridge fell into the Mississippi River, but site selection for the project is still up in the air.

Recent weeks have seen the likely spot for the memorial shift from Gold Medal Park, next to the new Guthrie Theater, to park property across West River Parkway that's actually owned by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board.

"People are ready to see the memorial," says mayoral spokesman John Stiles, adding that three years after the tragedy is "a decent time" for plans to proceed.

In the days after the bridge fell, the then-newly built artificial hill at Gold Medal Park drew crowds seeking a spot from which to survey the scene of the disaster--to mourn, to witness or simply to pay respects. Tom Oslund, the park's landscape designer, also designed the memorial.

But Gold Medal Park is not a real city park. Instead it's property belonging partly to the city and partly to the Guthrie, leased for 10 years to the William W. McGuire and Nadine M. McGuire Family Foundation for operation as a park.  

That means that in 2017 Gold Medal Park could become something else. So city officials have been looking at an alternative location across the street that could accommodate a somewhat downsized version of the memorial.

Park board president John Erwin says by removing "weed trees" and relocating planted crab apple trees, the new site could offer a similar view of the bridge site for the memorial--"in perpetuity."

But Gold Medal Park isn't completely out of the picture yet. "Nothing's off the table," says Stiles.

Source: John Stiles, City of Minneapolis; John Erwin, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board
Writer: Chris Steller

It's a good thing the board members of the American Craft Council made sure the Twin Cities had a deep talent pool before they chose to relocate the group's headquarters from New York City to Minneapolis.

Because not one of the ACC's staff members in NYC made the move.

For a variety of reasons, according to spokeswoman Bernadette Boyle, all 20�25 stayed East, including Boyle. Speaking by phone from New York on Monday, the day the Minneapolis office opened for business, she said the transition feels "bittersweet."

She has heard good things about the historic Grain Belt Brewery building, where the ACC is leasing space from RSP Architects, the firm that renovated the castle-like structure for its own headquarters.

The Twin Cities were familiar to people at ACC because of the craft show the organization holds annually in St. Paul, one of four such shows in cities across the country. (Another of those cities, Atlanta, was under consideration for the new headquarters site.)

So they knew that the Twin Cities are a "cultural hotbed for crafts," Boyle said, with great museums and simply a great place to live.

The organization had to move. New York simply wasn't economically viable for the ACC anymore, Boyle said.

Some staffers, like Boyle, are continuing with ACC for a few weeks or months, and the show staff will stay on, working remotely. About 15 people will staff the new office, she said.

One feature of the SoHo office still due to make the move to Minneapolis is the organization's 7,000-volume library, which Boyle said is open to the public, by appointment.

Source: Bernadette Boyle, American Craft Council
Writer: Chris Steller

When a couple living in Powderhorn Park moved out of the neighborhood this month, they hung wooden signs with stenciled blackbirds along the way to their new home, many blocks north. And a photographer from the Powderhorn 365 project was there to document the endearing demarcations of their departure.

Every day since Jan. 1, 2009, someone in Powderhorn has posted a photo from the neighborhood on the Powderhorn 365 website. It's a fascinating catalog of life in this diverse south Minneapolis enclave of artists, activists and everyday people.

"I wanted to show people our neighborhood," says resident Amy Wurdock, who dreamed up the project in late 2008 when she got a digital SLR camera. Her motivation: to replace the occasionally heard refrain of "God, this place sucks" with "How cool is this?" Wurdock calls Minneapolis-based photographer Wing Young Huie--known for his epic documentation of urban streets and neighborhoods--"my main inspiration."

But the prospect of posting a photo a day was too daunting for a mother of two young children, so Wurdock looked for six others who, with her, could each take a day of the week, all year long. The result is not only online but in an impressive coffee table book collecting the team's photos from 2009, made possible through the efforts of Leonie Thomas, an intern from the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). One resident sent the book to friends in Germany and Australia to persuade them to visit him, Wurdock says. (A 2010 book is possible--if another organization or foundation shows interest in contributing.)

Now the project is continuing with a new crop of seven photographers, augmented by occasional guests filling in. One of the only rules is that photos must come from within the neighborhood's boundaries--although the 2009 book includes a couple that violate that rule. No one has guessed which, says Wurdock.

Source: Amy Wurdock, Powderhorn 365
Writer: Chris Steller

All seems as it should be in front of the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History. Bronze wolves stalk a bronze moose on the path to the front door, and above the door, an immense American bison is carved in relief on the limestone facade, along with the museum's name.

But behind that facade, the 70-year-old building on the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus is suffering from old age, according to museum spokesman Martin Moen. Gallery ceilings lower than the current industry standard make installation of many traveling exhibits difficult or impossible. The space for such exhibits is only 3,000 square feet, a bare minimum. Air conditioning in the 1960s-era addition is on its last legs;  the original 1940 building has none.

A solution--constructing a new building for the museum on the university's St. Paul campus--has been in the works for nearly 15 years. Fundraising for the $39.5 million building began in 2001. Some of the $10 million raised so far went toward design work and construction drawing for a new facility at the southwest corner of Larpenteur and Cleveland avenues.

But state funding for the shovel-ready project has twice fallen victim to Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto pen, and last year the university decided to give the proposal a breather. The Board of Regents will decide this year whether to include the Bell again in the university's funding request next legislative session.

In the meantime, the state's only natural history museum continues drawing 60,000 visitors per year. On exhibit this summer are works by Francis Jacques, the Aitken, Minn.-born artist who painted dioramas for the Bell and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Part of the cost of the St. Paul museum will be the careful removal of some of Jacques' murals for re-installation in the new space.

Source: Martin Moen, Bell Museum
Writer: Chris Steller

An annual arts crawl reaches the age of maturity at its fifth year. At least that's how Dudley Voight sees the FLOW Northside Arts Crawl, which at the ripe old age of five will once again enliven West Broadway in Minneapolis this Saturday.

"At the fifth year, you can ask different questions," Voight says. "We're not going away. What are our goals? That's really pretty fun."

FLOW is not standard gallery-crawl fare, although Voight says her inspiration for it came from the regular jubilance of monthly crawls in the Warehouse District in years past, when that downtown slice of North Minneapolis teemed with visual arts venues.

Businesses that aren't art galleries play a big role in FLOW, hosting art shows and performances. A highlight this year is Catalyst Community Partners' newly renovated 5 Points Building at Penn and Broadway, now home to KMOJ-FM Radio ("The People's Station"), which will host three floors of exhibits and arts activities.

Familiarity breeds interest in art, says Voight. One measure of FLOW's impact is that businesses on Broadway now routinely have art on their walls throughout the rest of the year.

"It's an invitation to people to come into our community, into our space," she says, and the art they'll see is a sample of what the community has on offer. "All the things that happen at FLOW happen all year round in north Minneapolis."

Source: Dudley Voight, FLOW Northside Arts Crawl
Writer: Chris Steller

The news that the Bedlam Theatre will have to leave its West Bank space in six weeks to make room for an expanding mosque hit many fans of the offbeat troupe hard.

But Bedlam has periodically embraced and flirted with homelessness in the past as a possibly beneficial artistic state (see its 17-year history recounted in the Twin Cities Daily Planet), only to be set straight by supporters who liked the company's current or earlier digs.

Now co-founder and -director John Bueche says exactly what the theater wants in a new space "is a good question. Sometimes our preconceptions have been proven short-sighted."

Even letting slip that the theater would concentrate its search within the city limits of Minneapolis was enough to generate emails from Bedlam-lovers in St. Paul and a phone call from the St. Paul mayor's office.

The group, founded by grads from St. Paul's Macalester College, has since backed off its insistence on the Mill City.

Would, say, a spot in a suburban strip mall be out of the question?

Bueche said the group, which has built up a loyal following through social events that go well beyond standard theatrical performance, now has two main criteria: "proximity to a young, diverse audience" and a location on "an alternative transit corridor."

That suggests that Bedlam's perfect space is the one from which they're being evicted--located only steps from the Cedar-Riverside light rail station and in the heart of the  immigrant-rich West Bank neighborhood.

"It wasn't our choice," Bueche clarifies. "We'd be happy to stay." He sees a silver lining for the neighborhood Bedlam celebrated in its "West Bank Story" production. "We're moving because development is happening here"--due in part, he says, to resolution of decades-long lawsuits between local landowners.

Source: John Bueche, Bedlam Theatre
Writer: Chris Steller

When you think about the materials that make up urban places--concrete, brick, plastic, metal--you don't ordinarily think of yarn.

Yarn bombers, also known at knit taggers, are out to change that. They knit things that are meant to be worn outdoors, but not by people. They wrap their knitting around poles on the street or install it on chain link fences. It's part graffiti, part handicraft.

If you've seen knitting-covered objects in the Twin Cities, you've probably seen the work of yarn bombers. They've covered a big rock at the Barbara Barker Center for Dance at the University of Minnesota, decorated a structural column outside Borealis Yarns at Thomas and Hamline in St. Paul, and enlivened the Cleveland Avenue overpass above I-94.

It's a national trend that a few years ago took hold in the fertile, active knitting culture of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, which, according to Radio K, supports the greatest number of yarn shops per capita of any place in the United States.

These days, knitters of all ages learn stitches and share knit-tagging techniques at meetups such as "Drunken Knit Night" at Merlin's Rest. One knitter who has taken it to the streets, Ann Rojas, says a friend of her daughter's learned to knit for the sole purpose of practicing yarn bombing. 

"The stereotype of the old lady knitting at home is not too current," says Rojas, whose own yarn-bombing-in-progress once drew the attention of a St. Paul police officer. "I sent him on his way," she says.

Source: Ann Rojas
Writer: Chris Steller

In another era, the handsome but diminutive Music Education building on the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus might have disappeared without a voice being raised or a fuss of any kind.

But the 1888 sandstone structure survived into the 1990s, when along with other buildings on the Knoll (now the Old Campus Historic District) it got a last-minute reprieve from then-president Mark Yudof.

Nearby masonry heavyweights such as Nicholson and Pillsbury Halls got updated for continued use, but the tiny building on the hairpin turn of East River Parkway just outside Dinkytown proved too small for the 21st century. The university began knocking it down this week after 15 years of trying to find a new use or a new owner.

Over that time, says James Litsheim, historic preservation architect for U of M campuses statewide, the university spent $500,000 to keep the structure in decent shape. It needed $2 million more of work but the university offered it for one dollar. There was some interest, but no takers, says Litsheim. No one knew quite what to do with a Richardsonian Romanesque miniature that has no more than 3,000 square feet over four floors, divided into "a rabbit warren" of music practice rooms.

"It's hard to lose this one," Litsheim says, fearing for other small buildings around the state as the university downsizes its space needs in step with reduced state funding. The university is salvaging decorative elements and sandstone facing. The site is so small that the university's master plan calls for it simply to become green space.

The building began as home to the Student Christian Organization. Its last occupant in the late 1990s was a lone researcher, famed inventor Otto Schmitt, in the last years of his own life.

Source: James Litsheim, University of Minnesota
Writer: Chris Steller

In the news business' current economic climate, it's hard to imagine a newspaperman with enough cash to put up a castle.

But the castle-like mansion that Swan Turnblad built in Minneapolis a century ago stands as proof that it once was possible. And as if to repeat the stunt, the mansion's current owner, the American Swedish Institute, has announced mid-recession plans for an addition to the Park Avenue icon.

It's an effort that, as with other cultural institutions' recent expansion plans, has seen a course correction. But it wasn't a scaling-back due to donations drying up. Instead, a neighbor, Ebenezer, offered for sale its seven-story nursing facility next door.  ASI bought the property and its plans for a bulky addition with parking structure sidling up close to the historic mansion went by the wayside.

Instead, the Institute re-evaluated its needs and asked HGA Architects to design an addition that while still connected to the mansion would itself be less imposing, giving the Turnblad's landmark what Scandinavians might consider a more appropriate amount of personal space.

"A slightly smaller building," says Bruce Karstadt, ASI's president and CEO, "that doesn't need to be nestled up" quite so close to the old castle. It will house an event space, offices, and a crafts studio, among other things.

Karstadt says the ASI expects to break ground next year on the $21.5 million project, which now includes more restoration of the house (now museum) that typesetter-turned-publisher Turnblad built from his labors on the Swedish-language, Minneapolis-based newspaper Svenska Amerikanska Posten.

Source: Bruce Karstadt, American Swedish Institute
Writer: Chris Steller

Some places around town -- under-used, in transition -- seem to be waiting in the wings for their moment in the spotlight. Skewed Visions, a site-specific performance company based in northeast Minneapolis, makes such places part of the show.

Skewed Visions performances have taken place at sites ranging from the Grain Belt Brewery office building in Northeast to a storefront in Minneapolis' Elliot Park neighborhood and the old Drake Marble building on St. Paul's West Side.

As he ticks off those and other performance locations, founding member Charles Campbell notes that every one of the buildings Skewed Visions has visited has seen a new use since.

Moving outside the world of ready-made stages and seats is no simple matter. The company encounters many of the same obstacles that developers -- or other site-specific visual artists, such as Christo -- face when they try to make permanent or even temporary additions to the urban landscape.

Skewed Visions has a light touch at the locations where they perform, Campbell insists: "It's not a high-impact kind of thing."

At the moment, Skewed Visions has its sights set for a future production at a downtown St. Paul site that Campbell wants to keep secret until negotiations with local governmental agencies and other organizations are further along. The performance will be based loosely on "Austerlitz," a book by the late German author W.G. Sebald.  

Skewed Visions' goal is "to make something exciting to witness," Campbell says -- "to engage not just the audience but the spaces."

An effort to buy the stones that once made up Minneapolis' tallest--and, many say, finest--19th-century building continues to build steam.

Recovering and re-using the massive remnants of the legendary Metropolitan Building is suddenly a cause celebre among preservationists. The campaign promises partial redemption for the building's now-lamented destruction a half-century ago, at the nadir of an urban renewal era that devastated the city's most historic section.

Granite blocks from the majestic 1890 structure sit in a huge pile in rural Delano, where waiting to be crushed for road projects. "Most of them are the size of a large car," says Jack Byers, Minneapolis planning supervisor. He says stones with delicate carvings appear to have been placed in the middle of the jetty-like pile, possibly to protect them from the elements.

Byers is working with Preservation Minnesota, Preserve Minneapolis, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the Hennepin History Museum to find preservation funds, then a function, for the pieces of architect E. Townsend Mix's masterpiece.

Dean Phillips, creator of the "Bring the Metropolitan Back to Minneapolis" Facebook page, is eager to meet both challenges. He thinks the blocks would make a great a downtown urban ruins park.

"I'm a passionate fan of architecture, and Minneapolis architecture specifically," says Phillips, whose family's Phillips Distilling Company and Jay & Rose Phillips Family Foundation are in historic buildings in the Old St. Anthony district of Minneapolis. "I'm a sucker for a great story and a good puzzle. This has both of those."

Sources: Jack Byers, City of Minneapolis; Dean Phillips, Phillips Distilling Company and Jay & Rose Phillips Family Foundation
Writer: Chris Steller

The former Greyhound bus terminal in downtown Minneapolis completes its transformation this month into a total-package nightspot, with the opening--alongside the First Avenue and 7th Street Entry nightclubs--of the new Depot Tavern.
 
It is in the one part of the historic building that up until now has not been devoted to music, dance, and drink; most recently it held a storefront UnBank. But after what First Avenue's Madchen Davis says was "a long time coming," the Depot Tavern will serve bar food and drinks to clubbers, Twins fans and anyone else tempted by the aroma of bacon-wrapped Diamond Dogs wafting through the garage door that faces the sidewalk and will be open whenever the weather permits.
 
Davis, who works in promotions, says First Avenue saw that music fans were looking for a place to grab grub before or after a show. Even during a show, doors will allow movement between the Entry and the tavern. Davis says the Depot Tavern is about the size of the Triple Rock Social Club on the West Bank, maybe bigger.
 
With monitors streaming live video from performances taking place in First Avenue's Main Room and the neighboring Entry, Davis calls the Depot Tavern a perfect Plan B when shows are sold out. And it will also provide an opportunity for underage fans to catch acts (albeit on a flatscreen) that they might otherwise have to wait years to see.
 
Source: Madchen Davis, First Avenue
Writer: Chris Steller

Sanden Totten looks at the Twin Cities from his home in Minneapolis' Phillips neighborhood and his workplace in downtown St. Paul and sees infrastructure needs. Not the usual infrastructure tasks like filling last winter's crop of potholes or repairing bridges.

Totten is seeking ways to connect people with the cities' sizable inventory of murals, using technology and public input. He envisions something like bike routes criss-crossing the urban landscape that take riders from one mural to the next, via "place casting"--place-based podcasts that tell the stories behind the Cities' painted walls.  

Totten, a producer at Minnesota Public Radio's Public Insight Network, is bringing that organization's resources to bear on the challenge of mapping urban murals, first in Minneapolis, with St. Paul in the wings. He is currently soliciting ideas and mural recommendations at MPR's website and says the project will launch in July. The form it takes is still up in the air and will be determined in part by the contributions from the public.

The urge to map local murals isn't completely new or limited to Totten. Several years ago Kevin D. Hendricks set up a searchable catalog of nearly 150 Twin Cities murals, among other forms of public art, at his Start Seeing Art website. And Minneapolis City Council Member Gary Schiff has taken to posting on Facebook photos of delightful garage-door murals he encounters on his morning graffiti patrols of alleys in his South Minneapolis ward.

Source: Sanden Totten, Public Insight Network, Minnesota Public Radio
Writer: Chris Steller

Every city worth its salt has at least a few water tanks rusting atop century-old buildings. The lucky ones might score a paint job during a rehab or get depicted in a cityscape hanging on a coffeeshop wall. But few are brought to life like Rusty, the water tank overlooking the Minnesota Twins' new Target Field in Minneapolis' Warehouse District.

Every night since the Twins' home opener, projected images have animated the water tank's visage � most notably, "Rusty," a googly-eyed face that is already an unofficial team mascot and neighborhood icon. From his perch on the roof of the Wyman Partridge Building, Rusty winks, whirls and ogles at the action below, on and off the field (see video).

With a tank-head standing on support legs, "the water tower looks like it could be a person anyway," says Rusty's creator, Brock Davis, an artist who works by day at Carmichael Lynch, an ad agency in the same building.

The company asked Davis to do something creative with the tank in anticipation of its new prominence above the ballpark. Davis had admired European light-show projection work; that simple idea won out over more elaborate and expensive options.

In the future, the automated projections may key off of baseball results or use images that people submit via the Web. But Rusty's industrial-age roots will keep him a nostalgic, even primal presence. "It feels very retro to me," Davis says. "You look out into the darkness and there's something looking back at you."

Source: Brock Davis, Carmichael Lynch
Writer: Chris Steller

The Onion once ran a story about a Minneapolis architect's design for a house in which every room was a foyer. Orchestra Hall in downtown Minneapolis has had the opposite problem since its construction: not enough lobby space.

When it was built in 1974, funds were lavished on an acoustically excellent performance space but a more miserly approach was taken toward the public lobby and backstage areas.

The performance hall can hold 2,450 people but the lobby is meant to hold only 800. That leaves packed patrons with a choice at intermission, according to orchestra spokesperson Gwen Pappas: "Either to go to the restroom or to get a beverage. In 20 minutes, you certainly couldn't do both."

A design by KPMB Architects of Toronto was unveiled last month for a $38 million renovation to correct the imbalance, to be completed by 2013.

The square footage of lobby space afforded each patron will double. People in wheelchairs will come and go more easily; currently stairs are scattered throughout the lobby, remnants of the era before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

KPMB plans to raise the entire main lobby floor, now sunken, to street level, improving people-watching both into and out of the hall. New windows will also provide wider city views now blocked by huge blue tubes along the 11th Street exterior.

The biggest opportunity for intermission elbow-room comes with a lobby bump-out onto orchestra-owned land adjoining the Peavey Plaza public park, where sliding panels will encourage mingling among patrons and parkgoers, Pappas says.

Source: Gwen Pappas, Minnesota Orchestra
Writer: Chris Steller