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Creative Leadership : Featured Stories

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The shops @ Selby and Snelling

On a once-stodgy Saint Paul corner, boutiques blossom

Dan Heilman Wednesday, December 01, 2010
Time was when the northwest corner of Snelling and Selby was a meat-and-potatoes kind of locale: A sporting-goods store was there, and a shoe shop and a day-labor place. Then along came developer Ed Conley, who remade two buildings on the corner. The result: one of the city's plus chic shopping destinations, home to a designer handbag shop, hip vintage wear, lingerie, couture, and more. It's a peaceful, colorful touch of European-style savoir-vivre at one of the capital city's busiest intersections.
Bike Composting

Eureka: The offbeat recycling company that wants to go way beyond recycling

Karen Olson Wednesday, November 17, 2010
If you live in one of the cities and towns Eureka Recycling serves, chances are you've seen its big green trucks lumbering along, picking up waste. But if you think Eureka is just another green-bottles here, brown-bottles there outfit, you're in for a surprise. It's one of only a handful of nonprofit recyclers in the country, and its vision goes way beyond recycling to a world that doesn't produce waste in the first place. To that end, it collaborates with artists and restaurateurs, encourages manufacturers to think zero-waste, and in many other ways acts as if the green future has already arrived.
Trylon Cinema

Dale Connelly, Resident Tourist, visits Trylon Microcinema, the biggest little theater in town

Dale Connelly Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Dale Connelly--disc jockey, wit, culture maven, and for many years the co-host of Minnesota Public Radio's Morning Show, is back, and we've got him. As the Resident Tourist, he'll drop into The Line from time to time to share some of his favorite Twin Cities phenomena. This week: the tiny, elegant Trylon Microcinema, a cineaste's labor of love that lets fifty people at a time watch classic films in plush red seats. Does it have a chance against the multiplexes? Or is it playing an entirely different game?
John Foley of Level

John Foley's 4Front festival: turning our towns into world centers of creativity

Chris Steller Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Like it or not, the Twin Cities are competing with major metropolises around the world--we're talking Amsterdam, London, Tokyo, and the like--to attract creative, innovative, entrepreneurial people who can live anywhere. That's the message of adman John Foley, whose brand-new nonprofit, 4Front, aims to raise awareness of this high-stakes situation by creating a yearly festival that's part competition, part showcase of Twin Cities innovation. The goal: to lure the best and brightest worldwide to our towns.
Steven McCarthy

Where is product design headed? A U of M symposium offers up-to-the-minute answers

Camille LeFevre Wednesday, October 13, 2010
To celebrate the creation a graduate minor in product design, and raise awareness of the field within the Twin Cities' vibrant design community, the University of Minnesota's College of Design held a wide-ranging symposium on the discipline of designing objects to sell. Experts weighed in on everything from the role of humor in design creativity to the popularity of vintage clothing stores--and more than one presenter warned that the increasing geographical separation of design centers from factories is weakening product design in the US and favoring China, where designers and producers interact with ease.
Chef David Fhima

For chef David Fhima, healthy eating isn't necessarily lo-cal, lo-carb--it's all about real food

Lori Storm Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Want to be healthy? The celebrated Moroccan-born chef David Fhima says: eat butter, cream, and other supposedly "bad" foods if you love them. But eat them in moderation, and in all your eating, opt for "real food"--fresh foods that come right from mother nature. The stuff Fhima is phobic about is lo-cal fake food that may not be fattening, but isn't healthy either. The chef, who's had his share of glitzy successes and failures in the Twin Cities restaurant scene, has brought this "real food" philosophy to his Saint Paul restaurant, FACES, to Lifetime Fitness' health clubs, and even to high school.
Lili Hall of Knock

Will gritty Glenwood Avenue be the next hot creative district? Forward-thinker Lili Hall says yes

Amy Goetzman Wednesday, September 08, 2010
When Lili Hall moved her hip marketing agency, KNOCK, from the Warehouse District into a massively remodeled former grocery market on Glenwood Avenue, eyebrows were raised. After all, the street was best known for the municipal impound lot, vacant storefronts, and vast stretches of cracked concrete. But Hall is sure that Glenwood's creative resources (International Market Square, for one) and its role as a gateway to downtown foretell a cool future for the struggling street--and she intends to help it happen.
Aaron Porvaznik of Olive & Myrtle

Online merchant Aaron Porvaznik: bucking a down economy by being greener than the next guy

Meleah Maynard Wednesday, September 01, 2010
On his web site Olive & Myrtle, Saint Paul designer/merchant Aaron Porvaznik sells beautiful, high-design things, from housewares to toys to bedspreads, that aren't exactly necessities. So why is he thriving at a time when most folks don't have many spare dollars to spend? It might have something to do with the passionate care he takes to make sure that everything on Olive & Myrtle is sustainably sourced--and his conviction that good design and sustainability are practically the same thing.
Mojo Minnesota

The MOJO Minnesota "agitators" want investors to get risky--and innovators to get what they need

Dan Haugen Wednesday, August 25, 2010
The eleven people who formed the "innovation advocacy force" called MOJO Minnesota have been working hard to make it easier for smart money to reach bold entrepreneurs. They pushed hard for the recently passed Angel Investor Tax Credit, and, as Innovation and Jobs editor Dan Haugen found out when he talked to two of them, they're still on the front lines of the effort to fire up our state's startups.
Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson

The creative connectors behind Works Progress turn networking into an art form

Molly Priesmeyer Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson recently got married--but the wedding was only one of the many connections they've been making as members of Works Progress, a wide-ranging, multi-project organization dedicated to bringing people, ideas, and new perspectives on culture together. Call it face-to-face Facebook, a sharing of real concepts and real skills in the real world, all done in the spirit of improvisation and artistic innovation.
Meatloaf at the Uptown Cafeteria and Support Group

Bringing ideas to the table: Three hot restaurants that break the mold

Ellen Shaffer Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Nothing helps a new restaurant get off the ground faster than a fresh idea--a brand-new way to dine as well as great food and a hot location. Three new Twin Cities restaurants--the Uptown Cafeteria and Support Group, Barrio Tequila Bar, and Ringo--offer this special kind of conceptual freshness. But they give it an egalitarian Twin Cities stamp too, by fusing the drop-dead hip and the decidedly democratic.
Ron in his studio

In the TractorWorks building, art comes off the walls and into the lives of office workers

Jon Spayde Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The trendy new TractorWorks office building in Minneapolis' North Loop looks a lot like an art gallery inside-- ex-SoHoite Ron Ridgeway has made it that way. The artist and design professional curates the building's art collection, but what he's actually creating is an art center where employees of the firms in the building can explore their creative selves and get their art on. In the world of "tenant amenities," this just might be 2010's answer to the workout room.
An Artist's Rendering of The Capitol East Station

All aboard: Years before it rolls, Central Corridor light rail is already connecting Twin Citians

Chris Steller Wednesday, July 21, 2010
It's four years before a single train is slated to set out on the tracks, but the Central Corridor light rail line between Minneapolis and Saint Paul has already created a powerful network of connections across the Twin Cities. In particular, ad-hoc collaboratives, instead of a single light-rail "czar" or bureaucracy, and Saint Paul's traditionally strong neighborhood political structure, have pushed planning for how the line will impact the city now and in years to come.
Community Supported Art box 1

From locavore to art-avore: the local-food movement inspires tasty new forms of art support

Camille LeFevre Wednesday, July 14, 2010
People love locally-sourced food and close connections with the people who grow it, right? That's what inspired the Community Supported Agriculture movement. Well, a few forward thinkers in local arts organizations wondered if they could harness that same passion for connection to help support area artists and make art-buying fun, and Community Supported Art was born: cratefuls of art instead of kale, kohlrabi, and spinach. Meanwhile, Brooklyn-born FEAST was established here too, offering artists a festive, food-themed new form of competitive patronage.
Joel Breeggemann

The get-to-NoMi guy: Joel Breeggemann knows why you should move to North Minneapolis

Laine Bergeson Wednesday, June 30, 2010
North Minneapolis--NoMi--has had its share of hard times, crime, and social dislocation over the years. But neighborhood advocate Joel Breeggemann is sick of one-sided portrayals of the neighborhood. He and other Northsiders know it as a friendly, green, increasingly trendy "small town in the city" where neighbors are joining together to make things better--and word has been getting out. Scores of first-time homeowners have been drawn into the neighborhood by Breeggemann's Get to NoMi Home Buyers Tours, which celebrate the North Side while showcasing some amazingly affordable houses.
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