Creative Leadership : Featured Stories

It's not a statue plopped in a park any more. Public art is a complex, dynamic new way of looking at the relationship between creativity and community. And Jack Becker, director of Saint Paul's Forecast Public Art, knows as much about that relationship as anybody in America. He led the effort to build up Forecast from a failing art gallery into a multitasking go-to organization for public artists around the Twin Cities and around the country, helping public art become a major public resource as well as a public delight.

Dan Noyes was a veteran teacher of architecture and design who wanted to create something new: a small, hyper-hands-on school of "ecological architecture" where the goal wouldn't be simply to turn out well-trained designers, but to nurture visionary poets of space-making whose work would foster a connection with the earth. When Noyes discovered that a century-old telephone exchange building in Northeast Minneapolis needed a basement tenant, one of the nation's smallest--and most innovative--graduate schools was born.

What can we do to do leverage the abundant high-tech talent in Minnesota into more startups? At the MinneBar 2010 conference, geeks and investors gathered to grapple with that question--among others--and to assess the state of the tech biz in the Gopher State. The verdict: More risk-taking, more mentoring, more connectivity are needed here--but everybody can keep their cabins.

 What's the special sauce that makes so many bright people who come here stay here--and a lot people who go away, come back? (And what do we need to make that sauce even richer?) Some local creative types weigh in.