Shanai Matteson really wants to connect me with someone. She leans over her sandwich at the Birchwood Caf� and whispers to me about a woman--a local writer and storyteller--who has just visited our table. "You should really talk to her," Matteson says, covering the side of her mouth so as not to interrupt. "You'd really hit it off." It turns out she was right. The woman and I have a surprising number of project ideas in common and make a coffee date to talk about collaborating.

This is what Matteson and her newly betrothed, Colin Kloecker, do: They connect people and ideas like puzzle pieces. They're like masterful city planners, if a city were built on human links instead of crumbled highways. And they turn fostering new connections, building community, and promoting future-forward ideas into an art form.

Along with local artists and idea entrepreneurs Troy Gallas, Ben Shardlow, and Andy Sturdevant, the duo are collaborators in Works Progress, an umbrella organization that curates multi-disciplinary events, programs, and exhibits all over the Twin Cities in an effort to foster new connections and support the creative process. The group is responsible for, among other things, the West Bank Social Club (a sort of "social laboratory" for creative pursuits); Give and Take (a show-and-tell/exchange of ideas at Intermedia Arts, in which participants share knowledge of anything from knot-tying techniques to paleontology, and engage in what WorksProgress calls "socially focused games"); and Salon Saloon, a "live magazine"/talk show held at Bryant-Lake Bowl and focused on discussions of creative life in the Twin Cities.

Social Media's Cousin--and Antidote

Works Progress, as Kloecker describes it, is a network of creative collaborators built on the idea of what he calls cultural ecology. "It's really about studying and facilitating connections in an environment," he says. The lanky and bespectacled Kloeker wipes his mustache and lets out a nervous, boyish laugh that belies his obvious ambition.
"Okay, let's put it this way," he says, clasping his hands together on the table to punctuate his point. "Biodiversity creates strength in an ecosystem. We really want to help create diversity in a community and environment."
If social media are about digital connections and experiences, Works Progress programs are both their cousin and antidote, creating tangible experiences that expose the limitation of closed-beehive social-media connections while revealing the strengths of fostered real-world exchanges of skills and ideas. 

That's because Matteson and Kloecker aren't talking strictly about cultural diversity when creating their Petri dish of people�they're talking about putting together a diverse group of people with different skills, strengths, resources, and ideas to help facilitate a unique experience that teaches and inspires. 

"It's about creating fertile ground for more diversity. It's about asking, 'What unique skills and strengths can we learn from one another?'" Mattson says, referring to much of the Works Progress programming, such as its most recent exhibit/community interaction space at Intermedia Arts.

For the project, dubbed "We Work Here," the group created exhibits exploring the contributions that artistic and creative work makes to the community and to individual lives; plus an idea exchange and a temporary employment agency for creative-sector workers. The project was designed to encourage participants to value creative work by thinking about the way they use resources.

"We came to realize that, what we were really hoping was that we would connect people," Matteson says. "And maybe someone would get work out of it, or maybe someone would decide they wanted something they'd never needed before. But really it was also about the long-term success of that connection, and the value they started to place on that work."

A Career-Suicide Pact

Both Matteson and Kloecker know a thing or two about the value of creative work. A few weeks ago, Kloecker, who was trained as an architect, quit his career-paving job at a local architectural firm. "We were sitting around with some friends of ours the other day," Kloecker says, smiling sideways and gesturing towards Matteson. The two were recently married in Milwaukee, but they finish each other's sentences more like a couple with four decades of marital ups and downs instead of just two years of courtship. "And we all decided to commit career suicide," Matteson says, erupting into smiles.

Kloecker went in and quit that Monday, while Matteson, whose background is in biology and who works on films and other projects at the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum of Natural History, was slightly more restrained. "I want part-time," she offers sheepishly. "I love the work I get to do," she says, referring to her contributions to an upcoming film about polluted waters. "And in some ways the two are connected."

They quit (and part-quit) to devote their time to Works Progress. Formed recently as a sum of its parts, Works Progress is the result of Kloecker and founding Works Progress partner Troy Gallas' original brainchild, Solutions Twin Cities, a platform for future-positive creative thinkers and social entrepreneurs to share their ideas. Kloecker and Matteson originally met on a Solutions Twin Cities project, when she reached out to him to speak at an event. Kloecker jokes: "We became intoxicated with a dangerous mix of business and pleasure that we continue to indulge in to this very day!"

The Works Progress Whirlwind

That "intoxicating mix" includes a generous measure of exhaustion. Since committing their career suicide pact, the pair has been involved in a whirlwind of projects, including "Commons Census," a public research project on the concept of cultural commons--shared cultural resources that are free to all--commissioned by the Walker Art Center's Education and Community Programs Department.

The creative collaborators did it while planning their wedding and a celebratory barn dance (which, of course, included a stage to share stories, ideas, and art) and still maintaining Give and Take, Salon Saloon, Solutions Twin Cities, and the events at West Bank Social Center. But they are currently in the process of closing the Social Center in search of a storefront for ideas and relationship-building. "We learned a lot about opening and maintaining this kind of space, and will be far more deliberate about how we go about doing it again in the future," Kloecker says. "But this kind of social space is something we feel very strongly about and we will resurface again."

As for what the future holds, both Matteson and Kloecker say their metrics for success aren't based on numbers and money, but on long-term goals that are hard to quantify. "In the long term," Matteson says, "It's about growth." But there's no easy way to measure it, she adds. "Culture and knowledge don't work that way. You have to focus way more on the experience."

Molly Priesmeyer is a Minneapolis writer and editor.


Photos, top to bottom:

Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson: married to Works Progress and each other (photo by Bill Kelley)

The audience gets connected in the "Give and Take" project. (photo by Kaeti Hinck, courtesy Works Progress)

Table play at "Give and Take" (photo by Kaeti Hinck, courtesy Works Progress)

A job seeker examines listings at the creative-capital exhibition "We Work Here." (photo by Zoe Prinds, courtesy Works Progress)

"Salon Saloon," the "live magazine"/talk show about creative work (photo by Amy Berg, courtesy Works Progress)