creative leadership : Featured Stories

A new independent bookstore! A second ReStore store! Plus a community garden celebration and an art exhibit and fashion show featuring motorcycle helmets highlight September arts and culture.  

In the coming years, communities, businesses and nonprofits will increasingly look to architects for design solutions that extend well beyond buildings.  

Who are the local players behind MSP’s craft coffee scene? These four local roasters are undeniably at the movement’s fore, sparking a revolution in how we talk about roasting and experience tasting.  

Not-to-miss Fringe shows, a neighborhood happy hour, beer and bikes…a few of our favorite things for August arts and culture.    

The Bancroft Meridian Garden, founded in 1996 on a lot along 38th Street in South Minneapolis, began as a flower garden. But communities change. So do their gardens. Now it's a food forest for the neighborhood.

Designer David Strand looked beyond the brown asphalt shingles on a drab St. Paul foursquare and found an urban farmhouse ready for a light and airy modernization.      

Farm-fresh produce, handmade books on a floating library, historic walking tours along the Green Line and feasting locally are our top picks for July arts and culture in MSP.   

A new campus renovation announced this past spring will better connect the Walker Art Center with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, reinvigorating a longstanding city and art center partnership.

MSP boasts a cultural milieu in which diverse art forms, architecture and design take root and flourish. Metalsmithing, which includes jewelry design, is an integral part of the culture.

Festivals galore during the month of June, just a few of them listed here. There's the big one--Northern Spark 2016--as well as smaller neighborhood gatherings and opportunities to make new friends over food and brews.  

Since they began farming in Vermillion Township in 2014, HAFA's members have introduced Minnesotan palates to new flavors, seen production and profits increase exponentially, and cultivated a greater sense of community.

A recently completed affordable-housing complex in the South Quarter of Minneapolis is arguably the most healthy and sustainable in the U.S.    

In declaring 2016 the Year of Music, the City of St. Paul showcases all of the music genres, schools, initiatives and venues thriving throughout the city as economic drivers and cultural amenities.

Makers—the artists, entrepreneurs, innovators (aren’t they all the same?) who brighten lives with their joy of creativity and aesthetic panache—highlight May’s selections. Art-A-Whirl, of course. But the MSP Maker Faire is big news, too.  

The second article in our two-part series about the diverse people and companies that helped build the Minneapolis-St. Paul theater community.