Arts and Culture : Featured Stories

Franklin Avenue east of Hiawatha in Minneapolis used to be best known for bars and blight. Today, though, the area is blooming with Native enterprise as an American Indian Cultural Corridor takes shape. Culture and art are major drivers of the neighborhood's renaissance--an art gallery is one of the anchors, and there are new tribal and company offices and apartments too--and plans call for a brand-new mixed-use building and a Native-owned hotel. The biggest change, though, is a new sense of cohesion and pride at street level.

A survey by the Knight Foundation and Gallup found that cities do better economically when the people in them want to stay in them.It also found that Twin Citians are held here by many things, including our arts and cultural amenities, our parks and recreational advantages, and our improving transit picture. With a new year has come a new political climate, and fiscal challenges continue at all levels of government. What does this mean for our likelihood of holding on to the things that keep people loving the Cities? Holly Dolezalek asked some experts.

We've learned to count on the Walker Art Center to bring some of the freshest, edgiest performance troupes in the world to the Twin Cities, from venerable modern masters like choreographer Merce Cunningham and Japanese  dance legend Kazuo Ohno to young companies that fuse theater, dance, video, and installation art in unpredictable ways. Tomorrow night (January 6), the WAC inaugurates its 2011 Out There series, an annual showcase for eclectic, genre-bending and -blending stage performance, with Show Your Face!, a decidedly grown-up puppet drama.

The large images that lead off each issue of The Line are one of the ways we express our feelings about the Twin Cities. Managing Photographer Bill Kelley strives to shoot pictures that convey what we love about our towns right now and what we hope for them in the future--a fusion of beauty, energy, fun, and promise. Here are thirteen mastheads that Bill has picked from the more than two dozen he's shot since The Line debuted back in May. We hope they help you see Minneapolis/Saint Paul as both a deeply familiar and a brand-new place.

In North Minneapolis, there's an arts center that's been tapping into, and amplifying, the energy of African-American youth culture for fifteen years. Juxtaposition Arts is a place where neighborhood kids fired up by hip-hop turn street savvy into beauty and visual excitement through art and design. "Juxta" has collaborated with the likes of the Walker Art Center and the Guthrie Theater, but its heart has always been in its neighborhood; and now, with a planned $8.2- million expansion, it's primed to be a major player in the cities' art scene as it amps up its impact on the North Side.

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?

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.

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.

The palmy days of Prince, H�sker D�, the Replacements, and other iconic Twin Cities bands may have passed, but our music scene is just as vital, and a lot more diverse, today. Just as in the golden age, seeing and hearing the bands live is crucial to really getting to know the scene, so here is our list of definitive venues--from the legendary and cavernous former home base of the Purple One, First Avenue, to the beer-fragrant holes-in-the-wall where tomorrow's stars are plugging in their amps.

The three self-confessed "broke, clueless twenty-somethings" who put out MPLS.TV five days a week want to take their cheeky, edgy web-video love letter to the cities to the next level. With new offices in Northeast, a growing fan base and social-media profile, and no end of new ideas, they just might make it.

Six friends who live near the struggling intersection of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis wanted to see what they could do to revitalize their neighborhood. So, in the middle of an economic downturn and against most of the odds, they formed a nonprofit to create, of all things, an art center centered on fire. They worked hard and got lucky, and the Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center is set to open in October with classes in welding, forge building, jewelry making, and blacksmithing. If their luck holds, the CAFAC will be also be a crucible for change in the 'hood.

Guitarist Da�th� Sproule, a globe-trotting member of the Celtic supergroup Altan and one of the true giants of traditional Irish music, lives not in Dublin or New York but on Saint Paul's West Side--along with a growing community of musicians who play Irish music locally and nationally, and who love the fact that their close-knit neighborhood gives them plenty of chances to get together and jam.

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.

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.

The Twin Cities teem with cool crafters whose edgy and beautiful creations go miles beyond hand-painted "Bless This Mess" signs and laser-cut rocks that bid us "Imagine." For a long time these artists' main outlets were occasional crafts fairs and web sites. Then along came Sarah Sweet and Angela Lessman, who crafted the big, colorful, funky consignment store in Northeast Minneapolis with the disarming name. All it took for the shop to succeed was a dream, a near-failure, and a work ethic that borders on insanity.