arts and culture : Featured Stories

In one magical zone in the Twin Cities, there's a loon made of junk, a chimney covered in shattered glass and ceramic shards, a place to buy tarantulas, and a hotel straight out of the Coen brothers. It's called the Central Corridor. The Line's ace managing photographer, Bill Kelley, and its managing editor, Jon Spayde, traveled University Avenue and Washington Avenue, where much of the light rail line will run when it's completed in 2014, seeking out their favorite offbeat, oddball, one-of-a-kind, things, things they hope and trust will be preserved through the construction of the line and the development of the Corridor neighborhoods. Herewith, their top ten.

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.

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.

There's a mythical yellow house in a made-up Minneapolis neighborhood where a pair of writers and a musician join together with a rotating company of guest actors and singers to poke gentle fun at the foibles of the city's young, hip, and hopeful. Welcome to Powderkeg Live!, the cool little radio-style live variety show that's miles from Lake Wobegon--but very, very Minnesota.

There's art happening in Saint Paul's oldest neighborhood, the solidly blue-collar West Seventh, and it's revitalizing the area without gentrifying it. Creative types love the big houses and exhibition spaces that are available, and they're determined to remain good neighbors to the immigrants and old-line St. Paulites among whom they live.

Design maven Alyssa Ford scoured the Cities for places where great design is for sale, from legendary pottery to elegant, magazine-spread-worthy home decor to art toys straight out of Japanese cartoon culture--and our photographer, Bill Kelley, came along. Check out her picks and his pix.

 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.