Creative Economy : Featured Stories

Minneapolis Institute of Arts' first-ever curator of contemporary art talks about how she uses new art to illuminate old art (and vice-versa) in the MIA--and her plans for new forms of community involvement with the museum.

What do Black Hawk Down star Josh Hartnett, Tony award nominee Laura Osnes, and Comedy Central writers Charlie Sanders and Colton Dunn have in common? They all once belonged to this stellar Minneapolis youth theater company.

Three shops that are helping to redefine thrift shopping--turning it into an environmentally conscious, art-and-design focused way of celebrating and honoring the past while meeting today's economic challenges.

Across America, creative reuse organizations are popping up to "upcycle" and sell stuff that would otherwise end up in a landfill. Artisans and artists are, in turn, turning this would-be detritus into artworks and products.

In a Q and A with The Line, marketer and theater maven Mayer asks: with nearly eighty professional theater companies in town, why don't we do more to promote theater as an attraction that sets the Twin Cities apart?

Croissant-loving editor compares four of the finest products of local artisanship.

On Saturday night, lensman Bill Kelley braved the threat of another downpour to take some lively shots of Secret City, Minneapolis' answer to the Northern Spark alfresco arts festival, which was based solely in St Paul this year.  Check out his images of Aztec dance, djs, fire performance, sound art, and a huge inflatable civic mood ring called MIMMI.

"If urban planning is musical composition, then placemaking is improvisational street performance." Five tested tips for doing the much-talked-about, rarely defined, improvisational, street-level, people-oriented form of urban design that's rapidly replacing the old top-down paradigm in the Twin Cities and across the country.

If you're on the board of directors of HUGE Theater in Minneapolis, you have to improvise. That is, you have to actually go onstage and do improv in a three-evening run that is also an official series of board meetings.

Your editor helps run a meditative labyrinth-walking project amid the cheerful madness of the Northern Spark one-night, all-night arts festival--and points out another cool artfest that's ongoing.