Creative Economy : Featured Stories

Monday, May 6, The Line and its civic partners kick off a weeklong Placemaking Residency with urbanist and placemaker Katherine Loflin, who knows why we love (or don't love) our cities.

From Greenville, North Carolina to Baltimore, from Tampa to Denver to Cleveland to the Twin Cities, tech savvy, entrepreneurship, and investment are coming together to create bright clusters of digital innovation.

What if, instead of you going to a farmers market, the market came to you? That's the vision of an entrepreneurial couple who want to create a fleet of truck-drawn trailers full of food from local farms. They're calling on Kickstarter for help and betting that the market for fresh, local food can only, well, grow.

Consolidating its position as a laboratory for cutting-edge design thinking, the University of Minnesota's College of Design hosted the first Public Interest Design Week. Its climax was an awards show that displayed ingenious design-driven solutions to the dilemmas of poverty and ill health in America and around the world.

It's weathered industry exoduses and foreclosure--but now the proud old East Side Saint Paul neighborhood is home to a hot new bar/restaurant, Ward 6, that's both a sign of, and a force in, a wider renewal. 

This week: You've heard of "yarn bombing," knitting as a kind of graffiti (knitted cozies around trees and phone poles, yarn symbols strung through the links of chain-link fences, etc.). But how about knitting as out-there performance art? Our most fabulous local yarnmeister, StevenBe, will be doing just that on March 23rd. How will he turn knitting into performance? By weaving in stories--yarns?--from his glamorous life.

Despite a feisty ongoing effort to keep it open, Saint Paul's much-loved College of Visual Arts is slated to close--all the more reason to hurry over there to hear a talk about a fascinating Baroque artist, given by a fascinating local art historian/entrepreneur.