creative economy : Featured Stories

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.

You don’t need a stats pack to accept the obvious: craft beer is big business in The North, particularly in MSP’s hottest neighborhoods. Here are seven new craft-beer concepts coming soon.

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.  

Metro Transit's first aBRT, the A Line, provides fast, frequent, all-day service in one of the region’s busiest transportation corridors for MSP'ers.

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.  

Lowertown boasts a growing roster of relocated and expanded businesses—some from the suburbs, others spun out of Lowertown’s COCO, and some born and bred in the district’s office lofts and storefronts.  

We introduce the first in a two-part series about how MSP became the second-largest theater region after New York, as well as mobile, inventive and idiosyncratic.

The arts real-estate nonprofit Artspace is re-scaling its work to take a more geographic approach that includes consulting with a cohort of art organizations in Detroit and developing creative districts in rural Colorado. 

New research reveals the catalytic role that libraries and museums are playing in rebuilding troubled neighborhoods. These important  "anchor institutions" are helping drive economic, educational and social efforts in their neighborhoods.