Announcing the winner of the 2018 Creative City Challenge

The 6th annual Creative City Challenge sponsored by the City of Minneapolis Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy program with Northern Lights.mn and Green Minneapolis challenged the Minnesota creative community to create a project to explore the theme of commonality this year.

We are pleased to announce that Carry On Homes, a multi-functional pavilion hosting the stories of immigrants in Minnesota was selected by a national jury of arts professionals and community advocates. Carry On Homes will be installed June – August in The Commons, where individuals can come together to explore the concept of home through community gatherings, workshops, live performances and personal reflection. Home is a universal idea that transcends divisions by race, religion, gender identity, and class. At home, we belong, we feel safe and we are loved.

Eric Quint, Chief Design Officer at 3M Company and Creative City Challenge Jury Chair said: “On behalf of the jury we want to congratulate the winning team for capturing the stories of immigrants searching for a place to build their homes. The multi-cultural team, connected through their artistic backgrounds, created this authentic installation to bring people together in the public space uniting them across nationalities.”

Conceived by five artists from five countries: Peng Wu (China), Shunjie Yong (Malaysia), Aki Shibata (Japan), Preston Drum (United States), Zoe Cinel (Italy) and stemming from the Carry On Homes documentary photography project (www.carryonhomes.com), this participatory sculptural installation reimagines the home as an open structure. Walls disappear, while invitations to engage appear in the multiple forms of a stage, a colorful mural, a reflecting garden, a photo gallery and a sculpture built from repurposed suitcases.

Carry On Homes will premiere at Northern Spark and is free and open to everyone, everyday, beginning June 15, 2018 and lasting throughout the summer.

The project is made possible by the City of Minneapolis’ Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy program in association with Northern Lights.mn and The Commons. CCC 2018 was juried by JD Beltran, Jennifer Carruthers, Hannah Gray, Lisa Helminiak, Jeff Johnson, and Eric Quint.

Read all about it on northernspark.org

From collectively woven poems to roving applause to a bank for empathy — northernspark.org is now up-to-date with descriptions, pictures and artist information from the complete line-up of interactive projects for this year’s festival. Take a cruise through the Art and Events page to warm up for your two, late-night jaunts in downtown Minneapolis this June.

Art on the Rooftop: a Party to Benefit Northern Spark

7-10pm on Saturday, June 16
The Rooftop Lounge at Le Meridien Chambers Hotel
901 Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis

Join Northern Spark’s 8th annual benefit party! Indulge yourself with artisanal food and drinks, while enjoying music from a local DJ. Experience unique interactions with Northern Spark artists with exclusive access to interactive art, window-drawn images, and hand-typed poetry. Surround yourself with instagrammable art!

What’s new this year? We extended the party for another hour! Now you can mingle longer with our artist-led projects under the moniker of commonality. Get up close with artists from Wakemup Productions, Carry on homes, Witt Siasoco, Kashimana Ahua, Clarence White, and many more!

Mercy Bar & Dining Room will offer holders of VIP tickets an exploration of their four other senses- taste, smell, touch, and sound by dining in the dark led by Chef Arich Miech. Dining in the Dark includes a five-course menu that will spark your taste buds. VIP tickets will sell out soon so purchase them quickly!

All general tickets include artisanal bite-size food and drinks from amazing local chefs, distilleries, and breweries. Experience a beautiful view of the sunset from the rooftop lounge at Le Meridien Chambers Hotel, a walking distance from Northern Spark!

Get tickets here!

Become a Sustaining Supporter

Northern Spark is a free event, but we rely on you to help make it possible. Supporters who sign up for monthly donations in any amount will receive a discount on tickets to the Art on the Roof Party to benefit Northern Spark. Sign up today.

Your sustaining support builds a critical financial foundation that lets us innovate and take artistic risks — but it also supports our agile organizational model, allowing our highly-skilled staff to focus more on their areas of expertise and less on fundraising. Thanks for showing up for us, and helping us show up for artists, audiences and communities year after year.

Partner Spotlight: The Commons and Green Minneapolis

When we first heard of a new park in downtown Minneapolis to be called The Commons, we were in the beginning stages of planning for Northern Spark 2017 on the Green Line. It was exciting to think of a field of green on which to stage challenging and exploratory, temporary art.

Thanks to the partnership and sponsorship of Green Minneapolis and our joint support and collaboration with the City of Minneapolis Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy program for the Creative City Challenge, Northern Spark returns to this urban park for the second time this summer. Opened in 2016, The Commons provides some much needed green space in the rapidly developing East Town neighborhood.

Northern Spark is far from the only event that takes place in The Commons. Green Minneapolis – the non-profit conservancy that works to keep the park safe, active and beautiful – hosts free public programming all year long, from poetry readings and ping pong tournaments to a weekly farmers market and outdoor film screenings. Visitors can also watch some kick flips at the X Games in July or huddle around a bright campfire in the winter. Keep an eye on The Commons website for posting of the full 2018 Summer Season, including programming by Carry On Homes.

We are thoroughly grateful to the staff of Green Minneapolis and The Commons for working with us to ensure that Northern Spark artists achieve their visions.

Partner Spotlight: Native American Community Development Institute

Tucked behind the Pow-Wow Grounds Cafe on Franklin Ave in Minneapolis’ American Indian Cultural Corridor are a suite of offices where the staff of the Native American Community Development Institute work. Founded in 2007, NACDI creates programs that contribute to a clear and necessary goal: helping Native people create the future they envision. Native artists, whose work is presented at NACDI’s All My Relations Arts gallery (AMRA), are integral to this vision.

Our relationship with NACDI began nearly 8 years ago when AMRA was a site for a conversation and screening at the first-ever Northern Spark in 2011. In years since we collaborated to bring visual artist Wendy Red Star to town, and to host poet and climate change activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner in collaboration with MN350.org.

We are excited to build on these artist-centered connections with the co-commission of a large, participatory installation for Northern Spark 2018. A Buffalo Nation: Creating Community by Keith BraveHeart (Oglala Dakota) is inspired by the historic photograph from 1870 of thousands of buffalo skulls piled stories high near Fort Sill, a U.S. Army base in present-day Oklahoma. The image speaks powerfully to the systemic near extinction of the buffalo sanctioned by the U.S. government in the 19th century.

At Northern Spark, BraveHeart and Native youth from Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute in South Dakota will invite festival goers to contribute to an ever-growing sculpture and to fold hundreds of paper buffalo. Silkscreen and origami paper folding stations will transform The Commons into a site for collective making, as people fold, print, and build to bring back the buffalo.

Taylor Payer, Director of Art and Cultural Engagement at NACDI, curator at AMRA and Buffalo project collaborator relates the project to the festival’s theme of commonality this way, “The near loss of the buffalo, an American icon, affected everyone in this continent both the indigenous people and the settlers who destroyed the buffalo. The buffalo is an easy American figure to connect to and one that warns of the perils of culture loss and climate change. It relates to the theme of commonality by warning us all to not let history repeat itself.”

After Northern Spark, the installation will be displayed during the Indigenous Peoples’ Day Festival 2018 in the American Indian Cultural Corridor in Minneapolis.

News

Rescheduled Illuminate the Lock Info Session + extended deadline

Due to last weekend’s snowstorm, we rescheduled the Illuminate the Lock Info Session for this Saturday, April 21. To accommodate the delay, the proposal deadline is extended by 1 day. Find the submission form here.

Info Session and Lock Walk-Through: Saturday, April 21, 1 pm

Upper St Anthony Falls Visitor Center

1 Portland Avenue Minneapolis, MN 55401

RSVP on Facebook

New proposal deadline: Tuesday, April 24, 11:59 pm CST

Work at Northern Spark! Paid positions available

We’re now hiring several positions to help with production leading up to and on the weekend of the festival. Crew and lead positions are available! Look here for position descriptions. Join the team! Positions are open until filled.

Volunteer at Northern Spark!

Our Volunteers light up the night(s)! Many helping hands are needed to make each night of the festival a success. Sign up now to get your choice of shift and invitations to social events before the festival.

AOV9 exhibition postponed

In our last newsletter we eagerly announced the exhibition opening of the 9th cohort of our Art(ists) on the Verge in May.  Unfortunately we’ll have to postpone our excited for a little while. Here is a message from our partners, The Soap Factory:

“We were so excited to reopen our doors; we got a little ahead of ourselves. The Soap Factory renovation is a big, complex project involving a 130-year old building with 52,000-square feet of space. Did we mention it was big? So maybe we were a bit overly optimistic thinking we could host the first exhibit in May. While we still plan on opening our doors for other programming later this summer, Art(ists) on the Verge 9 will now be presented in our space this fall.

Our priority is to make sure that the AOV9 artists are supported and have the space they deserve to present the projects they have spent the last year developing in this unique mentorship program.”

See you for AOV9 in September!