My Night is a feature that lets you create a customized list of the projects you want to see at Northern Spark. You can add (or remove) projects using the "My Night" button — look for it on the Artists & Projects list (below each project image) as well as on individual project pages. Your "My Night" list can be printed, shared, or transferred to the festival’s mobile app.
Armed with cameras and a critical eye, more than a dozen Minneapolis teens documented their reflections and hopes for peace and safety in their communities. This collection of photographs represents their perception of the strengths and assets that support community peace and create an environment where young people can thrive.
Picturing Peace: PhotoVoice, 2012 is a collaborative community engagement and photography project that explores youth violence, peace and safety, and community supports for young people. Teens from local neighborhoods participated in the PhotoVoice workshops led by local artists Community Blueprint and Bfresh, in which they discussed issues confronting them as individuals as well as their community, learned the fundamentals of photography, and curated their own work to create this collection.
This photodocumentary project is coordinated and funded by the Downtown Improvement District and Minneapolis Department of Health and Family Support as part of its Minneapolis Blueprint for Action to Prevent Youth Violence.
Outdoor installation: The images are installed on sixteen utility boxes in east Downtown.
Download the walking tour map at www.minneapolisdid.com or pick one up at Minneapolis City Hall, Open Book, or Minneapolis Central Library. Connect to the link on each box to learn the photographer’s own perspective on that work.
Participate!
Announcing the Picturing Peace Photo Contest
Submit your own photographs that illustrate the theme of “Community Peace and Thriving Youth” and win the opportunity to have your work featured on the project website and installed on a utility box in Minneapolis. Go to www.picturingpeace.com for more information.
Presented by Minneapolis DID and Minneapolis Department of Health and Family Support
Color. Light. Sound. Visit Gamut Gallery’s grand opening show, featuring Brant Kingman and Silvia Yordanova, at 1006 Marquette Avenue. Veterans of this space will be familiar with the alleyway entrance, which leads to a live multimedia outdoor installation. View collaboration, live painting, sculpture, projections, and sound, inside and out of the Gamut Gallery.
ARTifacts in the Gallery, Live CoLab in the Alley highlights the debut of Gamut Gallery in downtown Minneapolis and previews what to expect from its CoLab events series.
What does it mean to “transform the world through creativity and purpose”? Using the college’s vision statement as a point of departure, this exhibition spotlights the myriad ways in which MCAD alumni have contributed to the transformation of the cultural landscape, in Minnesota and beyond. The creative practices of more than a dozen individuals and collaboratives working in the fine arts, graphic design, illustration, interactive media, and other entrepreneurial fields are featured. Experience engaging illustrations and books by Wanda Gág, paintings and prints of George Morrison, and mind-boggling interactive work by multimedia designer JK Keller—just a few of the artists in this exhibition that celebrates the 125th anniversary year of MCAD.
Christine Baeumler’s tamarack wetland restoration project on the roof of the main entrance to MCAD calls attention to these fragile and unique ecosystems and presents an artistic reimaging of green roof infrastructure. The project intends to remind residents how we might “reconstitute” the landscape by capturing water where it drops. An adjacent outside wall features a large-scale video projection of spectral tamaracks, and “field stations” are set up in the second floor galleries where the rooftop is especially visible through floor-to-ceiling windows. Visitors can look at the installation through binoculars, learn about the animals that inhabit this unique and often inaccessible landscape, and record their own observations. Maps of local remnant tamarack ecosystems and information on how people might explore these unique places will be available. During Northern Spark a naturalist will be on site to answer visitors’ questions.
Presented by MCAD Gallery at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with support from the McKnight Foundation, Barr Engineering, and the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization
Christine Baeumler
Christine Baeumler, the recipient of a 2011/12 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists, is associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota. As a public environmental artist, she explores the power of art to increase awareness about environmental issues and to facilitate action. She approaches her art through the combined perspective of art and the natural sciences, and her concern lies not only with diminishing ecosystems but also with the extinction of the human experience of these environments and the species that inhabit them. By portraying places remote from our daily experiences, yet impacted ecologically by our actions, her work offers the viewer a glimpse into these compelling, fragile, and often invisible worlds.
No, the sky is not falling. But standing in a space surrounded by hundreds of glow-in-the-dark bouncing Superballs might make visitors think otherwise. Walk into the space and the balls become part of your physical environment; watch from outside the transparent walls and observe the beautiful cascading rhythm as the balls roll to one end and are transported up again to the roof. Take a seat on the stationary bicycle that propels the balls up a conveyor belt and down into the structure. Unpredictable wonder!
Presented by Gallery 148 (a student-curated exhibition program) at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Ai Minnesota instructor and digital artist Tim Armato teams up with UX designer and musician Brian Rowe to create the Pix-aural Sensorium. Pulling from a stream of photos submitted from any mobile device, this project will generate a continuously evolving melody. The images are analyzed and the pixels are pushed to seed a generative musical score that accompanies a dynamic, large-scale, visual projection of the photo queue.
The Pix-aural Sensorium is presented by Tim Armato and Brian Rowe with support from The Art Institutes International Minnesota.
Student Spark is a curated exhibition of digital artworks created by Ai Minnesota students. Wave, jump around, and dance to control a wall of interactive art visualizations filling the gallery’s storefront windows.
Student Spark is presented by The Art Institutes International Minnesota.
Water Works Temporary is a convergence of multiple art and design projects at the proposed Water Works park site—the area from Third Avenue to Portland Avenue and from the Mississippi River to First Street. This site will feature Night Blooms, commissioned by Northern Spark from artist Wil Natzel; a horticulture exhibition among the mill ruins; and a landscape lighting scheme of the proposed Water Works Park.
Horticulture Exhibition
Making waves. Changing course. How landscape architecture is influencing the way we understand water.
This year the American Society of Landscape Architects–Minnesota Chapter (ASLA–MN) is focusing on protecting, enhancing, and celebrating our regional waters. Changes in climate and increased human pressures on our resources are difficult to predict. What is certain is that our complex connection with water will continue, as will our constant effort to understand and improve that relationship. The waterways we take for granted here in the Midwest create environmental, social, and economic ripples that can be felt across the country and around the world. Similarly, innovative projects have the power to alter the course of industries, fields of research, and the way we live. In 2012 ASLA–MN is showcasing the influence of water—one of the most powerful and important elements of our landscape—as well as the work it inspires and the legacy landscape architects will leave.
On the evening of June 9, ASLA–MN will demonstrate the confluence of innovative twenty-first-century water treatment, art, horticulture, and entertainment with floating islands and a giant outdoor living room in Water Works Temporary, located at the banks of the Mississippi River near the Stone Arch Bridge in downtown Minneapolis. The plan includes design and installation of a floating island in Mill Ruins Park that will improve water quality, attract beneficial plant and animal species, and help restore the river to a livable fishing habitat. These islands, known as floating treatment wetlands (FTWs), are powerful tools in water stewardship. They mimic natural floating islands to create a concentrated wetland effect. Constructed of durable, nontoxic postconsumer plastics and vegetated with native plants, the islands float on top of the water, providing a beautiful habitat for birds and animals, while underneath the surface they aid in cleaning the water by attracting microbes that are responsible for breaking down water-borne pollutants.
Join us as we celebrate our greatest state resource: water.
Night Blooms
For 2012, we commissioned Wil Natzel to create an architectural-scale installation just below West River Road Parkway near the Stone Arch Bridge from the humblest of materials: cardboard. Using a specialized CNC cardboard knife, he will make eight blooms ranging in height from 15 to more than 20 feet, assembled into a cluster. Each bloom has a round ten-foot diameter top that forms a permeable enclosure—an environment that can be explored throughout the night.
Natzel is interested in the history of architectural ornamentation, as well as its expression today using contemporary tools in unexpected ways with unusual materials. He has produced and assembled large architectural constructions of cut cardboard (giant domes with squids) at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. Night Blooms is his first outdoor cardboard installation. This whimsical bouquet, reminiscent of sunflowers stretching toward the moonlight of nuit blanche, contrasts with the surrounding historic structures in the community. The ephemeral materials, like a memento mori, remind us of the passage of time and the resourcefulness necessary to survive and prosper.
Natzel comments on his work: “With Night Blooms, I construct structures where pattern and decoration can thrive in architecture. I am creating spatial graffiti as a purely decorative enhancement to the built environment.”
Infrastructure as Habitat
The Minneapolis Park Foundation, with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and the College of Design at the University of Minnesota are sponsoring five installations at the Water Works site. University students created large scale cladding systems—as part of the RiverFirst project of proposed Knot Bridges—using drift wood and recycled industrial wood. Each cladding system is designed to provide habitat for a diversity of species along the river.
The Vine Arts Center invites you to join our vibrant artistic and bicycle-friendly community. We will be open from 6 pm until midnight on June 9 for the opening of the 2012 Spring Member Show, which features new and Northern Spark–inspired art. You can also enjoy the light artwork by guest artist Light the Underground outside the Ivy Building for the Arts—part performance art, part photography. The Vine Arts 2012 Spring Member Show will be on view until June 23, 2012.
Thirty members strong, the Vine Arts Center is an art-inspired space with a great gallery that promotes local artists and their artwork. Artist members work cooperatively to unite diverse artists, patrons, and the broader community through our creative presence and events. Vine Arts member shows bring out the best in our artists and our community. Members of the cooperative will be present on June 9 to enhance your experience of their work, and you may be inspired to create some art yourself!
Presented in collaboration with the Midtown Greenway Coalition’s Light Up the Greenway projects
Start off the night with food and drink by Bryant Lake Bowl, beer from New Belgium Brewing and live music in our gallery by The Serfs, Wailing Loons, and One Ukulele. Party with the Greenway Glow riders and check out our current exhibit Dream Lab.
Schedule of Music:
9 pm: One Ukulele
10 pm: Wailing Loons
11 pm: The Serfs
Dream Lab
Over the last three months, Intermedia Arts has invited over 60 artists, curators, youth, board, staff, neighbors and partners together to vision with us about the future of our property and facility. From green roofs to lip couches, natural light to art studios, food markets to dance clubs, the idea have ranged from the practical to the whimsical and everything in between. The Dream Lab exhibition showcases the visions and dreams from our community in a mural installation.
Electricity, which powers almost all technology in the twenty-first century, first became a useful energy source around 1800 with the invention of the battery. Since then, wires, switches, light filaments, transformers, motors, and floods of inventions (diodes, vacuum tubes, speakers, microphones, telephones, radio, TV, transistors, thermostats, and in our contemporary era LEDs, LCDs, CCD sensors, PCs, motherboards, chips, Ipads, and Siri) chart a history of dazzling innovation and miniaturization. In the process, however, electricity as something elemental and wondrous has become invisible. Our project is to reassert electricity’s essential mystery and to exteriorize and celebrate its properties along with its function as sign and symbol.
We will construct THE Northern Spark, an iconic electrical spark generator installation near the St. Anthony Falls hydroelectric plant, the only waterfall-driven hydroelectric plant on the Mississippi River. The installation will consist of a centralized rotating electrode arm from which electricity will jump across a spark gap to approximately one hundred terminals along a twelve-foot-diameter steel circle. Adjacent to the arcing power circle will be a video projection of closely related imagery, including the spark machine in operation, tonally reversed images of it, shadow images, close-ups, and other aspects.
David Goldes
David Goldes received an MFA from the Visual Studies Workshop at SUNY Buffalo; he also has a BA in chemistry and biology and an MA in molecular genetics from Harvard University. He has been awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, McKnight Foundation, and the Bush Foundation. His work was featured in the exhibition Midnight Party at the Walker Art Center. Since 1986 he has been a member of the media arts faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. http://www.davidgoldes.com
Jonathan Bruce Williams
Jonathan Bruce Williams received his bachelor of fine arts degree in photography from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008 and was awarded a 2009/2010 Minnesota State Arts Board Artists Initiative Grant and a 2010/2011 Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists.
SPARK3DS is an exhibition and mini symposium that explores the world of digital sculpture: sculpture created using virtual tools such as Rapid Prototype Machines (3-D printers), CNC Milling Machines, and Laser Router/Laser Cutters—all of which are software based design and sculpture / maker tools that produce machine printed or machine cut 2-D or 3-D objects.
SPARK3DS: An Exhibition of 3-D Printed Sculpture
Artist Receptions and Opening: Sat. June 9th, 7 pm – 2 am The focus of this exhibition and mini symposium is to expose artists and designers to an incredible art and design production resource that is just coming of age: customized, on demand, digital production for the individual studio practice. We are entering a period of time where artist are going to have core access to powerful software and machines that will aid them in the creation and manufacture of one work or a thousand works, right from their desk tops. While that is already happening for a group of artists and designers who are early 3D Print adopters, nationally and internationally, most studio artists and designers have not developed the resources or working knowledge that will enable their participation in this highly customizable digital, machine, production technology. 3-D Printing is the harbinger of a revolution that will help build a local and sustainable, creative economy: the digital studio.
SPARK3DS
Symposium: Sat. June 9th 10 am -3pm Open to artists, designers, educators, and the public.
Gallery13 will host artists and the general public at a Mini Symposium on Saturday June 9th: 10am-3pm where industry along with visiting artists will participate in a forum of presentations, discussions and demonstrations. In this symposium participating and visiting artists will talk about their work and how digital production impacts creativity, production, and studio practice. Discussing and learning about individual and collective experience in the studio will provide a much needed basic and practical look at this new and more accessible art production industry. Finally we want attendees to better understand and grasp the vast amount of activity taking place, bubbling below the surface, in this area of the arts and to be able to come away with information that will help guide artists into this new area creativity, production, and art making. For more information or to register, go here.
Join the Weisguides for these interactive tours, and be prepared to engage all your senses. View art in a new way, with only a flashlight as your guide.
HOTTEA is the tag name of artist Eric Rieger, a critically acclaimed installation artist and designer who creates street art with skeins of yarn in the Twin Cities and internationally. For Northern Spark, HOTTEA employs yarn and recycled materials on an installation project that will add colorful warmth to Target Park and complement Palace of Wonder, the community project undertaken by Patty Mitchell and Robert Lockheed. Come by to see what they’ve done! Stand back to see it all, or move up close and get lost in the details.
Eric Rieger
Eric Rieger (HOTTEA) is a well-known street artist. His stunning typographical installations are both beautifully elaborate and simple. His works have been displayed by invitation throughout the United States and internationally, with recent exhibitions in London, Berlin, and Poland. HOTTEA has exhibited at Minneapolis Future Presence Gallery and HAUS Salon, and he contributed to a series of European television commercials for a Converse shoes campaign. He was invited to design and execute his work prominently at the 2012 Minnesota State Fair, and in 2013 he will exhibit new work with a solo show at the Burnet Art Gallery in downtown Minneapolis. He received his BFA in graphic design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
The Katherine E. Nash Gallery in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota presents Landscape of the Mind. The exhibition explores the relationships of landscape, imagination, and experience in a variety of media. Each of us inhabits two separate but related landscapes: the physical landscape that surrounds us and the mental landscape of our own interior environment. The body, memory, culture, and history moderate the intersection of these landscapes. The art in Landscape of the Mind explores the shape, texture, and topography of these spaces and the relationships between them.
The curators of the exhibition are Lynn Lukkas, associate professor of experimental and media arts in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, and Howard Oransky, director of the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. Landscape of the Mind includes a site-specific artwork made by Berlin-based artist Ulrike Mohr during her residency at the University of Minnesota while teaching a sculpture workshop in March–April 2012. Projects made by the workshop students are displayed in a companion exhibition in the Quarter Gallery, also located in the Regis Center. Laura Aguilar: Life, the Body, Her Perspective, a video biography of the artist Laura Aguilar, will be screened continuously during the public reception on June 9 from 9 pm to 12 midnight.
The Regis Center for Art is wheelchair-accessible. All events at the Regis Center for Art are free and open to the public.
Artists featured in Landscape of the Mind:
Laura Aguilar, Rosemead, California Kate Casanova, Minneapolis Jan Estep, Minneapolis Jil Evans, Minneapolis India Flint, Mount Pleasant, South Australia Allen Guilmette, San Diego, California Mark Knierim, Minneapolis Joyce Lyon, Minneapolis Ulrike Mohr, Berlin, Germany Pipo Nguyen-duy, Oberlin, Ohio Jane Norling, Berkeley, California Rebecca Pavlenko, Minneapolis Anette Rose, Berlin, Germany Bernhard Sallmann, Berlin, Germany Petra Spielhagen, Berlin, Germany Kenneth Steinbach, Minneapolis JoAnn Verburg, Minneapolis
Presented by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, with support from the Goethe-Institut Chicago.
The Weisman Art Museum opens all its current exhibitions for the entire night. Take a flashlight tour with the Weisguides or visit your favorite masterpiece in the middle of the night. Free.
Located in the Edith Carlson Gallery in the Weisman Art Museum
FLO(we){u}R is a month-long performative installation that returns The Soap Factory to a site of industrial production. Artists Amber Ginsburg and Joe Madrigal will recreate a World War I–era target test dummy bomb factory, creating target test bombs from terra-cotta in the gallery space.
FLO(we){u}R highlights a little-known detail of American military history. Beginning in 1914, terra-cotta factories, which produced the decorative façades on buildings in downtowns across the United States, were commissioned to make ceramic test bombs for the Air Force. The ceramic bombs were then filled with baking flour and dropped from airplanes; the white marks made by broken shells allowed pilots to calibrate their targeting.
The Soap Factory’s gallery space will house a full-scale bomb manufacturing facility, and all aspects of production will be on display, from clay mixing through molding to drying. Over the course of the project, labor will accumulate in the form of dummy test bombs. Two variations of the terra-cotta dummy bomb will be produced based on original World War I blueprints. One model is fired for use as a seed shaker. The second model, un-fired, will be used for test launches and a one-time seed dispersal at the end of the exhibition. These seedings will leave new white blooming marks on the landscape. The Soap Factory’s location in Minneapolis’s historic milling district lends rich context to the humble materials filling each bomb.
During FLO(we){u}R, the audience will see production in process and will be able to interact with the dummy test bombs. Deviating from the military’s intentions toward accuracy and destruction, the interactive and performative elements will address dispersion and formation, using history and metaphor to insert a poetic undoing of the bombs’ military past. Gallery visitors are encouraged to fill bombs with a custom mix of flour and white blooming seed mixes. This mix will be scattered throughout Minneapolis by artist-led seed walks throughout the city’s park system or by bicycle seed rides.
The finale of FLO(we){u}R will take place during Northern Spark on June 9. With the factory cleared away from The Soap Factory, the remaining bombs will be racked, ready for anyone to take them away, replacing the military precision of aerial targeting with the random trajectories of strangers in the night.
“The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it is.” —Percival Lowell, Mars and Its Canals, 1906
Margaret Pezalla-Granlund’s exhibition Extramundane will explore the imaginative and expressive potential of modeling speculative landscapes: those unexplored places beyond what we can see, the places beyond our everyday world, the extramundane.
The American astronomer Percival Lowell popularized the theory of the Martian Canals through his books, including Mars and Its Canals, in which he imagines the citizens of the dying planet working in harmony to engineer a system of planet-wide canals to carry water from the shrinking polar ice caps. Today, one hundred years after Lowell was widely discredited, amateur scientists still scrutinize images of Mars for evidence of an advanced civilization. We are inspired and moved by our desire to discover something extraordinary. What if we could see beneath the surface of Mars? What if we could model the wondrous things just beyond our ability to see?
For 2012, we commissioned Wil Natzel to create an architectural-scale installation at the northeast end of Portland Avenue near the Stone Arch Bridge from the humblest of materials: cardboard. Using a specialized CNC cardboard knife, he will make eight blooms ranging in height from 15 to more than 20 feet, assembled into a cluster. Each bloom has a round ten-foot diameter top that forms a permeable enclosure—an environment that can be explored throughout the night.
Natzel is interested in the history of architectural ornamentation, as well as its expression today using contemporary tools in unexpected ways with unusual materials. He has produced and assembled large architectural constructions of cut cardboard (giant domes with squids) at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. Night Blooms is his first outdoor cardboard installation. This whimsical bouquet, reminiscent of sunflowers stretching toward the moonlight of nuit blanche, contrasts with the surrounding historic structures in the community. The ephemeral materials, like a memento mori, remind us of the passage of time and the resourcefulness necessary to survive and prosper.
Natzel comments on his work:
“With Night Blooms, I construct structures where pattern and decoration can thrive in architecture. I am creating a spatial graffiti as a purely decorative enhancement to the built environment.”
Wil Natzel
Wil Natzel lives and works in Owatonna, Minnesota. He graduated from the Cranbrook Academy of Art with a master’s degree in architecture after receiving an undergraduate degree in architecture from Iowa State University. Early in his career, he was an intern for Charlie Lazor, designing FlatPak bathrooms. Now his work circulates around the periphery of eclectic architecture, counteracting the banal.
The Stone Arch Bridge, overlooking St. Anthony Falls and connecting the east and west banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis’s historic milling district, is a primary site of Northern Spark.
University of Minnesota graduate Robin Schwartzman came up with the concept to light the bridge with a short text by Theodor Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss). THINK AND WONDER, WONDER AND THINK has become the 2012 festival theme and Robin will create the phrase in large, illuminated letters that will hang between the spans of the bridge on both sides. Visible for miles, the project will be mounted a week before Northern Spark’s nuit blanche as a clarion call to think and wonder — not only about the upcoming event but about the art of the world around us. As one participant in Northern Spark in 2011 wrote:
“Art is everywhere. The night of Northern Spark transforms your consciousness. Yes, you read the brochure and move from installation to installation, but you’re also always on the lookout for what might be new or different. Suddenly, everything becomes art: the lights under the 35W bridge; couples stealing a kiss under an archway; even spaces that you had never previously considered as anything other than no man’s land. The next morning, the sensation continues, and your senses are heightened for hours.”
Robin Schwartzman
Robin Schwartzman is the CNC Router Technician and an Adjunct Instructor at the University of Minnesota. She was Northern Spark’s Volunteer Coordinator in 2011. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota and her BFA from Syracuse University. She grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, where she spent her summers working at a local amusement park; seduced by the bright lights and moving colors, she has continued to work at carnivals and theme parks during the past ten years. Her experiences in these whimsical environments provide a basis for her sculptures, installations, and puppetry.
