Contact:
Jaclyn Grossfield
Carmichael Lynch Spong
(612) 375-0656
Jaclyn.Grossfield@clynch.com

NORTHERN SPARK ALL-NIGHT ART FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES SECOND ANNUAL MINNEAPOLIS EVENT

Celebrate and Experience Creativity, Culture and Innovation at a Free Event the Whole Community Will Remember

MINNEAPOLIS – (April 16, 2012) ― Push your imagination to the limit and discover the creative culture of Minneapolis at Northern Spark, a one-night celebration of art, technology and community, beginning at dusk on Saturday, June 9 until dawn on Sunday, June 10 and free to the public.

The Northern Spark festival brings artists of all genres together for an entire-night celebration. Masters of interactive media, film, music, performance, comedy, public sculpture, light, DIY technology and more will display their work and engage visitors throughout the city of Minneapolis.

Exhibits will cover the city from the Stone Arch Bridge to the Walker Art Center, downtown, the Whittier Phillips neighborhood, Midtown Greenway and the University of Minnesota. A map of Northern Spark can be found on the organization’s website and via an interactive mobile app, which will launch the end of May. Northern Spark encourages art lovers and festival seekers to travel from event to event by foot, bus or bike. Those who choose to cycle and download the app can also order custom “auto-synching” Northern Spark “Kuramoto” bike lights by artist David Rueter. Event-goers will be fueled throughout the night by the city’s most popular food trucks.

“Northern Spark is the coolest cultural mash-up in the Twin Cities,” said Steve Dietz, founder, president and artistic director of Northern Lights.mn. “We are thrilled to have more than 100 artists and 60 partner organizations participating in Northern Spark. Last year more than 20,000 people from Minneapolis, St. Paul and the surrounding areas visited the festival to celebrate art and connect with the community. As one visitor memorably put it, ‘How often do you get a chance to be with thousands of people to see an experimental band, draw under the stars and wander through a gallery at 3 a.m. all in the same night?’”

For the week leading up to Northern Spark, the historic Stone Arch Bridge will host an impressive light installation to generate excitement and awareness before the event.

To keep festival attendees in the know throughout the night, Carmichael Lynch, Northern Lights and Pixel Farm Digital have created a mobile application called Northern Spark. The app offers a map of exhibits and Nice Ride bike stations. It will also show which exhibits are socially trending and gaining the most traction from visitors. Users are encouraged to check into events they attend through the app, which will be available for iPhone and Android mobile users by the end of May.

About Northern Lights.mn

Northern Lights.mn is an interactive media-oriented, arts agency from the Twin Cities for the world. It presents innovative art in the public sphere, both physical and virtual, focusing on artists creatively using technology to engender new relations between audience and artwork and more broadly between citizenry and their built environment. To view a map of the Northern Spark festival or see a complete list of artists participating in the 2012 event, visit http://2012.northernspark.org/ or connect with Northern Spark on Facebook and Twitter.

Northern Spark is supported by

Carmichael Lynch, Cynthia Froid Group, Dominium, Le Meridien, the city of Minneapolis, Mpls St Paul Magazine, Art Works, Nice Ride, Pixel Farm Digital, Prairie Vodka, Red Stag Supperclub, Smaby Family Foundation and The W Minneapolis.

INTRODUCING NORTHERN SPARK 2011: FIRST ALL NIGHT ART TAKE OVER OF THE TWIN CITIES

Minnesota to Get Overnight “White Night” Art Festival This Summer; Join Worldwide Nuit Blanche Movement

MINNEAPOLIS, February 2, 2011 – It’s no secret Minneapolis St Paul is one of the leading centers of art in the United States. But on June 4 this year, the Twin Cities will join for the first time, the worldwide Nuit Blanche arts movement by hosting “Northern Spark” (www.northernspark.org) the area’s first ever, all-night long arts festival.

For one night only, more than 60 regional and national artists together with the Twin Cities’ arts community will display new art installations at public places and unexpected locations throughout the city. Directed and produced by Northern Lights.mn and funded by the MN State Arts Board, Northern Spark takes place this summer from sunset on June 4 (8:55 p.m.) until the morning of June 5, 2011 (sunrise 5:28 a.m.).

“The Twin Cities has an amazing art culture and reputation,” says Northern Lights director, Steve Dietz. “Our aim is to really showcase that artistic excellence in a way never quite seen before by transforming the cities’ urban landscapes into a Twin Cites-wide art gallery for one special night.”

The Northern Spark event will include a wide diversity of art forms and projects including multi-story projections, audio environments with vistas, installations traveling down the Mississippi on barges, houseboats and paddleboats, headphone concerts, and the use of everything from bioluminescent algae and sewer pipes for organs to more traditional media such as banjos and puppets.

One of the most highly anticipated installations is Jim Campbell’s “Scattered Light” from New York’s Madison Square Park, in which LED light bulbs suspended in a cube-shape on high tensile wire blink on and off to recreate the forms of pedestrians’ movements in three dimensions. Other artists involved in the nuit blanche include Christopher Baker, Phillip Blackburn, Body Cartography, Bart Buch, Barbara Claussen, Wing Young Huie, Debora Miller, Minneapolis Art on Wheels, Ali Momeni, Janaki Ranpura, Red76, Rigo 23, Jenny Schmid, Andrea Stanislav, Piotr Szyhalski, Diane Willow, Roman Verostko, Liu Xuguang, Marcus Young, and others.

The event is a collaboration – rarely seen on this kind of scale – of more than 40 partners each of which will sponsor one or more projects for the duration of the night. The goal is to showcase the urban splendor of the Twin Cities in a unique way, introducing a broad and diverse audience to innovative local and national talent in an inspiring journey through the night.

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About Northern Lights

Northern Lights.mn is a roving, collaborative, interactive media-oriented, arts agency from the Twin Cities for the world. It presents innovative art in the public sphere, both physical and virtual, focusing on artists creatively using technology, both old and new, to engender new relations between audience and artwork and more broadly between citizenry and their built environment.

About Nuit Blanche events

(source Wikipedia.org)
Nuit Blanche (literally White Night, All-Nighter or Sleepless Night in French) or Light Night is an annual all-night or nighttime arts festival. Its exact beginning is disputed between Paris, St Petersburg, and Berlin, but, taking elements from all of these, the idea of a night-time festival of the arts has spread around the world since 1997, taking hold from Toronto to Tel Aviv and Lima to Leeds. A Nuit Blanche will typically have museums, private and public art galleries, and other cultural institutions open and free of charge, with the center of the city itself being turned into a de facto art gallery, providing space for art installations, performances (music, film, dance, performance art), themed social gatherings, and other activities.

Participating Organizations

Northern Spark participating organizations include: 1419 Artists in Residence, All My Relations Art, American Composer’s Forum, The Art Institutes International Minnesota, Art Shanty Projects, Beijing Film Academy, Black Dog Cafe + Wine Bar, Burnet Gallery at Le Meridien Chambers Minneapolis, College of Visual Arts, The Film Society Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Forecast Public Art, Franklin Art Works, The Friends of Saint Paul Public Library, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Intermedia Arts, Kulture Klub Collaborative, Landmark Center, Le Meridien Chambers Minneapolis, MAW, Macalester College, McNally Smith College of Music, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota Museum of American Art, mnartists.org, mn original, Mpls Photo Center, Northrop Concerts and Lectures, Public Art Saint Paul, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Regis Center for Art, ro/lu, Saint Paul Public Libary, Schubert Club, Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory, Saint Paul Riverfront Corporation, Science Museum of Minnesota, Soap Factory, SooVac, W Minneapolis-The Foshay, Walker Art Center, Works Progress

Northern Spark is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.