What about more art downtown?
This is a great article from the Star Tribune about a neighborhood in south Minneapolis called Whittier that has a project going to liven-up local storefronts by filling the windows with art – Artists in Storefronts. It’s a six-week effort to bring people to the neglected parts of the neighborhood. The project was started by Joan Vorderbruggen who noticed that the empty windows had a lot of potential for displaying artwork, making the spaces as creative and interesting as they can be. The things that can be seen through the windows range from poster and abstract banners to a crazy installation of bricks and spittoons decorated with political statements about things that happened around the world in 1919.
The article also talks about one of Candy Chang’s “Before I Die” chalk murals on Stevens Ave. (see above). She has this project in other places around the world, and it’s really cool because it’s artwork that encourages people to participate in it. A black wall is painted with the phrase “Before I Die _____” and chalk is left out so people can complete the phrase however they want. When the wall fills up, the chalk is washed off, and the process starts over. A work of art like this invites people to come see it and spend time reading what everyone else has to say.
Another unique sort of artwork that Joan Vorderbruggen is doing on the wall outside of the Rainbow Chinese Restaurant is a moss mural. She mixed moss spores with yogurt, beer, and “retention gel” and then smeared it on the wall in the shape of letters to spell “Everyone Together Different”. Watering the wall every day will make the moss grow into fuzzy green letters. It’s kind of a nice spin-off of a Chia Pet. We’ve covered the concept before.
Now, folks around Eau Claire, Menomonie, and Chippewa Falls have done similar things for years now. The murals from 2 S. Barstow immediately come to mind – now on permanent display in Building 6 of Banbury Place. And late last year, Downtown Eau Claire, Inc. tapped UWEC students to display their art in vacant shop windows. And while it’s a whole different animal, the Eau Claire Sculpture Tour shares a similar mission with the artists Minneapolis’s Whittier neighborhood. I think it would be nice to see Eau Claire adopt some sort of a project like Chang’s murals – something exciting, intriguing, and interactive, which gives people an incentive to return to its location. People would feel a sense of connection to that space since they helped in the creation of the artwork, and all of a sudden the artwork would belong to the community just as much as it belongs to the artist.
P.S. You can find Artists in Storefronts on Facebook, too.
