On Saturday we arrived in Montevideo, Minnesota, where we’ll be staying for the next two weeks in an apartment above a storefront on the city’s main street. I’ll be posting soon about our experiences this past weekend visiting artists’ studios and community spaces as part of the Arts Meander, an annual art crawl that spans several communities along the Upper Minnesota River, but first: a note of explanation, in case you’re wondering:

What are we doing here?

Have you ever met someone at exactly the right moment in your creative life, when the questions you are asking and the questions they are asking overlap in such a way that you know you could both learn a lot from one another?

Earlier this year we met Patrick Moore at the Rural Arts & Culture Summit. Patrick is the Director of CURE, an organization based in Montevideo that works at the intersection of culture and environment. To learn more about what they do, check out this recent MPR story.

At the RAC Summit Patrick was giving a presentation about art and culture in towns with less than 5,000 people. We sat in, curious about the area of Minnesota he was coming from, a place we’d heard about from friends who’d spent time there. They told us about how sustainable food production and art were both thriving.

We immediately connected with Patrick’s energy and enthusiasm for the place he calls home, the way his work engages big creative ideas and is also grounded in an ecological understanding of systems, and his willingness to try new things and to make unexpected connections and partnerships - whatever it takes to engage people creatively in community life.

Since then, we’ve been out to Western Minnesota twice to visit Patrick and to meet his neighbors, each time staying a little longer. I’m not exaggerating when I say that they are the most wonderful & giving hosts you can imagine. In our back pockets we keep ideas for collaborative projects: a Give & Take program in Monte, or a public art project involving community stories and roadside signs. But we know that in order to get to a place where this community welcomes the art projects and experiments we’re excited about, we need to get to know them better. Which is really why we’re here. That, and we needed some time away from the Twin Cities.

So that’s it! That’s why we’re sitting in a little apartment in a little town, thinking about art, culture, ecology, and community. Today we settled in and took a bike ride around town. Tomorrow, someone we just met has offered to us a lift to nearby Granite Falls. We’re looking forward to seeing where our meandering conversations with the people we meet take us. When we can, we’ll share some of these stories here.

S.H.M.

Note: the artwork pictured here was created by another friend we’ve made out on the prairie, an artist and musician named Malena Handeen, who is fantastic. You should check out her art, and her album.