Western Minnesota Working Together, Building Community

The Bush Foundation’s Catherine Jordan with a short write-up of her recent visit to Western Minnesota for the Arts Meander. She’s got it right, lots of great stuff happening here.

Another highlight of our visit to Montevideo: tagging along with the group of Uruguayan high school students who arrived shortly after we did.

The city of Montevideo, Uruguay and its namesake in Minnesota have a longstanding relationship as sister cities. A statue of Jose Artigas stands in a plaza on Montevideo, MN’s main street. The cities exchange regional artwork and artifacts - in fact, Montevideo, MN has one of the largest collections of Uruguayan art in the world - and send visiting delegations, including groups of young people like those we met last week.

Specifically, this group was here in Minnesota to learn about American environmental issues and organizations, and spent most of their time with Patrick Moore from the organization CURE visiting sites of cultural and natural significance, including Lac qui Parle State Park. Colin & I joined them for an afternoon cleaning up the highway and lakeshore.

S.H.M.

Some of the photos we’ve been collecting of signs in the town of Montevideo. There are a lot of small businesses on Monte’s main street, some of them struggling or altogether closed, others bustling at times.

We’re particularly interested signs that have an original or hand painted quality (there are a lot of those here) because one of the projects we hope to pursue in the coming year involves creating roadside signs based on interviews with landowners in the surrounding counties. When we do, we’ll look to existing signs in and around the town for ideas and inspiration.

S.H.M.

We’re still in Montevideo, Minnesota. We’ve spent the past week catching up on writing and video projects, reading books, exploring the town on our own and with friends we’ve made here, and meeting with various individuals and groups that we hope to collaborate with in the future. I have to admit, it has been harder than I thought it would be to adjust to the slower pace of life here, in part because we’re still tethered to our computers for much of the day. We spent the past weekend offline and outside. Some of the highlights: Driving to Easy Bean Farm in Milan for dinner, then sitting in a hot tub (a wooden tub of water heated by a wood-burning stove) outside, in the rain, while my tub companions sang murder ballads into the wind. Biking to Duffy’s Bar & Grill for Biker (Discount) Day, and being the only ones on non-motorized bikes. No one seemed to care. We ate dinner, then biked back along a highway with absolutely no shoulder. Walking to the laundromat, biking to the grocery store, cooking dinner in the apartment together, going to the library to print things, having coffee in the coffee shop and getting to know the faces and habits of regular customers, asking eachother, “What if we lived here?” Attending an annual community event in which everyone who came was invited to perform their favorite Beatles song to a packed room full of neighbors, who clapped and sang along. Getting invited onstage to join a group singing With A Little Help From My Friends. The quiet nights overlooking main street. We’re planning to head back to Minneapolis later this week. Hopefully, we can get out a few more times before then! S.H.M.
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We’re still in Montevideo, Minnesota.

We’ve spent the past week catching up on writing and video projects, reading books, exploring the town on our own and with friends we’ve made here, and meeting with various individuals and groups that we hope to collaborate with in the future. I have to admit, it has been harder than I thought it would be to adjust to the slower pace of life here, in part because we’re still tethered to our computers for much of the day. We spent the past weekend offline and outside. Some of the highlights:

  • Driving to Easy Bean Farm in Milan for dinner, then sitting in a hot tub (a wooden tub of water heated by a wood-burning stove) outside, in the rain, while my tub companions sang murder ballads into the wind.

  • Biking to Duffy’s Bar & Grill for Biker (Discount) Day, and being the only ones on non-motorized bikes. No one seemed to care. We ate dinner, then biked back along a highway with absolutely no shoulder.

  • Walking to the laundromat, biking to the grocery store, cooking dinner in the apartment together, going to the library to print things, having coffee in the coffee shop and getting to know the faces and habits of regular customers, asking eachother, “What if we lived here?”

  • Attending an annual community event in which everyone who came was invited to perform their favorite Beatles song to a packed room full of neighbors, who clapped and sang along. Getting invited onstage to join a group singing With A Little Help From My Friends.

  • The quiet nights overlooking main street.

We’re planning to head back to Minneapolis later this week. Hopefully, we can get out a few more times before then!

S.H.M.

Other snapshots taken in & around Montevideo, Minnesota, where we’ll be working for the next two weeks.

A few snapshots from Earthrise Farm, one of the stops on our Meander tour last Saturday.

Earthrise is an organic farm founded & managed by two School Sisters of Notre Dame, who are also biological sisters that grew-up in Lac qui Parle County and came home in the 1990s to work the land they were raised on.

Sister Kay and Earthrise educator/intern Kat gave us a tour of the farm, which features organic vegetable plots, a yurt that they rent to visitors, a schoolhouse they moved to the site to use as an environmental science classroom, teaching gardens, a chicken coop, a pottery studio and art workshop, a kitchen where they hold food education classes for local children, and a hearth in the woods for bonfires and storytelling.

S.H.M.

Tokheim Stoneware, one of the stops on our Meander tour this past Saturday.

We could only afford to buy a single piece, so it took us awhile to decide. We chose this bowl because it was unique, even in a place full of unique objects. It was the only one that was this color and shape. It’s now one of the most treasured things we own, because we shook hands with the man who made it.

S.H.M.

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.
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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.