ArtPlace wanted to put the idea of creative placemaking on the map, and that meant clarifying and demonstrating what the practice looked like all over the country. To that end its first round of funding was by invitation. Coletta and her new staff—Bridget Marquis, Tim Halbur, and Shreya Parekh—looked at applicants for grants from the brand-new NEA Our Town program, along with other people and groups in the ArtPlace funder network who were doing work in line with the new paradigm, and sent them requests for proposals. The idea was to highlight initiatives that reflected both the current reality and the potential of the approach—a portfolio of projects that would help illustrate the work and then serve as a launch pad for the public debut of ArtPlace.

The 34 first-round projects included a wide range of geographies and partners: from an Office of Planning–driven project to support temporary art interventions in public space and vacant buildings in Washington, D.C., to a farm/art collaboration to spur economic development and solidarity in rural Wisconsin, to a unique multi-artist initiative in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Springboard for the Arts Presents “Irrigate”

The Irrigate project, piloted by Springboard for the Arts in Saint Paul, invited hundreds of local arts practitioners to take part in a wildly varied “ecosystem” of artworks and art happenings, all aimed at bringing fun, joy, and uplift to neighborhoods challenged by a disruptive construction project.

When construction began on the Central Corridor Light Rail Transit line (later dubbed the Green Line) linking the downtowns of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, many rejoiced; the Twin Cities, which had scrapped their streetcar systems in the 1950s, were going to have a second mass-transit rail route, eventually connected to the already-operational Blue Line linking downtown Minneapolis with the airport. At the same time, the transit line planning was full of contention as communities along the route fought for stops in their neighborhoods that have suffered a long history of displacement, disinvestment, and insufficient resources.

Regardless of whether one was feeling excited or had trepidations, the reality would be three years of highly disruptive digging and building, much of it down the middle of University Avenue. In Saint Paul, University runs through the Frogtown neighborhood, and on it Hmong, Lao, Vietnamese, and other immigrants have, since the light rail’s inception, established a flourishing business district, with restaurants, hair and nail salons, groceries, garages — small businesses operating on narrow margins. Years of reduced access could be fatal to many of them. At the time it was a stretch of small buildings dotted with vacant car dealerships that had moved to the burbs, and full of small, locally owned businesses that give great flavor and authenticity to the area.

A majority of people of color owned businesses here, and in particular Black- and Asian-owned businesses were also threatened all along the 11-mile Saint Paul stretch, from the Midway neighborhood to downtown. Rondo, an historic African American community, had been through this before. In the 1930s it was a vibrant, vital community that was in many ways independent of the white society around it. The construction of I-94 in the 1960s shattered this tight-knit community, displaced thousands of African-Americans into a racially segregated city and a discriminatory housing market, and erased a now-legendary neighborhood. This time around, news reports and editorials anticipated loss of business and economic turmoil.

With funding from ArtPlace, Springboard for the Arts leveraged community connections to train over 600 local artists and foster nearly 200 artist-led projects over three years — projects that helped alter the media narrative and bolster community spirit and cohesion.

In downtown Saint Paul, Laura Zabel, Jun-Li Wang, and their colleagues at Springboard were on the front lines. “We started seeing the effects of the construction firsthand,” says Zabel, executive director of Springboard. “There was a huge hole in the ground outside our building. That was the spark: just witnessing in our own neighborhood what a large disruption this was going to be and thinking, what could artists bring to the table to help neighborhoods and communities?”

For most of its life, Springboard had concentrated on helping individual artists develop their careers. But they’d also been looking to expand their self-identified mandate into community development and building reciprocal relationships between artists and their communities. Wang, an experienced community organizer, was brought on board by Zabel to lead the new direction in 2010. She first piloted the concept of supporting artists to engage with community issues and creative placemaking by collaborating with the Friendly Streets Initiative, an effort to help residents conceive how to make their street more bike- and pedestrian-friendly. So in 2011 Wang was ready to spearhead a much more ambitious project, funded by ArtPlace, and in partnership with Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and the city of Saint Paul, and eventually titled Irrigate.

The plan was to engage local artists to support businesses in the construction zone by creating projects that called attention to the shops, restaurants, and organizations, and celebrated the neighborhoods they were part of. In an atmosphere of apprehension about the immediate economic future of the avenue, the projects would remind everyone that the area was still vibrant and would continue to be so.

Springboard had other goals as well. “At this moment of building huge physical infrastructure in the city,” says Zabel, “we asked if we could build a parallel infrastructure of relationships, between artists and businesses and neighborhood organizations. We wanted to provide the conditions for artists to develop new skills in working in community development and big community issues; for neighborhood organizations and small businesses to experience the value of artists; and to create opportunities for people to come together and have moments of joy and surprise in a time that was pretty challenging.”

Wang called upon her close connections with the area’s district councils — organizations that foster residents’ engagement in community and with city planning processes — who then collaborated with Springboard to reach out to artists who lived and worked in the affected neighborhoods. “The district councils know their neighborhoods,” Wang says. “They can talk at a granular, grassroots level. For Irrigate, the question was: how do we support what’s and who’s already here?” Other community and cultural organizations partnered and provided connections as well.

The result, says Zabel, was that a broad cross-section of artists applied to do an Irrigate project. “Some had been comfortable calling themselves artists for years,” she says, “and others maybe had never called themselves artists before, but had a creative practice or a cultural practice or tradition, and were interested in what they could do in their own community.”

Springboard held free workshops for artists in collaboration and creative placemaking, and pretty soon neighborhood residents and the wider Twin Cities community were getting glimpses, one after another, of just how much was happening under the Irrigate banner: primarily through nearly 200 modest artist projects. Alliances between artists and businesses were forged; murals were created, outdoor dance classes were held, photography exhibits appeared in store windows, and concerts popped up in restaurants.