Partner Perspectives
Viewpoints from Lars Erdahl (Minnesota DNR Parks and Trails), Ellie Hohulin (Metropolitan Regional Parks), and Renee Mattson (Greater Minnesota Regional Parks and Trails Commission).
Image: For her residency, MNPAiR artist Lindsay Buck focused on two parks: Wright County Robert Ney Park and Sherburne County Two Inlets at Bdé Heháka – Omashkooz Zaaga’igaans Regional Park (Two Inlets). She developed a mobile phone app, called heart+land, that pairs with onsite signage to bring users a new perspective on the land through the lenses of history, language, and botanical knowledge. The trail and app are free and open to the public for self-guided tours anytime.
Lars Erdahl, Legacy Program Consultant at DNR Parks and Trails
Eleanor Hohulin, Creative Policy Fellow, Metropolitan Council
Renee Mattson, Executive Director, GMRPTC
The MNPAiR project began when something happened that doesn’t happen every day: three separate governmental entities devoted to the same issue got together and decided to cooperate.
Leaders at the state Department of Natural Resources (DNR), the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities, and the Greater Minnesota Regional Parks and Trails Commission (GMRPTC) sat down together to figure out how artists could help make Minnesota’s parks more welcoming to everybody.
Artist Amanda Lovelee, former Parks Ambassador for the Met Council, had long wanted to create artist residencies in parks, and she reached out to two officials advising parks in Greater Minnesota: Lars Erdahl, Legacy Program Consultant at DNR Parks and Trails, and Renee Mattson, Executive Director of GMRPTC. Erdahl and Mattson were new to the idea of embedding artists in parks, but they were intrigued.
“This was about two years ago, and it took us at least a year to decide what this was going to look like,” says Mattson. “But it started with the three of us saying, “if we're going to do something, let's bring in user groups who don't feel that a park is for them. How can we make them feel welcome? How can we make them feel like they belong there too?”
"If we're going to do something, let's bring in user groups who don't feel that a park is for them. How can we make them feel welcome? How can we make them feel like they belong there too?"
— Renee Mattson, Executive Director, GMRPTC
MNPAiR artist JG Everest held a Wild River Poetry workshop; participant Nur reads his site-specific poem at the spot where he wrote it, for Teaching Artist Rosetta Peters (in red) and other workshop participants along the shore of Wókižu Wakpá (St Croix River) at Wild River State Park on July 28, 2025.
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Belonging—that was the theme agreed upon to guide artists’ activities in parks throughout the state. To find those artists, the trio put out an RFP for an arts-focused partner. “We decided pretty early on,” says Erdahl, “that we needed to find capable, professional art experts to administer the program, people who had a track record, rather than us developing it on the fly.” Forecast got the nod.
When Lovelee left the Met Council, Eleanor Hohulin, Creative Policy Fellow at the organization, took over as its representative. Hohulin was well acquainted with Forecast, having held a fellowship there and worked freelance for it on several projects. For her, this collaboration among three entities that hadn’t had much to do with each other previously was a breath of fresh air.
“I think that this shared ownership of the program, a program that the three agencies are working together on, is really special,” she says. “Because famously, in government, people don't necessarily work together super well. It's really challenging to do that. But from the start, we vowed that this had to be done collaboratively.”
“This shared ownership of the program, a program that the three agencies are working together on, is really special.”
—Eleanor Hohulin, Creative Policy Fellow, Metropolitan Council
Image: While MNPAiR artist Sam Zimmerman spent the year exploring and learning about the natural environment and inhabitants of Tettegouche State Park, he also engaged with local schoolchildren and visited the park with kids on a field trip. Sam held an art show with students from William Kelley High School, with an opening reception, at Tettegouche State Park Visitors Center in Silver Bay, Minnesota.
Forecast crafted an RFQ and sent it out to a range of artists. The response was more robust than any of the project’s leads expected—close to 300 applications. Winnowing this embarrassment of riches down to the final 12 artists began with Forecast, continued with teams from the three agencies, and was finalized by staff from the parks selected.
The full year of the residency—autumn 2024 to autumn 2025—gave the artists time to learn about the parks as well as to develop their contributions.
“I think that having the artists embedded in the parks was essential,” says Hohulin. “It wasn't just, ‘Oh, you're working with this park to create a sculpture.’ Each artist got to spend time getting to know the park, getting to know the agency, and then doing what they wanted to do with that knowledge as a background.”
Erdahl agrees: “The artists, I think, got some knowledge about the arts and sciences of administering a park, which I think, most people aren’t aware of in all of their complexity—the seasonality of park work, the different levels of staffing at different times of year, and so on. We tried our best to combine the needs and goals of the artists with the needs and goals of the parks, to make something bigger than each would be on their own.”
Image: The high schoolers’ Art Club helped Lake Bemidji State Park MNPAiR artist team Monica Rojas and Nicole Rojas-Oltmanns design a patch for Art Packs that are available at the park Visitor Center for free check-out. Items in each pack include sketchbooks and mark-making tools, with pouches sewn by Monica using fabric from local business Bemidji Woolen Mills. Also included are directions on the location of new convertible benches in the park. The artists and park replaced four benches to better facilitate use of the Art Packs. The back of each new bench can be rotated into a table by an adult. In bench form, they usually face the trail. In a table-top position, they face away from the trail. These new benches provide an ideal sketching space to use the Art Packs. Note: One bench was destroyed in the devastating June 2025 storm that impacted 10,000 acres of forest.
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“From the Parks’ perspective, these partnerships were ways in which to reach a new audience. When artists and parks work together as true partners, the impact can be exponential. By respecting and supporting artists—giving them time, resources, and space to create meaningful work focused on belonging—we saw incredible results. Artists were central to the project, not an afterthought, and the work they produced was deeply impactful because they were paid fairly and given the freedom to work over a longer span of time.”
—Renee Mattson, Executive Director, GMRPTC
Image: Marlena Myles and Tanáğidaŋ To Wiŋ (Tara Perron) held four community celebrations at Battle Creek Regional Park that brought together Dakota ancestral teachings, modern Indigenous artists and artistry, and community-building activities to honor each season’s beauty and cultural significance, and celebrate what it means to people who have called this area home for thousands of years. Both artists coordinated each event and also participated as local artisans; each celebration included 20–30 Native vendors and culture bearers. Additionally, Marlena and Tara worked on an outdoor classroom and a medicine garden full of native plantings, shown here during a tour at their Okáǧa Summer-Wind Celebration.
The events and artworks in the parks ranged from workshops in which park visitors created their own art to murals inspired by visitors’ ideas and actually painted by them under an artist’s guidance; from innovative wayfinding and nature-study signage to nature walks; from a smartphone app to sound-and-music installations. Native knowledge, imagery, and storytelling played a prominent role.
For Mattson, the variety and attractiveness of the art programming that the artists-in-residence came up with fulfilled the agencies’ goal of attracting new users to the parks. “This project far exceeded our expectations,” she says. “I was on site when some of these art projects were happening, and I saw people in those parks who wouldn't typically arrive to hike a trail or go mountain biking or paddling. They were there because they had an interest in an art project.
“The day that I happened to be at Lake Brophy Park, for example, people were in the shelter working on little mosaic tiles that were going to go around a bigger mosaic in the building. And this grandmother said to me, ‘my granddaughter comes to play at this park all the time. But when we saw what was happening in the park shelter, she wanted to come over here and work on the mosaic.’ There were many different ages and ethnicities in the shelter that day working on these mosaic projects.”
The artists worked as ambassadors as well as creators, she notes. “They did outreach in each of their communities, talking about what they were planning to do in the parks and looking for the public's input.”
All three leaders declare the project a success, noting that in some cases, park staffs are planning further collaboration with their associated artist. And Erdahl, Hohulin, and Mattson met on December 5 to begin discussions about possible further artist residencies under their triple umbrella. Erdahl points out that these conversations are very preliminary.
“This project far exceeded our expectations. I was on site when some of these art projects were happening, and I saw people in those parks who wouldn't typically arrive to hike a trail or go mountain biking or paddling. They were there because they had an interest in an art project.”
—Renee Mattson, Executive Director, GMRPTC
Erdahl, Hohulin, and Mattson all suggested that, while the general concept of “belonging” and drawing new users into the parks served the pilot project well, future versions of the residency could take more time to learn about the specific needs of each park and each park staff. And more provision could be made for different park staffs to connect with each other about needs and goals to be addressed by artists and the progress of residencies.
“We're super grateful for the artists who stepped forward, obviously,” says Erdahl, “but also for the parks that stepped forward— because it was an extra thing for them to do, and their plates were already full. The outcome was unknown when we started this. So that was kind of a big leap of faith that they had to take. And I think that the end product, in every one of the parks, was a positive benefit.”
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