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Posts Tagged ‘emily badger’

When Artists Control the Building: A Minneapolis Story

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on August 11, 2012| Leave a Comment »

We lived in Minneapolis in the late 1990s and thought the theater scene there was super — many small, under-the-radar groups taking on adventurous work.

We also enjoyed going to music and art events, especially open houses in the former Warehouse District, where some of the Twin Cities’ best restaurants had sprung up.

So we weren’t surprised to learn that a national effort to tackle rundown areas in a way that benefits both local economies and artists emanates from Minneapolis.

Emily Badger writes about Artspace in Fast Company.

“The city of Minneapolis’ arts commission founded Artspace in 1979 to help connect local artists to affordable space in the city’s warehouse district. But the same artists kept coming back, priced out of their homes and studios, in need of yet another space. When [Kelley] Lindquist took over a decade later, the local arts community began to focus instead on the only permanent solution: They needed to control the buildings. Since then, Artspace has completed 30 live/work developments in 21 U.S. cities, with two more opening this fall, two more under construction, and another dozen in the pipeline.

“Lindquist recalls that in the ’80s, four other organizations — in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington and New York — were toying with a concept similar to Artspace’s (at the time, the five had been given a grant by the Apple Foundation to network with each other). Artspace is the only one of those original five that has survived to this day.

“ ‘I do honestly think that there is a prairie spirit here,’ Lindquist says, laughing. He sometimes thinks about why this idea got off the ground in Minnesota when it didn’t elsewhere. ‘Living in Minnesota is pretty rough,’ he says. ‘There can be easily six months of the year that would seem pretty hard to live in and intolerable to a lot of people. But I think it forced those of us here to try harder, and to be a little more experimental, a little more risk-taking on how do we keep our culture vibrant?’ ” Read more.

By the way, this lead came from ArtsJournal.com, a reliable source of bloggy inspiration.

Photograph: Warehouse Entertainment District

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A (Completely) New Calendar

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2011| 2 Comments »

Today I read an article at Miller-McCune on an astronomer and an economist who want to dump the calendar we all use (Gregorian) in favor of something completely new.

It reminded me of my late friend Doc Howe, who was commissioner of education under Lyndon Johnson and who often spoke of an idea for a calendar that he learned about in his Ford Foundation days. (It might have been the World Calendar seen here, but I’m not sure. Like invented languages, new calendar systems keep popping up.)

Writes Emily Badger at Miller-McCune, “The ever-changing calendar, with its periodic leap years and mouthful of monthly mnemonic devices, has irked timekeepers almost since the system was introduced in the 1500s.

“ ‘It’s a very accurate calendar,’ says Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. …

“That said, he wants to get rid of the thing. He and Johns Hopkins economist Steve Hanke are now lobbying to replace it with their invention, the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. In the long tradition of calendar reformers, they believe they’ve settled on the elusive solution to the Gregorian calendar’s floating days of the week: one calendar that remains constant every year, where New Year’s Day falls without fail on, say, Sunday every single time.

“The big advantage to such a system is that nobody — businesses, the NFL, universities, beleaguered governments — would have to go through the exercise every year of rewriting holiday schedules, course calendars or sports seasons.”

Henry and Hanke believe it preferable to insert “an entire extra week onto the end of December every five or six years. … The rest of the calendar would remain constant with four equal quarters of 91 days each, with two months of 30 days and a third month of 31.”

Does this solution speak to you?

Read more on the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar here.

(Read more about Doc Howe in the Cincinnati Enquirer obit.)

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