Back in October we put together our yearly METRO 100 list. Editor in Chief Chris Clayton dug deep into the the art scene and found one common thread, a new-found sense of community. Artists have coalesced, bringing a once-solitary profession to a critical mass of avid artists and art admirers. It seems fitting, that in year of economic turmoil, a symbolic joining of hands became the calling card of the Twin Cities art scene. Have a happy New Year.

Scottie B. Tuska, Your Humble Web Editor

Community is generally not a sexy concept. Herds of likeminded people connecting for reasons social, biological or otherwise can be beautiful, transcendent even. But cool? Not so much. Americans especially have a knack for being the biggest squares at the square dance, so to speak, a skill we picked up centuries ago from those party animals the Puritans. Which isn’t to say that sexy communities have never existed here. Look at the cowboys of the Wild West or the beat poets. The allure of these groups, however, comes not from the fact that they rallied around a cause, but from the cause itself—whether it be roping cows and looking great in a Stetson, or writing 50,000-word prose poems while hopped up on Benzadrine and Buddhism.

Once in a while, though, community builders wise up and make the idea of rallying seem cool in order to draw more people to their cause. Historians love these blue-moon moments because when community gets sexy, extraordinary things tend to occur. Such was the case in the '60s, when the civil rights and anti-war movements hooked up with the countercultural revolution for some super-fly teamwork that mended more than a few tears in our social fabric. A similarly cool “Kumbaya” vibe has emerged recently thanks to a certain well-known community organizer’s game-changing presidential campaign. Love him or hate him, Obama and his crafty campaign strategists made civic engagement hip—via YouTube, Facebook and Shepard Fairey posters—and in the process renewed our country’s collective desire to, well, collect.

If Obama ignited this fire to unite, then the recession is keeping it hot in 2009. As historian and Great Depression expert Robert McElvaine put it on PBS’s Newshour earlier this year: “Community-oriented values tend to come out during tough times.” This civic-minded ethos, we’re happy to report, has trickled down to the Twin Cities art scene, which has spent much of the year finding interesting—and yes, sexy—new ways to rally around art. Take the (28) West Bank Social Center, an indie community arts center of sorts that opened last June above the Nomad World Pub in Minneapolis’s Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. Like a clubhouse minus the secret knock, this free-wheelin’ venue offers gratis Wi-Fi and coffee for anyone who stops by (a few wandering creatives use it as their makeshift office), and often calls on the public to curate its events, which have varied from group naptime sessions set to European art cinema, to a discussion about death and memorial tattooing featuring death and dying expert John E. Troyer and tattoo artist Awen Briem. Performance art duo Hardland/Heartland took a more guerilla approach to creative communing with last summer’s (29) Derek’s Shoppe project, which invited the public to produce art projects in a small shack the twosome somehow procured on the corner of Franklin and Lyndale.  

This citizen art movement is also being fostered by more established organizations. Last August the Soap Factory gallery in Minneapolis opened (30) Common Room, a temporary gathering place that hosted discussions, game nights, potlucks, karaoke and more—all to encourage interaction between artists and art-lovers. The venue’s kick-off party featured screenings of silent films with live scores courtesy of the Common Room Community Orchestra, a ragtag

ensemble comprised of audience members playing instruments they brought from home. The creative output of We The People will again be highlighted this February at (31) Foot in the Door, an open exhibition at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. All submitted art will be accepted (which means that awesome unicorn painting of yours will finally see the light of day!), the only catch being that works must not exceed one cubic foot of gallery space.

The most zeitgeist-y of these collaborative endeavors was last August’s (32) Save Canvas, a series of temporary art installations in vacant buildings on Tenth Street in downtown Minneapolis. Not only did producers Aaron Bickner and Andrew Shannon do something useful with empty real estate—the ultimate physical reminder of our economic fall from grace—they coaxed out average Joes’ inner Jackson Pollock by encouraging passersby to spray the installations with paint-filled Super Soakers.

The above examples inspire group hugging by democratizing the creative process, which is great, but the fact remains: art needs an audience. Thankfully art groupies are being cultivated with similar stylish zeal. Faced with the grim reality that their fan bases are literally dying off, classical music organizations have begun hosting fashionable soirees in an attempt to lure younger patrons. Minnesota Orchestra’s year-old (33) Crescendo Project does this with pre-show booze tastings and post-show meetups at places like Hell’s Kitchen. Minnesota Opera has a similar program called (34) Tempo. (Both programs, it should be noted, are taking cues from the Walker Art Center, which was way ahead of its time in 1997, when its (35) After Hours parties began unstuffing seemingly stuffy art for the kids.)

Audience building is happening more organically online, where critics, artists and fans are using social networking sites to better report on our creative climate. The hyper-immediate, get-to-the-point nature of Twitter has proven particularly effective at making people pay attention to what’s happening, culturally speaking (local art-happy Twitterers worth your time: Minnesota Independent editor Paul Schmelzer's (36) twitter.com/iteeth; ’CCO anchor Jason DeRusha's (37) twitter.com/derushaj). Other platforms like Tumblr make it easier for cultural watchdogs to aggregate key bits of news from multiple online sources (read architect Colin Kloecker's (38) tumblelikeyougiveadamn.tumblr.com and writer/curator Andy Sturdevant's (39) southtwelfth.tumblr.com).

Of course the valuable byproduct of all this sexy community building, local and otherwise, is that it reminds us of how important the concept of community is in the first place. And if renowned Harvard sociologist Robert D. Putnam is right, and America’s social capital has plummeted to historic lows over the past 50 years, then we need all the reminders we can get. Though judging by the reinvigorated civic spirit that’s wafting through the country, our social capital might just be our most valuable resource right now. -- Chris Clayton