Creative environment: Art, science, ice produce powerful palette

By Alice Rossignol

Each year as Medicine Lake thickens with ice, artists from across the nation flock here for a four-weekend celebration of art, science and the winter season.

Inspired by traditional ice-fishing houses, selected artists build unique temporary shanties on this Minnesota lake for a festival called the Art Shanty Projects. The shanties themselves are art, but they also house interactive art and science activities and performances for weekend visitors.  This year’s exhibition ends today.

“We’re trying to raise the thought of who can be an artist and what art can be,” said Caitlin Hargarten, this year’s director.

Started in 2003, founders David Pitman and Peter Haakon Thompson saw potential in a frozen lake’s short-lived land to be an artist’s canvas.

“It goes back to the idea of a temporary landscape and where in our region of the world we have these places that we can go out and walk on and there are no buildings,” Pitman said. He and Thompson now serve as project board members.

Artistic expression unhampered by building codes

And Medicine Lake, about 10 miles west of Minneapolis, seems ideal. Unlike municipal lakes inside Twin City limits, structures can be left up over night.

Plus, building regulations for frozen lakes are more lenient – making the landscape a flexible space for creative souls.

“The space isn’t used and hasn’t been used as art. It’s totally unique,” Hargarten said.

This year the project has 20 individually themed shanties built by more than 100 artists.  Thousands of people visit each weekend.

“It’s allowing people, encouraging people from the Twin Cities to get out of their houses and also interact with art in a totally new and strange way,” said Joseph Rand, a member of the team that this year created IDEA Shanty.

IDEA stands for Innovation, Design, Energy and Art. None of the 8-member team considers themselves professional visual artists, but the idea of combining art with science appeals to them.

“We are all interested in science and art so we wanted to play with that intersect,” Rand said.

They teamed up with the Science Museum of Minnesota Design Team youth program.  That program stems from the IDEA cooperative – a partnership between the museum and St. Paul public schools that engages students in engineering and technology. Eighth and ninth graders painted the shanty and they help with its science activities – experiments with batteries, magnets and circuits.

Wind powers great IDEA

To power these experiments the IDEA team built a wind turbine from do-it-yourself plans. A shut-off mechanism was designed and installed because of Medicine Lake’s potential to be a violently windy environment.

But, building a working turbine from scratch wasn’t easy.

“That’s been a challenge. I think for those of us that built the wind turbine it was such an amazing and challenging process every step of the way,” Rand said.

Another obstacle was the small budget.

The Art Shanty Projects is funded by grants, sponsors and donors – enough to hopefully cover the artists’ expenses.

Money is tight this year. Each shanty team received about $400 to realize their vision.

But that doesn’t seem to be the motivation.

Project brings together diverse community

“The most satisfying aspect of the project is the sense of a community that it brings, not only within the artists, but people coming from all over – people who live around the lake to the hipsters in their cowboy boots,” Hargarten said.

The project takes care to respect Medicine Lake and its surrounding community.

To be moved easily, all shanties are built on runners, and when the ice melts they are placed on blocks to avoid getting stuck.

“We try to be very conscious of the community by not leaving anything behind,” Hargarten said.

The event’s high traffic draws some complaints, but they are few in comparison to praises.

“The majority of the community really loves the project and keep coming out year after year,” she said.