By Laura Zabel, Springboard for the Arts

Last week, we hosted Art Happens Here: A celebration of artist-led creative placemaking along the Green Line, happened on October 27 at ZagLaug Chaw (read KnightArts blogger Susannah Schouweiler’s full report here) Mayor Chris Coleman spoke and artists performed and lead visitors in art making activities. Not to mention food trucks and a living statue.

The Mayor even stuck around to participate in Irrigate artist, Brenda Bell Brown’s, Strut Yo Stuff cakewalk!

We were also so grateful to be joined by Polly Talen from the Knight Foundation, who spoke about Knight’s work to support informed and engaged communities in St. Paul and across the country.

Check out more photos from the event here

If you’re interested in learning more about Irrigate, take a look at our new video and see what happens when you add artists to a big community challenge. To date we have trained 358 artists with our Placemaking workshop and have approved 74 Corridor Collaborations involving 117 artists. That adds up to a lot of artists working with people they may not normally work with and lots of art out in the world. Super exciting!

Finally, we were delighted to learn recently that Irrigate has been chosen by Minnesota Monthly as the Twin Cities’ best public art. To quote, “No Twin Cities initiative has put the “public” in public art like this”.  Below is our rock-band-inspired photo at the award party.