The Lift | Laura Zabel & Dennis Scholl Interview from The Lift on Vimeo.

Knight’s Dennis Scholl is at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, talking about the impact of culture on communities.  While there, he spoke with Springboard for the Arts’ Laura Zabel on local TV about how artists can better connect with their neighbors.

The St. Paul-based Springboard fosters those connections with a variety of programs –  one of which involves a very large black dog.  

As a way to ease the difficulties caused by recent light rail construction in the Twin Cities, Springboard trained hundreds of local artists in community development, resulting in 120 creative projects along what is now the Green Line. When the Black Dog Cafe was losing business  because of a makeshift moat dug around its location during construction, a puppeteer created a roving black dog that took the business’ sign and brand out into the community, reminding people  the cafe was open.

Scholl and Zabel will be on a panel at 10:20 a.m. MT Tuesday on “The Communities We Hope For” and the role the arts have in shaping them. Their co-panelists are Jamie Bennett of ArtPlace America, Kate Levin of Bloomberg Associates and Eric Liu, former White House adviser and founder of Citizen University.

On Twitter, you can follow the conference with #AspenIdeas, and watch panel video on the festival’s site.