Past and Present Art in the Midtown Greenway
Giant Biker Sculpture Inside our Office Window
Artist: Victor Yepez
Materials: Steel
Year: 1997
This sculpture was in the Intermedia Arts parking lot for the 10 years or so because we didn’t have a safe place to put it on the Greenway. It was loaded into our new office on Tuesday, May 13, 2008 right before the window was installed when the wall was open.
Celebracion del Dia de los Muertos en el Midtown Greenway
Local multimedia artists, Victor Yepez and Constanza Carballo, the Midtown Greenway and Peace Coffee worked together in 2004 and 2005 to bring the community together in with a procession and celebration in observance of the holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Artist’s altars (ofrendas) lined the edges of the Greenway honoring the lives of friends and family members. The procession included an opening ceremony, lanterns, decorated bikes, puppets and dancing.
 
Sculptures of Community Leaders
In 1996, a group of community organizations sought funding for physical improvements and business development projects in the area of East Lake Street and Fourth Avenue South. One of the projects that resulted in this effort was to support artistic enhancements for a new bridge over the future Midtown Greenway trail that was about to be built by the City of Minneapolis. The group wanted the artwork to represent the heart and the soul of the neighborhood. It also wanted the art to involve the local community with the new Midtown Greenway trail.
The group decided to pursue two major artistic projects with the bridge: inspirational quotations inscribed in the concrete railings to be viewed by people crossing over the bridge and sculpted faces of community leaders on the north bridge abutment to be viewed by people passing underneath the bridge on the Midtown Greenway.
Parade of Arts/ Wheels as Art
Co-sponsored by Intermedia Arts and the Midtown Community Works Partnership, thousands of people celebrated in 2002 and 2003 with dance, drawing, performance, poetry, music and games in the Greenway.
Personal Journeys
Local artist Greg Ingraham and Teri Kwant worked together beginning in 2005 to create a series of art installation along the Longfellow and Seward section of the Greenway. Five sites between Hiawatha and the West River Road, will have imagery, thought provoking phrases and benches at various entry points to the Greenway. Proposed completion is in 2008. The partners for the this project were Public Works, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, Hennepin County, Longfellow Community Council, Seward Neighborhood Group and the Midtown Greenway Coalition.
People, Places, and Connections
A collaborative program presented by Intermedia Arts, the Midtown Greenway Coalition, Midtown Community Works, and Hope Community. Between March 2002 and March 2003, five artists worked with people of all ages in six south Minneapolis neighborhoods that border the Midtown Greenway (Lyndale, Powderhorn, Corcoran, Central, Phillips, and Whittier) to create art, make connections, and instigate change in their communities. One of the creation of this project was On the Map II, a reprisal of a hands-on exhibition that allowing community members to plot their “safe place”
on a wall-size map of south Minneapolis. The participating artists were Ta-coumba Aiken, Douglas Ewart, Marilyn Lindstrom, Wendy Morris, and Victor Yepez.
Artful Greenway Bridges Conceived
On October 25th, 2001, twenty-six people—from a few blocks away and from half way around the world—gathered at Intermedia Arts where we would spend the next three days focused on the Midtown Greenway.
As stated by the organizers at the University of Minnesota Design Institute “The primary focus for the workshop will be bridge design; the secondary focus will be the Greenway spaces between and around the bridges. All physical design from each collaborative team is to be perceived as a holistic work striving to fully integrate community perspective, art, engineering, and architecture disciplines.” My role as one of the three community activists was to guide an effective, productive team process. Each community activist was assigned to a different group, each with a different site—a six- to eight-block segment of the Greenway. Although none of the bridges designed in this project were built, the visual concepts are still relevant as designers consider replacement bridges in the future.
Jefferson Community School Mural Project
The Everyday Leaders after school activity class at Jefferson Community School has been working hard on designs and drawings for 4, 4 foot by 4 foot mural boards. This is a group of 3rd and 4th grade students who are interested in art and community
improvement. They like to draw and wanted to paint something for the community and started by written stories about freedom, friends and nature. There were inspired from books, the internet and sketches. The murals reflect their view of the community, nature, happiness, the earth, friends, freedom, life, birth, America, peace and global warming.
 
 
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