Minnesota Leads the Way in Cultivating Rural Arts Initiatives
Submitted by Steve on September 10, 2015
From Eileen Cunniffe, writing for Nonprofit Quarterly:
Earlier this week, NPQ reported on a novel approach to civic engagement in Minneapolis: artist residencies in city planning departments, aimed at sparking fresh ideas for solving urban issues. Today, we note that the North Star State is also an innovator when it comes to integrating the arts into its rural communities. As reporter Kristin Tillotson says, “Across Minnesota, small towns and farms are busy putting the culture in agriculture.”
The state has one huge advantage in this area: its Legacy Amendment, which funnels sales tax revenues into the arts. But Minnesota’s rural communities have also received significant grants from other sources, including $75,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to the town of Fergus Falls for local artists to develop preservation and economy-boosting projects; and $313,000 from ArtPlace America to Lanesboro to integrate an “arts campus” throughout the tiny town, already known for its theater and promoted as “the B & B capital of Minnesota.”