Jason Ericson, Writer

Before Tina Nelson started working for the Midtown Greenway Coalition back in 1999, she worked for years as a community organizer in the Seward neighborhood. She toyed with the idea of going back to school for urban planning, but remained uncertain. MORE »

The Patio Nights summer concert series at the Minnesota Museum of American Art (MMAA) continued July 24th with sets from Story of the Sea and Kid Dakota. MORE »

Minneapolis City Council approved $500,000 last January for the construction of 10 new public drinking fountains, each designed by different Minnesota artists. Invigorate the Common Well, a trilogy of performances being staged over a two-year period at In the Heart of the Beast Theatre (HOBT), inspired the project. Sandy Spieler, artistic director of HOBT, writes in a public letter that the show began as a meditation upon a broken drinking fountain in the lobby of the group’s Avalon Theater. It is a “sad shrine,” she writes, to widespread neglect of the value of water. MORE »

Scissors beats paper. Rock beats scissors. And last Thursday evening, string beat rock. MORE »

Several years ago, local journalist Brad Zellar was poking around in the damp, poorly lit basement of the Bloomington Historical Society. He was looking for photographs documenting the construction of I-494. He had tried several other repositories of historical records: each a dead end. In the last room in the Historical Society basement left to search, Zellar found a pair of big filing cabinets standing amid a crowd of clutter. He opened the first drawer, and thumbing through its contents, quickly realized the value of his discovery. MORE »