How hot are Minnesota artists? Plenty hot.

No, really, enclosed-car-interior-on-one-of-our-few-summer-days hot. The Rake front-pages "The Minnesota Moment" with the tag line: "Seven artists have the New York art world wrapped around their fingers. How'd they do that?"

If I only knew the secret artist formula we'd all be artists and wealthy, I tell you! But I have to wonder if this is less about a place and more about a sensibility. Writer Julie Caniglia quotes Philippe Vergne, the senior curator and deputy director at Walker Art Center:

It's difficult to put a finger on what is distinctive about artists here, Vergne said. But he knows that it's very different from what's going on, for instance, in Houston. "There are lots of reasons. You have the long winter," he said. "It sounds silly, but it triggers things, you go inside for six months because it's freezing and it's dark out—you do a different kind of work than if your door is open and it's sunny." He also touched on words like "angry" and "feisty," and noted that some artists here develop an idiosyncratic kind of "Midwest bad-ass philosophy."

But aren't people and their works more mobile, even migratory? From Marianne Combs' report about Minnesotans at New York's Whitney Biennial:

"Artists move around," Iles points out. "They have to. They have to be pragmatic, they have to go where the teaching is, where the money is, where the studio space is. So it may be harder to say 'There's a Chicago school' than it was 20 years ago or 10 years ago."

Is Minnesota where the money is? The studio space? Is there magic in the air, creativity in the water, or just a fluke in the trends?

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Julia Schrenkler
American Public Media Interactive Producer