Schedule
Kick off your all-night art adventure at the official Northern Spark Launch Party at the newly-renovated Orchestra Hall. Musical guest Dosh. Food and drink by Travail, Marin, Black Sheep Pizza, Indeed, Oskar Blues, and more!
Creative City Challenge: Lovelee/Field/Waites/West •
Music by Mu Daiko and GRRRL PRTY
Watch as Balancing Ground is unveiled and power up for your Northern Spark adventure with music and hand-held electricity!
An audio and visual collage that examines the chimney as a shared space for both humans and a small bird, the Chimney Swift.
Leav is a free mobile platform for placing, viewing, and sharing digital art. Download Leav in the iPhone App Store.
Engage with interactive imagery developed in Processing by students in Ai-MN’s Interactive Media program. Sensors, cameras and touchscreens will track and transform the movements of passers-by as seen the windows of the gallery.
An audio and visual collage that examines the chimney as a shared space for both humans and a small bird, the Chimney Swift.
Leav is a free mobile platform for placing, viewing, and sharing digital art. Download Leav in the iPhone App Store.
An audio and visual collage that examines the chimney as a shared space for both humans and a small bird, the Chimney Swift.
Leav is a free mobile platform for placing, viewing, and sharing digital art. Download Leav in the iPhone App Store.
Have your reading done by this eco-oracle with art tarot cards representing the WAM collection. All your ecological mysteries will be revealed.
Inspired by the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, Ragamala Dance explores the interconnections between human emotions and the landscapes that shape them.
Indoor and outdoor art experiences with film projections, a day-glow painting, and a few surprises mix with a gallery exhibition by member artists.
Blankets. Pillows. Lay back under our ever-changing pillow fort and take in images, sounds, and stories of the places we find rest. Share a cozy moment or a crazy pillow fight.
The Audible Edge explores intersections of architecture and sound. The exhibition is open until midnight, with special events for Northern Spark visitors.
Performance by Emily Johnson/Catalyst and the Anonymous Choir, participatory light-box walks, volunteer actions, and video by Mona Smith.
Gamelan – the traditional orchestra of Indonesia. Sumunar invites you to experience the rich sounds of Java!
Footsteps, inspired by everyday movements in city life, is an interactive Ballet set to live drumming.
Blue Dream Journeys invites audiences to interact with performers as they move through a set of obstacles toward a space where dreams become real.
Mellow under the moonlight at WAM. Converse with artists, dance, prepare for the flood, and have all your ecological mysteries revealed. Also, discover WAM@20: MN, featuring art that entered WAM’s collection in the past 20 years—chosen by Minnesota artists, celebrities, U students, and state fair goers!
Step through the diorama glass at the Bell Museum of Natural History to experience resident artist Andy DuCett’s delightfully curious research project, inspired by nature and inhabited by our imaginations.
Grab a map and hitchhike a Galactic Web inspired by Douglas Adams. Dress like an alien, wish on a star, and visit planets real and imagined.
More than forty artists display unicorn-themed art, including paintings, taxidermy, video, and more!
The Sky Opens Twice is a three-story aural installation with an original script and sound design by Abinadi Meza.
Mobile JXTA is a fleet of bike carts that create an oasis of light,sound, and play in the public right of way. Visitors can play illuminated chess or dominos, charge phones, read #ns_msgboard tweets projected on a community message board, and make art.
The Art Department’s Outdoor Cinema showcases the extraordinary wealth of talent at home in the University’s West Bank Arts Quarter. Short films and experimental media projects run the gamut from visual poetry to cultural critique, complete with occasional forays into humor and irreverence.
Your evening’s game room! Enjoy outdoor Ping-Pong, bocce ball, cornhole, and giant checkers—or just come with your crew to relax and take a break.
In contemplative dialogue and song, Holly Hansen reveals our accidental commitments to unexamined ideas due to default mindsets in culture and family.
Leav is a free mobile platform for placing, viewing, and sharing digital art. Download Leav in the iPhone App Store.
From tiny winged critters to the vast cosmos, join Bell Museum program staff for an exploration of nature at every scale.
sPARKit: a pop-up park trailer full of amenities to activate public spaces!
Take your turn playing the ultimately portable arcade machine designed to be worn as a backpack.
An amalgamated union of letterpress printers collaborates on a series of limited edition wood-type posters, which will be given away (free!) all night.
Write your dream for Minneapolis on a ribbon, attach it to a glowing water balloon, and use a trebuchet to launch it at a mega-sized map of the city!
This Aura information hub is a glowing guidepost in the landscape primed for the revelers of Northern Spark.
Rest and recharge with refreshments from Whole Foods Market, short yoga classes presented by The Yoga Center, artist performances presented by A Mill Artist Lofts, tea from TeaSource, and massages—a relaxed moment on your way between the energy and excitement of West River Parkway and giant projections on Hennepin Avenue and 5th Street.
Need coffee to power your late night at Northern Spark? Stop by the Coffee Garden, hosted by Peace Coffee—and grab an opportunity to perform on stage!
Projections of the Greenway on found and intentional objects, using photographs from Greenway users.
Re-experience the sounds and sensations of bubble wrap under your feet and popping balloons, fragments from Andy Ducett’s installation: why we do this.
Rejuvenate yourself in this metaphysical space for decompression. A 2014 Art Shanty Project.
With elevator-themed music, puns, and rowdiness, the Elevator Shanty will take you to new heights. A 2014 Art Shanty Project.
Contribute to a large-scale stop motion animation project. Create your own bike wheel zoetrope. Screen a short video on the theme Connect the Dots. Submit short videos here: facebook.com/mnkino.
Visit three wooden towers and gaze into their eyes to see what lies inside.
Drop discs into a giant illuminated board. Randomized pathways and pegs reveal unique and creative plinko poetry!
Experience the city on a pedal-powered bike trailer. Layers of video reflect Midtown Greenway past, present, and future, evolving through the night.
Ever wonder what you’d look like dancing the night away with an elephant skull for a head? Check out Chimera, an interactive projection by Fall 2013 RARP artists Minneapolis Art on Wheels.
Watch an original hand-cranked and sketched TV show under the I-35W billboard. Wear a TV on your head for a reimagined understanding of televison.
Projecting Lowertown is a lively composite of images from St. Paul’s Lowertown projected on The Cowles Center. Additional support has been provided by The Cowles Center for Dance and Performing Arts.
beyond the LOOP combines aerial acrobatics, media manipulation, dance, and social media to explore our dreams of wanting more for our cities.
Ego Sum is a larger-than-life, inflatable, drawing project by Benjamin Entner which parodies art historical precedents. Here the reference is to Hamlet’s soliloquy on death holding the skull of Yorick.
Sing from a shape-note tunebook from 1844. We are not a choir, this is not a performance—come sing! Join us for Singing School or anytime, all night.
Experience a visual and sonic exploration of local music.
Dosha Kitchen is a mobile camper that helps the public discover Ayurvedic Dosha through food, drink, and objecthood.
La Maroma is a site-specific installation about a childhood story my mother told me about the Ayutla River in Mexico.
Wind harps and electric drones amplify and sonically reflect the ebb and flow, rich textures, and whispery tendrils of Minnesota wind.
Karl Unnasch illuminates the night with Glassicles. Three light installations made from repurposed bottles and drinking devices ignite dance in the city.
An artistic interpretation of MCAD’s archives from 1886 to the present.
Sit back and sample creative films, videos, and animations by MCAD students over the past decades. Appropriate for kids age 1 to 99.
Relive a golden age of cinema with Russian avant-garde films. The Museum of Russian Art will show classic early Soviet movies on the Post Office wall.
Nighttime Post illuminates the bond between strangers, hand-delivering messages from citizen to random citizen. Find an outpost and send a card!
,Midtown Greenway
Nighttime Post illuminates the bond between strangers, hand-delivering messages from citizen to random citizen. Find an outpost and send a card!
Grab a fistful of clay to make a “kiln god” around a glowing kiln. NCC presents this hands-on collaboration with ceramic artist David Swenson.
This sound-reactive projection-mapping project pays homage to pioneers of experimental film and animation as it transforms the new Orchestra Hall. Performers and the public will play the hall.
Amplify Us reflects the social dynamics in the lobby of Orchestra Hall, offering a playful interface to control color and sound in the space.
CELLULAR is a collaborative projection: we create an energetic display with our phones, encouraging movement, play, and dance.
Sculpt the future in FUTUREKAVE, a participatory 3D game that puts you on the moon with the power to bring colorful life to a desolate world.
David Luke’s animated poetry, created in collaboration with Upstream Arts, expands our understanding of expression, choice, and play.
Lights, reflectors, and intimate audio transform Kix Field into a boundary between present and past: a playing field becomes art.
Explore harmonic sounds and lighting effects through more than thirty large-scale tubular chimes and LED lights, activated by the audience.
Pedal Bear is a giant bear-puppet bike powered by ten riders. Take a ride and enjoy the night along the Greenway.
Flicker & Spore activates the space below a Greenway bridge by creating an interactive playground installation with moss and light.
A light sculpture of our expressions and stories: individual contributions become collected strands that evolve while traveling on the Greenway.
Stilt performance with shadow puppetry and light projections, transcending a spectrum of imagery from modern city to natural wild beauty.
Bring a towel (or not) and explore how public spaces promote social exchange. Project your dreams for your city through conversations in the sauna.
Iconic artworks from the Walker collection are on view all night, with activities and artist interventions happening throughout the museum’s campus.
,Minneapolis College of Art and Design
Sculpt the future in FUTUREKAVE, a participatory 3D game that puts you on the moon with the power to bring colorful life to a desolate world.
Chicago artist Andy Hall examines George Kubler’s dichotomy of useful inventions vs. artistic inventions in the creation of dyed silk shopping bags.
Fancy Folk is a witty snapshot framing the behavior of three privileged individuals.
Leav is a free mobile platform for placing, viewing, and sharing digital art. Download Leav in the iPhone App Store.
Transient Melody is an evolving soundtrack that surrounds the Chain of Lakes and Midtown Greenway in Uptown Minneapolis. At Northern Spark, experience it near the Walker Art Center.
Leav is a free mobile platform for placing, viewing, and sharing digital art. Download Leav in the iPhone App Store.
The Walker Art Center presents The Clock, a major cinematic installation by Christian Marclay. Be among the first to see it at this 24-hour screening.
Navigate jungles of gleaming sculptures under interstellar light displays, with live music until sunrise. Try space art, drawn by the wave of a hand.
Join MCBA for 1978—a true Happening with mirror balls, Warholesque screen printing, black light paper marbling, and plenty of disco!
Come sit at the banks of two major world rivers, meeting for the first time tonight in this Arab/American waterways project of poetic confluence.
Sophronia is two half-cities, half carnival, half stone, a glowing pavilion where the graffiti angel mixes video, images, music, and text. #sophroniatwo
Extend your voice (not your arm) and record your story. Capture a moment or a memory and tell us what you see before you. And we’ll give you the mp3 to share with all of your followers.
Students from St. Cloud State University invite you to collaborate in a filmed experiment of anonymous storytelling inspired by the Mississippi River.
The great river rises to unprecedented levels. Encounter this immersive ecosystem in the great stone egg before it begins its long journey to the sea.
Sit and converse. Push the boundaries of traditional portraiture. Anne Labovitz will transpose your words and visually synthesize them into paintings.
All-night Vexations by Erik Satie, with contemporary sound and video responses dispersed in the building—and disco-funk lessons!
Circumstances for We is all-night spontaneous performance! Participate with SuperGroup, Brute Heart, Rachel Jendrzejewski, and Liz Miller.
Tour the new Northrop with the architects of its revitalization: the renovated performance hall, the new “tunable theater,” murals, and more!
100 courses on the Mall! Scott Pampuch and a culinary team present 100 tasting courses during the night—100 seats at the table at 10-course intervals.
Northrop will be open all night—halls and spaces filled with art, music, dance, film, video, and conversation. Join us!
Are You Robot/Monster? revives the tradition of cardboard cutout photos in Art Shanty fashion. A 2014 Art Shanty Project.
Minneapolis³ is a performance site that creates a unique experience of our city with music, puppetry, dance, song, poetry, and interaction.
MysteryPhone: Art of Darkness is a cross-platform app (iOS, Android) providing an interactive story based on players’ geographic location.
Garden of Earthly Delights explores the relationship between public and private space and each person’s subjective view of his or her environment.
Local artists and a few hundred friends contribute to an unfolding, ever-changing artwork that is heroically projected onto a wall as it’s made.
POSTography visualizes the density of public thought related to places throughout the city, and creates a vehicle for meaningful engagement with these places.
Gossip Orchestra is an interactive musical installation in which audience members conduct twenty musicians with a full-body control board.
,Midtown Greenway
Nighttime Post illuminates the bond between strangers, hand-delivering messages from citizen to random citizen. Find an outpost and send a card!
Hotel Hotel is a poetic exploration of the transient nature of living organisms and architecture via insects and large-scale projection.
A three-channel video installation explores Minnesota’s white colonial legacy, the U.S.–Dakota War, and the myth of Paul Bunyan.
We match you with your song (in our aesthetic-predisposition screening process), teach it to you in a tent by the river, and send you off singing.
A team of performers works together to win—but there is no finish line. This performance video shows arduous effort and a strong vantage point of labor.
Within pulsing color and motion imagery, you are in a live projection as faces and bodies of the audience interact with the Gold Medal silos.
Based on Great Lakes circumnavigation, an overhead projector roams the city with mock lectures of poetry, map slides, travel pics, drawing, and water.
What does it mean to work? This performative event centers on collective work, public space, and art through a collaborative printing project.
Babies Sleep Tonight projects the invisible, sleeping babies of the city into the midst of the energy and excitement of an all-night festival.
Electric Hopscotch is a glowing electronic twist on the classic jump and skip game.
An all-night performance of Terry Riley’s minimalist piece In C.
City Symphony in 16mm is an interactive, multiprojection, expanded cinema project at the abandoned Fuji-Ya building on the Minneapolis riverfront.
The Ghostly Streetcar History Tour seeks to resurrect the past and inform the future with a visual narrative that explores the anatomy of a lost Twin Cites.
Have you always wanted to make art but couldn’t find the time? Here are a dozen opportunities to learn from MCAD artists in 15 minutes or less.
Lost, Found, & Wanted Shanty will make connections all over Minneapolis. Write up and post what you’ve lost, what you’ve found, a personals ad, or something to trade.
The Magic Hand of Chance, a pioneering work by Roman Verostko, presents a nostalgic display of early “computer art” created in 1982. Witness the endless algorithmic possibilities!
It’s a map, it’s a house . . . it’s a lot of new art in the MCAD sculpture garden! Six alums reshape projects to fit the campus theme of “déjà vu.”
Back by popular demand: Keetra Dean Dixon’s collective high-in-the-sky swing installation in the skywalk on the MCAD campus.
TASK is an improvisational participatory event with a simple structure and few rules. Write a task, pull a task, interpret a task—the possibilities are endless.
Teeter-totters and benches under a canopy of shadow patterns and prismatic colors make an interactive space for play and reflection. Listen: community voices will speak to you.
Loring Park’s new restaurant brings friends together for quiet and revelry, for a night of light sculptures, performances, film, espresso, and more!
Engage in artmaking and stargazing from our rooftop deck and open air shanty. A 2014 Art Shanty Project.
You are on the crew of the spacecraft Aspera. Through light, sound, switches, levers, and knobs, you must keep the ship intact. Your in-flight entertainment comes from Greycoats and a projection-mapped debut of new songs.
You are on the crew of the spacecraft Aspera. Through light, sound, switches, levers, and knobs, you must keep the ship intact. Your in-flight entertainment comes from Greycoats and a projection-mapped debut of new songs.
Come listen to jazz standards and new jazz compositions by the Dakota Combo, MacPhail’s premier student jazz group.
Stilt performance with shadow puppetry and light projections, transcending a spectrum of imagery from modern city to natural wild beauty.
American composer Kevin Puts’ 28-minute score is animated by the live visual projections of Yael Braha and Bryant Place’s /ärtəfakts/ in motion. Using sensing devices, the sounds of the players trigger experimental video projections inside the Orchestra Hall auditorium.
Enjoy a free performance of the BNW’s legendary Late Night Improv in our mainfloor event space! Limited availability—first come, first served!
Need coffee to power your late night at Northern Spark? Stop by the Coffee Garden, hosted by Peace Coffee—and grab an opportunity to perform on stage!
Visit Rain Taxi’s tribe of poetic seers, who will write a poem for you on the spot based on a reading of uniquely designed Tarot cards.
Dive into ground zero of our new cultural district with an OCULUS perspective featuring projections, performances, illuminated sculpture, and more!
Performance by Emily Johnson/Catalyst and the Anonymous Choir, participatory light-box walks, volunteer actions, and video by Mona Smith.
You are on the crew of the spacecraft Aspera. Through light, sound, switches, levers, and knobs, you must keep the ship intact. Your in-flight entertainment comes from Greycoats and a projection-mapped debut of new songs.
Write Fight is a single-elimination tournament: eight writers go head to head, amid distractions, battling to be champ.
Back by popular demand! Interact with live raptors perched outside the museum. Get in touch with your night owl and learn about Minnesota’s raptors.
Zeitgeist and komungo master Jin Hi Kim present an improvisational performance celebrating night.
You are on the crew of the spacecraft Aspera. Through light, sound, switches, levers, and knobs, you must keep the ship intact. Your in-flight entertainment comes from Greycoats and a projection-mapped debut of new songs.
Stilt performance with shadow puppetry and light projections, transcending a spectrum of imagery from modern city to natural wild beauty.
Greet the midnight charm of Northern Spark with a yoga class. Join Gorilla Yogis in downtown Minneapolis. BYOMat & Water. All Gorilla species welcome!
You are on the crew of the spacecraft Aspera. Through light, sound, switches, levers, and knobs, you must keep the ship intact. Your in-flight entertainment comes from Greycoats and a projection-mapped debut of new songs.
Have your reading done by this eco-oracle with art tarot cards representing the WAM collection. All your ecological mysteries will be revealed.
You are on the crew of the spacecraft Aspera. Through light, sound, switches, levers, and knobs, you must keep the ship intact. Your in-flight entertainment comes from Greycoats and a projection-mapped debut of new songs.
Stilt performance with shadow puppetry and light projections, transcending a spectrum of imagery from modern city to natural wild beauty.
Experience the magic of a Northern Spark sunrise with a delicious pancake breakfast, whether you’re tired out from all-night fun or an early-riser.
