Minneapolis Convention Center Plaza will host mini_polis, Creative City Market throughout summer

MINNEAPOLIS, (June 5, 2015) The 2015 winner for the Creative City Challenge, mini_polis, will debut at the Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC) Plaza on June 13 at 8:30 p.m. as part of the opening ceremony for Northern Spark, an annual dusk-to-dawn festival in Minneapolis with tens of thousands of participants. The public art work will remain on the plaza throughout the summer and be the site of the new Creative City Market on the second Thursday each month from July through September.

mini_polis by Niko Kubota and team is a scale model of Minneapolis built in collaboration with community participants in a series of build workshops. The mini_polis team, led by local designer-educator-artists Niko Kubota, Jon Reynolds and Micah Roth, collected place-based hopes and memories at the workshops and created a multimedia interface within the finished city model to share these stories. The completed mini_polis will be a landscape of lighted plywood buildings, laid out to approximate the Minneapolis downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. A multimedia interactive map station allows visitors to interact with installation: selected buildings will light up and play the model builders story, giving the viewer a peek into the experiences and hopes of a particular place they can now locate in their city. A selfie station will encourage visitors to photograph and share their pictures in front of the project. View more about the project and a brief video explanation here: http://www.minneapolis.org/min....

Creative City Market coming soon

Summer event programming has always been a part of the Creative City Challenge project and, this year, the Creative City Market will launch on the second Thursday, July 9, 2015, and continue on the second Thursdays the following two months on Aug. 13 and Sept. 10. The Creative City Market will be open on the MCC Plaza from 4 p.m. to sunset, and offer a variety of vendors selling unique locally made, affordable, usable products made by diverse communities in the city and region that are curated by The Musicant Group, food and Minnesota craft beer from the MCCs Craft Bar and Lounge will be for sale and there will be various entertainment and activities, as well as a place for visitors and residents to hang out and enjoy the views of Minneapolis and mini_polis. Event information will be available at http://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/on-the-plaza/events.

Creative City Challenge background information

The Creative City Challenge (CCC) is a competition for Minnesota-resident architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds to create and install at the MCC Plaza a temporary, destination artwork. The artwork acts as a sociable and participatory platform for summer-long onsite programming, and encourages a sense of connectedness to the city as a whole and its rich cultural and natural offerings. The MCC Plaza is a green roof that is located directly across from the MCC at 1301 Second Avenue South.

The CCCs goal is to draw visitors and residents of the city to the Minneapolis Convention Center as a central meeting space for the surrounding area, as well as to provide a compelling gathering site for the MCCs thousands of visitors. The commission fee for the winning project is $75,000, inclusive of all artist fees, installation and de-installation costs. The winning project will remain on the MCC Plaza throughout the summer and be the site of public events to be announced at a later date. The MCC is a site of convergence for visitors to Minneapolis from around the country and the world, as well as being a part of the local neighborhood, and Minneapolis downtown.

The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC), the Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Program of the City of Minneapolis and Meet Minneapolis, Convention & Visitors Association, in collaboration with Northern Lights.mn and the Northern Spark festival are responsible for the annual Creative City Challenge competition and associated programming.

In its inaugural year, the Creative City Challenge selected the Minneapolis Interactive Macro Mood Installation (MIMMI) as the 2013 winner. The 2014 Creative City Challenge winner was Balancing Ground.

More information about Creative City Challenge, past projects and the new winning project is available at http://www.minneapolis.org/minneapolis-convention-center/ccc.

ABOUT MINNEAPOLIS CONVENTION CENTER

The Minneapolis Convention Center (MCC) is the largest indoor, contiguous, convention center in the Upper Midwest with over 1.5 million visitors annually, including 250,000 during the summer months. The MCC is more than a meeting place. It's more than a show space. It's a building all about building something elserelationships. A blend of form and function, the MCC provides aesthetically pleasing and innovative solutions for a variety of conferences, trade shows and events. With nearly 480,000 square feet of trade show space, 87 column-free conference meeting rooms, a 28,000-square-foot ballroom, and an auditorium with superb production and flexible technology options, the facility can handle any event from a small meeting to a large convention or trade show.

ABOUT THE ARTS, CULTURE AND THE CREATIVE ECONOMY PROGRAM, CITY OF MINNEAPOLIS

The Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy Program is an initiative of the City Coordinator's office established August 2011 to leverage the creative sector towards strengthening social and economic growth in the City of Minneapolis. The goal of the program is to develop, promote and coordinate the arts as a social and economic generator in alignment with key City of Minneapolis goals. The program achieves this by stimulating cross-sector collaboration that strengthen the arts economy and community, tracking, surveying and sharing information on the creative sector, placing artists in residence within the City Departments and providing presence and visibility for the creative sector.

ABOUT NORTHERN SPARK

Northern Spark is produced by Northern Lights.mn, a non-profit arts organization dedicated to artists working innovatively in the public sphere, exploring expanded possibilities for civic engagement and encourage pluralistic community. This years festival begins at 9:01 p.m. on June 13 in Minneapolis. http://northernspark.org

ABOUT MEET MINNEAPOLIS

Meet Minneapolis is a private, not-for-profit, member-based association. It actively promotes and sells the Minneapolis area as a destination for conventions and meetings, works to maximize the visitor experience and markets the city as a desirable tourist destination to maximize the economic benefit of the greater Minneapolis area.

Meet Minneapolis is accredited by the Destination Marketing Accreditation Program (DMAP) of the Destination Marketing Association International.

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MEDIA CONTACT

Kristen Montag, PR and communications manager, 612.767.8038, kristenm@minneapolis.org, @Minneapolis_PR on Twitter.

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