Winner will debut June 13 at Minneapolis Convention Center Plaza

MINNEAPOLIS, (March 5, 2015) 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 announce the 2015 winner for the Creative City Challenge is mini_polis, one of three project teams competing for a $75,000 commission to create the project that will debut at the MCC Plaza on June 13, 2015, as part of Northern Spark, an annual dusk-to-dawn festival in Minneapolis with tens of thousands of participants.

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, will collect place-based hopes and memories at the workshops and create 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 will allow 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.

"The finalists for the Creative City Challenge are getting stronger every year," said Eric Quint, chief design officer at 3M Company and CCC jury chair. "It's exciting to see all the creative opportunity that abounds when Minneapolis is the inspiration. On behalf of the jury I congratulate the winning team for designing the platform of a miniature city to capture the dreams and stories of young minds to imagine a meaningful urban experience. I also want to acknowledge the creative initiative of the other two projects, "Shadow Swing" and "We all share the same Skies," for their exciting proposals.

The jury members felt that this project stood out because of the community engagement process the team is using to develop the piece, said Jeff Johnson, MCC executive director. And also for the way it invites its audience to imagine what the city could be. We look forward to watching residents and visitors interacting with the project and one another on the plaza this summer.

We feel incredibly privileged to accept the 2015 Creative City Challenge, said Kubota, one of the winning team members. Our goal was to design a sculpture and a process that shows off Minneapolitans' stories and dreams, and we can't wait to begin working with people and hearing their great ideas for the city.

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.

Three finalists were selected from the entries received in the fall of 2014. The other two finalists were:

• Perkins+Will, Shadow Swings

Shadow Swings is a series of musical swings around a central canopied area conceived by a team from the architectural firm Perkins+Will, led by Anne Smith and Doug Bergert.

• PLAAD, We All Share the Same Skies

We All Share the Same Skies by PLAAD, an interdisciplinary design office led by Matthew Byers and Mark Stankey, will provide visitors to the convention center an opportunity to introduce or reacquaint themselves to or with our sky through three separate enclosed structures, joined by a common central canopy element.

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 goals of the program are to: promote and coordinate city resources to develop the arts as an economic generator in alignment the city goal "art and artists are economic drivers in and of themselves, to stimulate cross-sector collaboration to strengthen the arts economy and community in Minneapolis and provide presence and visibility for the creative sector in the City of Minneapolis.

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.

Online: www.minneapolis.org and http://go.minneapolis.org

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MEDIA CONTACT

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

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