#worksprogress

[h2o-mn]

Such a cool project - chip in! I donated because I've been involved (http://h2o-mn.tumblr.com/tagged/waterbar) and because I think that water issues and public space are important. How cool does "Art-Sustainability Incubator" sound?!

Link to Water Bar SIP Fund GoFundMe page, and information copied below:

A taproom for tap water and art-sustainability incubator. Help make it happen in Minneapolis! Give to the Water Bar & Public Studio 'SIP' fund and help us open our doors this spring. #WaterBar #SIPfund #WaterIsAllWeHave #NEmpls What is Water Bar? Water Bar began in 2014 as a public art project, a pop-up bar that serves local tap waters and is staffed by artists, water researchers, sustainability educators, and other community residents.

Here's a video from our opening night on Twin Cities Public Television's TV Takeover  program: Over the past two years this pop-up Water Bar has served local tap waters to over 30,000 people in Minnesota, Arkansas, Illinois and North Carolina - sparking conversations about the importance of local water to lives and communties, and helping to equip people to engage with complex issues that stem from our collective attitudes and approaches to environment - issues like water pollution and scarcity, land use and urban development, climate change, and environmental injustice. In just under 2 years, we've also directly engaged over 60 volunteers and interns as Water Bar water tenders. These everyday experts help care for and communicate about water and the ways it shapes and is shaped by human culture. We want to bring Water Bar back to our Minneapolis neighborhood. Through partnerships with neighborhood and environmental organizations, University researchers, and other artists and advocates, we have the opportunity to open a storefront Water Bar & Public Studio in northeast Minneapolis. This social space will be convivial and creative, serving water (for free), and serving as a hub for neighborhood art and sustainability events, programs, community-led classes, and more. Before we can open our doors, we need to hear from our community. We've identified a space near Central and Lowry Avenues, we're lining up partnerships and building public program collaborations, but we need to know who else wants to see the Water Bar happen in Minneapolis. Give if you can, share if you can't, and please be in touch if you want to get involved! Give to the Water Bar SIP (Studio-In-Progress) Fund! The Water Bar SIP fund is our way of showing that a place-based, collaborative art and ecology project can thrive in Minneapolis with broad community support. Importantly, donations will help to cover the costs of opening the space and gathering the supplies we need to start activating it right away. What will the SIP fund support? (1) A Water Bar 'Taproom' - Where water is all we have, and water is always free. During regular taproom hours, anyone can visit for a free glass of Minneapolis tap water. Water Bar will also feature “limited edition” pours of other local and regional tap waters, inviting guests from those communities to share their own water stories. These waters will be served by volunteer water tenders from partnering environmental and community organizations, schools, and local advocacy groups - they will provide information about the sources of these waters, related environmental issues and campaigns, and ways that visitors can get involved and take action. All of this water will be free to drink, but any tips given to bartenders will help to support the activities of visiting organizations and campaigns, providing seed funding for those existing neighborhood and community projects - or new ones developed at the bar. (2) Creative community space - for thinking, making, doing, and dreaming. Creative and accessible public programming will invite audiences from in and around northeast Minneapolis to gather, contemplate, connect and create together. Water Bar programming will be arts-based and cross-disciplinary, amplifying art and creative culture that introduces ecological thinking, absent narratives, local and neighborhood environmental justice issues, and environmental science research that is regional and global in scope. When events are not scheduled, the space will be open for meetings and informal coworking. Water Bar will feature free water and free wi-fi, a small library of books and other reading materials, a rotating exhibition program of artwork by visual and media artists from our community, and a calendar of related programs and events across the Twin Cities. (3) The first public art and sustainability incubator in Minneapolis -  placed in northeast, but tapped into regional and global research and organizing. In addition to public programs planned by Water Bar artists and partners, the Public Studio will be a platform for others within and beyond the neighborhood to research, develop, or create their own artworks, public events, and environment-focused programs. This will happen initially through partnerships, and eventually, through an open studio and apprenticeship program. As we grow the space, we'll fundraise and add new resources and offerings, including opportunities for research and art-making residencies, for anyone to teach or take classes, and for art-making on site and in our broader neighborhood. Our goal is to enable innovative art and design ideas, practices, and projects that support equitable public engagement, education, and sustainable design-development for water quality at the neighborhood and city level. How will we fund Water Bar once it is launched? We're in the process of developing a core group of partner organizations, and together with our partners, are raising operational and project-based support. We are also looking for investors who can make a larger investment in this social enterprise project. In addition to this support, we'll be earning income by continuing to offer the pop-up Water Bar to outside groups for a fee (Interested? Sign-up here!), employing artists and neighborhood residents as Water Bar tenders and educators, and by renting our space for meetings and special events. We will also sell products and services developed through the Public Studio - including publications, media projects, and workshops for groups interested in utilizing art and creativity to engage their own community with water and environmental issues. Neighborhood SIP fund for art-environment projects After covering the costs of operating the studio, any profits will be redistributed to community-generated projects through the establishment of a neighborhood SIP fund for art and environmental innovation and engagement - managed by a rotating group of artists, scientists, and other community residents. Help us launch this project! To receive updates about the Water Bar project, sign-up for the Works Progress Studio newsletter. Find us on Twitter: @works_progress Instagram: Works Progress Studio And Facebook: Works Progress Studio About Works Progress Studio: We're a public art & design studio whose collaborative projects catalyze relationships between people, place, and environment - helping to enable new possibilities for artistic expression, civic imagination, and participation in public life. We've been around in one shape or form since 2010. Led by multidisciplinary artists Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson, Works Progress engages an expansive network of artists, designers, organizers, researchers, educators, advocates and other creative people to realize imaginative public art and design projects that are rooted in place and purpose. Say [email protected] / worksprogress.org

[h2o-mn]

Link to Article: “Building Relationships - and a water ethic- that we can all live with”

[oneyellowbird-blog1]

Do you know where your water comes from? #WaterBar #WorksProgress

[jkim5]

Ties that Bond: The Occupy Community

In and around the Occupy movement I’ve been talking with people about communities, communes, communalism, commons, communism, etc.  The conversation I attended the longest at A Public Thing // Financial Engagement (an event organized on November 5 to promote public conversations on the Occupy movement in the Twin Cities) was about the possibility of forming a commune in the Twin Cities, which got me thinking about why we might want this and what need this might be a response to. Outside of the real economic and political demands that the Occupy movement has been making is there something lacking in our lives at the level of our relationships to others that the movement strives to articulate?

Indeed, one of the things I’m excited about in the Occupy movement is how it has resulted in the creation of ties that bond individuals together into communities outside of the ways in which relationships usually form.  G.W. Hegel imagined that substantive civic communities are based on the model of families; community members are held together "by the bond of mutual need."  The movement’s bond is recognizable in the encampments that have sprung up, a nexus of sharing, singing, militating, collaborative teaching, protesting and learning.

We are surrounded by people, especially in large cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul, but why isn’t this enough?  Maybe because of the habitual ways in which our relationships arise.  For example, there’s friends we make at work.  But these form around the capitalist production of a good or service – a very thin connection between people who would otherwise be strangers.  There’s play.  But we gather around mass distractions, like beer, booze or sports. There’s politics.  But we’re too busy apologizing for what mainstream politics is failing to do, instead of organizing to make meaningful changes.

The Occupy movement has inspired me to think more critically about the communities I’m regularly a part of and motivated me to strengthen my relationships to others by becoming active in movements that share my mutual needs.  Crisis can be the basis for the formation of a vibrant community of individuals who share bonding moments, like protesting and organizing, and there’s lots of movements out there to join. Here’s some that come immediately to my mind:  unions (IWW, Worker’s International); Minneapolis Autonomous Radical Space; a social justice non-profit (like Minnesota Neighborhoods Organized for Change or Rock Star Supply Co.); community farming organizations (like Frogtown Gardens); the Experimental Community Education Organization of the Twin Cities.  This list could go on and on.  I’ve recently been fascinated by Ourgoods; find me there!