Not every art installation instructs visitors to take small steps like a penguin. Again, there is nothing like it Art Shanty Worksin which intrepid Minnesota artists in insulated overalls and ice packs annually recreate traditional ice fishing huts, called shacks, in their own wacky style on a frozen lake in Minneapolis.
Dreamy constructions – such as a ‘Hot Box Disco Inferno’ wrapped in space blankets, pulsed with LEDs – attract thousands of visitors to a temporary public space that looks like Burning Man on ice.
This year, it was thin ice.
The idea that 19 artists’ shacks would rise on Lake Harriet — Bde’ Unma in the Dakota language — for this three-weekend event was never a given. A cold snap in late November followed by a lull in early January and then sub-zero temperatures led to highly inconsistent and potentially dangerous ice conditions on many of the state’s famed 10,000 lakes. Already this winter there have been four deaths from people driving vehicles on ice. In late December, more than 100 people had to be rescued from a pole of ice that broke loose from a fishing area on a northern Minnesota lake.
But on Jan. 27, for the Art Shanty grand opening, there was a miraculous 13 inches of solid ice at Harriet, and about 10,000 people showed up on ice skates, rubber bikes and sleds full of little kids to interact with crazy interactive shacks.
Then this week, March temperatures wreaked havoc on the event, leading organizers to conclude the lake was no longer safe for crowds. On Thursday they finished the program. Moving the structures to the coast, which is snowless and muddy, was not an option.
“It was 52 degrees yesterday,” lamented Erin Lavelle, the works’ artistic director, “and 32 degrees at 5 in the morning — but only for two hours. We didn’t want to be in an emergency.” The artists, wearing life jackets, began to dismantle huts one by one.
At least two other cultural events and several ice fishing tournaments were also canceled due to rising temperatures.
Ice reduction has become status quo in Minnesota. Winters have warmed five to six degrees since 1970, “one of the strongest signs of climate change,” said Kenneth Blumenfeld, senior climatologist at the state Department of Natural Resources. The current rise, with highs of 40 to 50 degrees, is due to natural El Niño weather patterns in addition to human-caused climate change, he said.
“We’re seeing where things are going, so there’s a bittersweet edge to our festival,” said Kate Nordstrum, the artistic director of a side event called the Great Northwhose partner organization, the US Championships Hockey Pond – which draws players from Belgium – was canceled due to water on the ice.
To safely accommodate the shanty village and visitors, county officials required that the lake ice be at least 10 inches thick. Right after New Year’s, Lavelle began digging a hole in the ice and putting her bare hand into the frozen depths, assessing the results. On January 18, Lavelle postponed the event for a week, and the long-awaited day when the ice was smooth and pristine finally arrived this past weekend. “I think I’m the only art director in the country who holds an ice drill,” she said of a tool that looks like a giant corkscrew.
Among the highlights of the opening weekend were “Klezmer on Ice“, where the spectators danced to the time without slipping. Then there was ‘Fro-Gahhh’, the opposite of hot yoga, in which the ice was lined with colorful mats and yogis in hats and boots descended, their breaths visible in the cold.
In the center of the old village square stood a bright red ‘shack’ hut, a recreation of the original shack – part club, part art studio – built 20 years ago by artists David Pitman and Peter Haakon Thompson on a Lake. west of Minneapolis. In keeping with Art Shanty Projects’ DIY aesthetic, the insulating walls were made from gym mats recycled from Minneapolis public schools, with Covid barriers for windows.
“Frozen lakes are beautiful, desolate places where you wouldn’t expect to find art,” Thompson said. The artists’ mission was to engage the viewers as active participants. more than half of the project’s $200,000 annual budget typically comes from donations from visitors and goes toward paying artists. Those funds are now at risk, organizers said.
Like the conspicuously absent snowflakes, no two shacks were alike, each built on ski-shaped planks that allow them to move close to shore when conditions are choppy. “People park their sense of decency at the edge of the lake,” said Robin Garwood, a 44-year-old carver and installation artist who was in his fourth shack. Called the “NatureGrafter,” it was a tribute to Minnesota’s wildlife, with images of animals, plants and aquatic animals beautifully wood-burned onto boards.
Garwood, who has canoed the Mississippi River solo, an odyssey that lasted 84 days, has a deep reverence for his hometown and the winter that is part of a Minnesotan’s identity. But gradually he accepts the inevitable. “We can’t count on having reliable winter ice in Minnesota,” he said. “We’re going to lose a lot of things we love about our state.”
Some of the shantytown themes were apparently focused on a warming planet. In one, called “A Poem for Entangled Living,” a young group of environmental activist-etchers constructed a pyramid with see-saw arms meant to suggest a world out of balance. Visitors added their own quotes and images. The idea was to “engage with climate grief,” said Dio Cramer, 26, one of its creators.
Young architects were also drawn to the shacks, a very different exercise from the stereotype of designing a first home for one’s parents. In an effort brimming with ingenuity, four graduate students from the University of Minnesota College of Design built a hut out of construction waste that became a xylophone, incorporating a dismantled chain-link fence and supports sawn from a metal bed frame. They handed out xylophone mallets to those waiting in line.
Jerry Carlson, an emergency technician, helped his family create a virtual “Banned Book Reading Room” with crocheted blankets, a fake fireplace and shelves of banned tomes and paper flames placed on the pages. Among them were EB White’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” (banned by a Kansas school district) and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” (banned in at least two states).
Carlson grew up ice fishing, a time-honored tradition in the Upper Midwest, where anglers usually go after perch and walleye (and often spiked with alcohol). Before the current nuisance conditions, most Minnesota lakes were dotted with colorful shacks and sometimes custom RVs with underwater cameras that project fish strikes onto 65-inch flat screens, a phenomenon captured in the YouTube series “Show us your shack!”
On Wednesday, he said, a man on an ATV misjudged the conditions and rolled his four-wheeler onto what he thought was solid ice. Before his vehicle plunged into icy waters, he was rescued by fellow Carlson EMTs.
So this Sunday’s nighttime walk of illuminated ice sculptures – including the Icecropolis and Icehenge – has been moved to land. “It’s a race not to melt,” said Claire Wilson, its executive director Loppet Foundation, a group dedicated to getting people out into nature.
While they still could, the Outdoor Painters of Minnesota they set up their easels, imprinting greens and blues on the frozen landscape that perhaps only their artists’ eyes could discern. The shacks were cracked and splotches of paint in the background. “It’s a dynamic environment,” said Jack Dant, a product development engineer who paints for pleasure. “Every time you look up it’s different.”
Mikha Dominguez, 36, who moved from Caracas, Venezuela, to teach Spanish and Portuguese at Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji, Minn., had imbued his shack with a fever dream of a tropical paradise filled with flowering trees. He built “La Casa de los Sueños de Colores” (“The Dream House of Color”) with his German husband, Alexander Aleman. Last weekend, Dominguez suited up, dressed as an inflatable psychedelic fish that wrapped most of his face. (“Listen,” he told a reporter, “it keeps me warm, okay?”)
On Thursday, he dismantled the shack in frustration, which was in about three centimeters of water. “It looked like a wet summer morning with steam coming off the lake,” he muttered of the warming trend.
However, he was thankful that their paradise had two days to live. “I think the land is more predictable,” Dominguez said. “But there is power and beauty in the lake.”