John Davis

I am the Executive Director of Lanesboro Arts, a multidisciplinary arts organization founded in 1980. Lanesboro Arts fulfills its mission to serve as a regional catalyst for artistic excellence and educational development in providing diverse art experiences for people of all ages through visual art galleries, the performing arts, an artist residency program, public art, and educational outreach. Last year, Lanesboro Arts programming involved more than 180 volunteers, 300 artists, and 30,000 audience members. In 2013, Lanesboro (pop 754) was named one of the Top 12 Small Town ArtPlaces in America, a recognition determined by the number of arts opportunities per capita.

Since its founding, Lanesboro Arts has worked at developing local partnerships to shift the paradigm of the role an arts center can play in the social and economic success of a rural community. With funding from ArtPlace America, the NEA Our Town program, the McKnight Foundation, and many other contributors, we are re-imagining the sustainability of rural towns by using the arts as a change agent and an economic driver. Utilizing an asset-based, collaborative strategy for gaining community buy-in, our Lanesboro Arts Campus initiative has aspired to become an innovative national model for small towns around the country, seeking to strategically weave the arts into city infrastructure and foster a more inclusive, vibrant community that encourages creativity, walkability, and economic opportunity.

In developing community-wide arts integration strategies, Lanesboro Arts has worked on the principle that how change is presented is as important as the change itself. At the outset of our initiative, then, we cultivated relationships with leaders of the City of Lanesboro and the Lanesboro Area Chamber of Commerce. These relationships culminated in integrating the arts into the policies and values of the community: the Lanesboro Arts Campus vision is now a shared vision for the future of the city. The Lanesboro Area Chamber of Commerce, for instance, has changed its vision statement to read, “Become the premier small town arts and culture destination.” The city’s strategic plan, drafted from a community-wide survey called Lanesboro 20/20: Envisioning Our Future, recognizes “the growth of a strong arts community” as an asset vital to the community’s success. The plan aims to “encourage the vitality of existing arts programming and seek to develop new artistic venues,” as well as to “implement improvements of infrastructure, and build upon Lanesboro’s walkability and friendly community spirit.” Building upon this shared community vision, the arts as a change agent now fits into a context of community strategic planning as well as serving a vital civic purpose.

For the Lanesboro Arts Campus initiative, the notion of aesthetic frames was essential in order to better integrate the arts into a master vision plan for a small town. Community stakeholder meetings were crucial in gaining not only buy-in and enthusiasm for the vision, but also for cultivating new ideas and providing feedback for an aesthetic framing discussion. Keeping Lanesboro unique, memorable and authentic were values that rose to the top of town conversations about aesthetics.

One example of the arts serving a civic purpose as well as solving a community challenge was the transformation of the town parking lot. Lanesboro is a tourism-based community; our problem was that the municipal parking lot was uninviting. Visitors simply wouldn’t park there. Creating a poetry parking lot focused the arts on solving a community challenge—parking—and encouraged social change by transforming a parking lot into a canvas for poetry as well as promoting greater community connectivity and walkability. Minnesota poet Ed Bok Lee curated a regional haiku competition that was thematically connected to the Lanesboro area. Hundreds of haiku were submitted; 15 were woven into the poetry parking lot as 24”x 36”signs, seamlessly integrated into historic street lights in the poetry parking lot for maximum visibility. Designed for consistency with creative signage made by local artist Karl Unnasch for the downtown area, the aesthetic framework for the haiku was carefully reviewed by key community stakeholders—the City, the Chamber and the Park Board—as well as by our design team which included city planners Hoisington Koegler Group Inc. and wayfinding/signage experts Archetype Signs. Similar signage was created to guide visitors from the poetry parking lot to downtown, connecting parking to retail businesses and arts venues as well as to green space and to the Root River.

Creating a shared aesthetic and economic vision over time, through community consultation and buy-in, has been the key to establishing the Lanesboro Arts Campus as a vehicle for addressing civic challenges and implementing creative social change. Developing community and civic partnerships and utilizing the arts and creativity to foster and facilitate community dialog helps to break down perceived barriers to change. Process is important. Relationships are essential. Communication is vital in helping everyone—civic leaders and citizens alike—to grapple with aesthetic questions and challenges in small town America.

In September of 2014 the City of Lanesboro passed a unanimous resolution declaring the whole town of Lanesboro an Arts Campus, becoming the first rural town in America to make such a declaration.