The organizers of an all-night participatory art event that graced the Twin Cities for the past 15 years have published a book to reflect on the challenges of organizing such an event.
The organizers in question, Northern Lights.mn, shuttered the nonprofit’s doors on June 30. The organization organized the annual event, known as the Northern Spark Festival.
The organization dissolved because of funding challenges, exasperated by the pandemic and ongoing inflation.
“The business model of the organization ceased to function well or at all. And it maybe never worked well. As a nonprofit that was providing very expensive, free programming to the public, we ran out of money, or we projected running out of money,” said Sarah Peters, the former co-director of Northern Lights.mn, in a Zoom interview. “We didn’t want to just dwindle into nothing.”
Over the past year, over 45 contributors collaborated to create a glossary, funded by the McKnight Foundation, consisting of poems, essays, reports, graphics, and photographs of what they learned in the years they organized the event. To learn more about the book, we interviewed Peters (SP) and Ady Olson McNair (AOM), two of the artists who produced Northern Spark as well as the book. Their responses were edited for clarity.
Q. Why did you all decide to write the book?
AOM: One of the things that was really a gift in our decision to sunset is that we were able to foresee that we would not have enough funds to continue, and so we were not in a state of crisis when we decided to sunset. And that gave us this distance where we could kind of plan ahead. We had this year-long sort of gap where we didn’t have our regular programming to do. And all we had to do was focus on this sunset. We didn’t know what we wanted to do yet, but we wanted to do something that was a multivocal reflection of our 17-year history of Northern Lights, and we wanted to create something that we could share with everyone.
Sarah and I got together with the founder and former executive and artistic director, Steve Dietz, as another co-editor of the book, and Matthew Rezac, who was our longtime graphic designer. And we kind of brainstormed, and we gathered a group of 15 artists to help us think through what this thing that we were creating could be, and it turned into this very, very detailed and thorough and very multivocal book. There were 45 contributors who we had worked with throughout the history of Northern Lights, artists and partners and we just kind of want it to be a reflection on the meaning of Northern Lights and how it impacted so many people in the community and how they are continuing to carry their experiences forward with them.
SP: One of the things that’s hard as an organization, is when you are in the everyday operating cycle of making annual programs, it’s hard to have any time to sit back, slow down and reflect. This is a common challenge, and we’re like, we actually have an opportunity to do that. Like, what was this work about? You’re kind of doing that along the way as you’re writing grant narratives, and talking with your colleagues about what your values are. But this was an opportunity for us to think out loud and make visible the kinds of conversations we sat around and had in our office for the 10 years that mostly the three of us, Ady, Steve, and I, were working together.
I don’t even want to call it wisdom, because it sure is wisdom, but like, this is what we thought about. This is what we were trying to figure out. This is what we were trying to do so that the field can discuss it, grapple with it, argue with it, disagree, or maybe find some help in some of that thinking, as we hope people continue to make work in public spaces.
Q. The book has a glossary that is interspersed with photos and essays. Why structure it as such?
AOM: We didn’t want to create the history of the organization, but we did want to include bits and pieces of the history of the organization. We came up with the glossary idea first, and as we were developing the project, we started calling it a messy and interrupted glossary. We knew that we wanted it to be kind of chock full of lots of different directions that you could go, kind of like a choose-your-own adventure. We chose the glossary format so that people’s contributions could be as long or as short as they needed to be, and so that we could highlight certain ideas that were meaningful and placed words and terms with them. Our designer, Matthew Rezac, also wanted to make sure that it felt quite messy, because the work of Northern Lights tended to be pretty messy and not unidirectional.
SP: The glossary idea we got so excited about, because, frankly, it was really overwhelming to think about how to even talk about what our work was, and we often had a practice internally of just keywords that we would use, or the words in our mission statement, were all words that were connected to our values. We started out by just making this great big list of words, and what we realized is by having the writing follow a glossary format, is that we could hold lighter topics, like bicycle, alongside heavier ideas like harm or bigger ideas like community, and have those have equal weight in terms of hierarchy.
Q. What is the takeaway for people who do pick up a copy of the book?
AOM: I think it’s going to be so different for everyone, depending on their relationship with Northern Lights. Maybe for me, just this book was a way of honoring and acknowledging the meaningfulness of the work that we did, and recognizing that it was not just a meaningfulness for one particular group. It wasn’t just meaningful for staff, but it was meaningful for audience members and for volunteers and for partner organizations.
SP: I agree that people are gonna have a million different takeaways. But what I hope is seen by the book is the idea of complexity and interconnection. We put this drawing that I had sketched, not quite on a napkin, but probably on the back of a report printed out or something of all the intertwined components of each of these circles needing attention when making an event as complex as Northern Spark. Really, it was complex, it was beautiful, and it was really hard.
Q: What advice do you have for those who want to organize similar events?
AOM: We’re very proud to be working on a toolkit (http://northern.lights.mn/blog/toolkit-and-bibliography/) for people to use who are doing this kind of work. It’ll be a downloadable Google Drive toolkit that people can access through our website. It has templates of budgets and examples of contracts and a ton of different materials that people can download and then turn into whatever they need.
SP: Look for organizational partners that have the same values and mission and can work with you, because it’s harder, it’s just true that it is harder to pull these things off as individuals rather than organizations. Bureaucratic systems aren’t really designed to talk to individuals. They understand organizations and nonprofits. If you can sort of partner up with an organization that just has that status, it can grease the wheels of bureaucracy a little bit.
Partnering up as a team with other organizations and don’t ever forget the art at the center of it. You could get lost in the bureaucracy very easily and in all of the rest of the details, and they’re important. The production details are how people feel welcomed or experience your event or hear about it, or know how to get there or have food and water once they are there. But keep the art at the center.
There’s also just the total DIY, like, make an event in the park and put it up on social media and invite people to come, right?
AOM: Documentation is super important. We always hired photographers and videographers for our programs. And I think that is one of the things that an organization, a small organization, can add to their portfolio in order to get future grants, in order to work their way up to being able to get a general operating grant. It’s so important that the experience itself is what you want it to be, and is artist focused, and then also, in order to tell the story, it’s really important to be able to share that with people who were not there, so that they can get excited about future events.
Northern Lights
From Agency to Wonder can be purchased at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, as well as SubText Books and Next Chapter Books, both in St. Paul. Books can also be borrowed locally from the Hennepin County Library, the St. Paul Public Library, Macalester College Library, Minneapolis College of Art and Design library, the University of Minnesota’s Performing Arts Archive, and the University of Minnesota Anderson and College of Design Libraries. The University of Minnesota Library Publishing Services will also publish a digital edition on Sep. 4. Visit http://northern.lights.mn/blog/northern-lights-mn-from-agency-to-wonder/ for an updated list of locations and a link to the digital edition.
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