Making Room for Art at Rafter Through commissions, purchases, and a residency program, one of Northeast’s new apartment high-rises works to build art into its bones by Russ White n your way into the Arts District from downtown, Rafter Apartments are hard to miss. At 26 stories tall, the black and white building at Hennepin and 4th Street towers over the neighborhood, one of several residential high-rises to go up in recent years. Interestingly though, once you’re inside Rafter, it’s actually the Arts District that’s hard to miss. “I’ve lived in Northeast for fourteen years,” says Jill Kiener, VP of Development for The Excelsior Group, the Minneapolis-based real estate firm that worked with Golden Valley-based Mortenson to develop the building. “When I got to work on this project, I said if we’re going to do something in my neighborhood, I want it to connect back to what I love about Northeast.” It’s a tricky set of questions facing Northeast right now: will more condos and apartments contribute to rising rents and continue driving working class residents like artists and immigrants out of the neighborhood? Can we develop new housing options, scaled to the perceived demand, that won’t displace the people who made this neighborhood so desirable in the first place? At
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the same time, could an increase in population mean an increase in arts audiences? To put it crudely, could more wallspace mean more art sales? For their part, Kiener and her team wanted to craft an arts program at Rafter that would help tie the building’s success to that of local artists and businesses. Kiener reached out to arts organizations, including NEMAA, for help in finding ways to incorporate (and compensate) local artists and artisans, and in the end, the building now boasts over 90 commissioned pieces from 23 makers, almost all of whom are NEMAA members as well. “We quadrupled our typical art budget,” Kiener says. Highlights of the collection include murals throughout the building by Top Seda Studios (Emily and Abbey Quandahl), individual pieces by Shelly Mosman, Kim Heidkamp, Hilary Greenstein, Aaron Wittkamper, and Ashley Mary, as well as a collaboration between Patrick Pryor, Jodi Reeb, and Nicholas Legeros, not to mention the 30’ tall mural by Chuck U on the building’s exterior.