Great Northern festival lights up Lake Street with new HotTea art piece

The piece is made from 9,000 strands of yarn, in 11 colors, spread across a 40-by-40-foot grid. But somehow, they sway together.

Twin Cities-based, internationally known artist Eric Rieger, who goes by HotTea, spent two months in the studio preparing the piece, part of this year’s Great Northern festival, dipping each string of yarn in resin, as if bundling it in a little winter coat. Then, last week, he and his assistant donned their warmest outerwear to install the artwork on East Lake Street, hanging each string of yarn 6 inches apart.

By the time they looped the last one, it was 19 below. So cold the lift malfunctioned. So cold yarn kept breaking, sending them back to the studio.

When it was all done, Rieger lay below the piece, called “Stories,” and looked up. He saw the way the light hit the strands of yarn, the way the colors transitioned toward the center. Looking at it, he feels “a sense of peace and calm,” he said. “Then I think of all the community members that were generous to share their stories.”

Because that’s how this project began — with stories.

Each winter, the Great Northern, a 10-day winter festival, features sports and saunas, a carnival and an ice bar. Kate Nordstrum, the fest’s artistic director, crafts a hefty calendar of musical and artistic highlights, too.

“It’s a combination of events that we return to that are much loved and new arts events and site-specific work that are surprises,” Nordstrum said.

This year, those surprises include Indigenous two-spirit singer and composer Jeremy Dutcher making his Minnesota debut with a show at Icehouse in Minneapolis. An immersive concert called “Floresta: Soundbath,” inspired by trees’ underground communication networks at Public Functionary. And HotTea’s installation in an empty lot on Lake Street, which launches with an event Saturday.

Rieger, 42, works all over — including in Alaska last winter, when he invested in some seriously warm winter wear. But when the Great Northern approached him, he was “really pumped to do something in his city again,” Nordstrum said. The piece is funded partly through Lake Street Lift, via the Graves Foundation.

In his early days, Rieger used yarn to design vibrant, graphic words and images on fences around Minneapolis, some of them on Lake Street. He was working in south Minneapolis in 2008, 2009, and would commute there from St. Paul’s Frogtown via bike, stopping along the Greenway to loop string through metal.

He got a sense of the place, “a real tight-knit community where the neighbors look out for each other.” So when the Great Northern reached out, he knew he wanted to involve people who live and work along the corridor.

At a gathering last fall, he started by telling the group an intimate story about himself, and “they were generous enough to share intimate stories with me.” Those stories became images and those images became anchors of the piece.

Rieger’s drawing shows three versions of himself as a child, as a young person and as an adult. In the left, as a kid, he’s smiling. In the middle, his face is pulled tight. Then, on the right, he’s smiling once more.

“I felt free when I was little,” Rieger explained. “As a grew older, started feeling more insecure. Now that I’m older, I feel that freedom again.”

HotTea: A Public Art Opening

What: Hear from artist Eric Rieger, known as HotTea, enjoy fire pits and listen to music.

When: 5 p.m. Jan. 25.

Where: 730 E. Lake St.

Cost: Free with registration.