Part art, part science: Art Shanty Projects returning to Lake Harriet ice

Turn the dial on a little ice hut on Lake Harriet to become a rabbit, a gopher, a shrew.

Part of the Art Shanty Projects, the NatureGrafter lets visitors choose a Minnesota natural phenomenon — an animal or a tree or a bug — to embody, if only for a moment, if only in their mind’s eye.

Transformation is a major theme of the annual, impermanent art village, which returns to the ice Jan. 18. These little ice huts turn artists into scientists and scientists into artists.

For one thing, the ice requires it.

Each winter, artistic director Erin Lavelle becomes an auger-toting, ice-measuring forecast analyst. To hold the whimsical winter event, the ice on Lake Harriet — Bdé Umáŋ to the Dakota people — must be at least 10 inches thick. Last year, after a late start, March-like temperatures forced organizers to halt the fest after just one weekend.

This year, 10 days beforehand and after an ice reading of 9.5 inches, they made the call: The free fest would be back on the ice for a full month. Fingers crossed.

“Last year’s lesson was that we have to look at the long-term, long-range forecast,” Lavelle said, “and be prepared to pivot at any moment.”

Since she started as artistic director in 2019, Lavelle has developed an ice prediction calculator based on scientific papers and ice fishing practices. She became a voyeur on ice fishing blogs and in Facebook groups. “I’m a lifelong vegan and have no interest in the sport of ice fishing,” she said, laughing. “It’s kind of an unusual place for me to be, culturally.”

But hosting an art installation increasingly affected by the changing climate means grappling with science. In 2021, the nonprofit behind the Art Shanty Projects rewrote its mission to include climate change. This year’s huts are spread across the ice in the shape of an hourglass, “a visual reference to the urgency of slowing climate change,” Lavelle said.

And several of this year’s shanties deal, directly or indirectly, with science, ice or both.

A group of Duluth limnologists has fashioned what appears, from the outside, like a big black box. Mysterious and unassuming. But inside, cameras and microphones will offer a peek into the unknown.

The shanty mirrors a scientific phenomenon called “the black box of winter,” meaning that winter is understudied, said Alia Benedict, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Historically, scientists believed that water in winter was quiet and still.

Benedict believed that, too. But then she began collecting samples from under the ice. “I’m leaning over, peering into an ice hole, thinking there’s got to be nothing down there,” she said. “And we’re pulling out all sorts of creatures moving in and around the ice.”

Benedict and a team of other water scientists, some of whom worked in theater and set design, built a shanty that will show that. Some of the equipment is scientific, some recreational: a hydrophone, an underwater microphone used by lake physicists, alongside an underwater fishing camera.

“There’s noise, there’s light, there’s movement,” she said. Together, it invites an “aha moment.”

This is Benedict’s first art shanty. In fact, she’s never attended the 21-year-old fest before. So as part of a new mentorship program, the Art Shanty Projects paired her team with a veteran artist and shanty builder, Robin Garwood, a printmaker and installation artist. The scientists had been tempted to slap a big chart on the side of the shanty.

But Garwood convinced them to consider how visitors might engage through touch, sound or movement. Maybe the sound of the water could project outside the shanty. Maybe they could pass a block of ice to people waiting in line.

“These are all really great ideas we wouldn’t have thought about ourselves,” Benedict said.

Garwood’s first shanty, “Snow Blind,” was a piece he’d exhibited before — at the University of Minnesota, at Walker Art Center’s Open Field, in a gallery space and at an art crawl. But even if he was standing beside it, inviting people to enter, people wouldn’t.

“No one would go inside the thing,” Garwood said. “Nothing I did would convince people.”

But out on White Bear Lake, the Art Shanty Project’s second of three homes, person after person stepped inside. “People are there to play in a different way,” Garwood said. He was hooked.

Because last year’s shanties were cut short, Garwood is bringing back NatureGrafter, the mutating meditation on Minnesota’s natural world, which he created with artist Sam Price, his wife. He presents that piece as scientific, but it’s “100% fake science.”

So he loves that this year’s festival will feature some real scientists, presenting real science.

The festival itself is a kind of meta-conversation about climate change, said Garwood, who worked on climate policy at the city level for many years.

“The idea that ice on a lake in Minnesota in January and February is a roll of the dice at this point should make us all take a long, hard look in the mirror and say, ‘What are we doing?’” he said. “It’s interesting to me that people are thinking about how do we, in this setting, give people an artistic, participatory experience around the fact that winter is under threat?”

When: Weekends Jan. 18-Feb. 9, with pop-up performances and other events.

Hours: 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Where: Lake Harriet/Bdé Umáŋ, Mpls.

Cost: Free, but donations encouraged.

Info: artshantyprojects.org.