Q&A: Arts Appreciation Makes For a Vibrant Community

Created in 2001, the River Heights Arts Alliance’s mission is to encourage, develop and facilitate an enriched environment of artistic, creative, and cultural activity in the community they serve.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: What is the River Heights Arts Alliance and when did it begin?
Mary Dimick: The River Heights Arts Alliance is an organization that is interested in promoting the arts in Inver Grove Heights and surrounding communities and helping artists to promote themselves.

We’ve been around since 2001. The reason this organization started was, at the time, Mayor Joe Atkins, now representative, and councilman Bill Klein decided that our community needed an organization like this.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: Why do you think Atkins believed the community needed a group for the arts?
Dimick: From a city perspective, or an economic development perspective, people want to move to a community that is a vibrant community—and the arts is part of that. It just makes a community more appealing to both individuals and to also businesses.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: What are some of the goals you have for the group?
Dimick: Right now one of our biggest goals is to get more people either on the board or more people involved with us.

For a while we did have Andy Evansen, who was a really, really
renowned watercolor artist in the Twin Cities area—he taught classes for us for a few years until he got too busy to do that. But we’ve offered art classes and we’d like to do that again.

Another goal that we’ve had in the past, since we don’t have an office or any kind of space, [is] to be able to have some space so we can have art classes. We’d really like to get to where we have an income flow so we can do more than we’ve done.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: What types of events do you host?
Dimick: In the past we’ve done art salons, and that is where we invite people—musicians as well as artists—that come in and share their work and have some food and drinks.

We’ve had fundraisers. The last fundraiser we had was at Valentino’s in South St. Paul, two years ago in the fall. We had food and music and an auction. Usually there’s a silent auction, music, and art. We get about a hundred people together.

Our fundraisers have been so much fun, and with all volunteers this
is not easy to pull off.  The other one that I’m thinking of that I just loved was at Kaposia Days and we had that canvas divided into squares. We marked it off, and we had children as well as young
adults, parents, whoever, do their artwork and it was amazing how people get excited about something like that.

Inver Grove Heights Patch: Is the group open for the community to join the board, and how would they go about doing that?
Dimick: Absolutely. They can contact myself or any of the board members. We would love to have more people join our board. 

Editor's Note: Some of Mary’s answers have been edited for length.