Artist Creating New Life in Southeastern Minnesota

BEAVER TOWNSHIP, FILLMORE COUNTY – The rural Spring Valley home of artist Michelle de la Vega Ludwig doesn’t have walls filled with paintings or shelves full of sculptures. Instead, she has been focusing most of her creative energy on building a life in southeastern Minnesota with her husband, Jeff Ludwig, since the two moved here from Seattle more than five years ago.

Although the artist has a long list of achievements in the Seattle arts scene compiled over the last couple decades, the change in location wasn’t as drastic as people might suspect. She had known Jeff for a long time before they moved to Minnesota.

Jeff is originally from Minnesota, has relatives here and made friends on his many fishing trips to the Root River. He often brought her along on his trips, so she knew what she was getting into when they made the decision.

Bees and beehives make up Michelle de la Vega’s apiary on this Beaver Township farm south of Spring Valley. (Photo by Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

“It’s a beautiful area,” she said. “It was a favorite place of his…and I loved it, you know, when he started introducing me to it, and I was ready for a change. It felt like something he needed to do in his life, too. I could tell.”

Artist developed career on West Coast

“I’ve lived most of my life as an artist,” said de la Vega Ludwig. She studied both dancing and visual arts, with her career starting in dance. She left her profession as a dancer about 20 years ago to focus on visual arts.

“There are a lot of different ways to be an artist,” she said. “When I was working in dance companies it was like a communal thing. So, when I started doing my art practice, I felt like I wanted to maintain that in some way.”

In the visual arts, much of her work includes what is termed social practice or community engagement. Her projects center around a social concept and she tends to partner with groups or organizations to get community involvement in the work.

Many of her art installations have been multidisciplinary as she became proficient in film, photography, sculpture and even metal fabricating while she also learned welding and furniture design. She wrote a lot of grants to help fund her projects and also did some teaching. Through it all, though, her motivation has always been community engagement.

She often worked with unhoused communities, underserved communities, kids or schools. Her mother, who was an educational therapist, influenced her while she was growing up as she not only taught adult literacy, but also worked with people in recovery.

De la Vega Ludwig co-founded the King County Jail Art Workshop for incarcerated women in Seattle. She has also been involved with Path with Art (PWA), which is based in Seattle, as an artist and member of the steering committee. PWA has online classes, so she is still able to work with that group on art education for people in various stages of trauma recovery, whether it is homelessness, addiction or incarceration. 

Open space under the Seattle, Wash.-area sculpture “Inheritance” by artist Michelle de la Vega Ludwig, creates a public space commuters travel through on foot.(Photo by Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

She has been involved in a new program of PWA for people reintegrating from incarceration. When she moved here, she talked to the Olmsted County sheriff about doing art programs for women in the jail in Rochester. She got a favorable response, but then the pandemic hit, which put a halt to that. While also experiencing several other changes in her life, she has put that on hold indefinitely, although she is thinking of pursuing it again.

“That’s still on my mind. It’s kind of a passion for me,” she said.

Seattle public art project just completed

Although she said she hasn’t really focused on her art career path since she moved to Minnesota, she was still heavily involved in a public art sculpture she created in the Seattle area. The sculpture, which was officially installed in December 2024 is located at a commuter light rail train station outside the Kent and Des Moines area near Seattle, Wash.

She started on the sculpture seven years ago. One of the first items was to contract with other artists before building the large sculpture. She ended up working with an all-women team, something unusual since there is “a lot of gatekeeping in the public art world,” she noted. The female makeup of the team wasn’t her original intent, but she did want to work with a small-scale fabricator rather than a big fabrication house, so she encouraged a woman she knew to apply. The final choices, which also included a female project manager, were made by a selection committee.

The permanent sculpture is called “Inheritance”, and it relates to people and their connection to a place and time. 

The 30- by 15- by 26.5-foot sculpture forms an iconic A-frame house, a reference to shelter as place and as sustainability. De la Vega Ludwig describes on her website that people will walk directly under and through the sculpture to and from their cars at its corner plaza location where it sits at a slight angle off of the parking garage. The latticework is not opaque, so it interacts with the sky and other surrounding features, as well as casts intricate shadows as the sun moves across the sky. The public will have several viewing levels from the glass garage elevator, and from open landing areas on each parking level. 

Viewable from every angle, the “Inheritance” sculpture sits alongside a commuter train station near Seattle. (Photo by Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

She finished the community engagement portion of the project while she was still in Seattle before the construction took place. The razed commuter train station moving into this area is making quite an impact on the neighborhood, which is a low-income area with working class people and immigrants, she noted. In wealthier neighborhoods, stations are often underground, she added.

She attended various events to talk to people who lived there about how they felt about it and how it would impact their lives. She asked about their feelings on potential changes in access to transportation, employment opportunities, cost of living, property values, neighbors, landscape, and local businesses and services. 

She also had residents of the area draw family trees, which represent generational inheritance and belonging. She collected the drawings and made line drawings from the images, the actual branches without any names. They were fabricated out of stainless-steel tube and put together to form the lattice work to clad the A-frame house structure, while casting the “glimmering” shadows, she said.

Family tree drawings make up the latticework of the top of the sculpture which interacts with the sky and other surrounding features, as well as casts intricate shadows as the sun moves across the sky. (Photo by Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

One of the ironies she noted is that right off the parking lot of this beautiful, architecturally designed building, a tiny, dilapidated house still stands, which is visible through the opening of her sculpture. The contrast is “wow,” as it shows an image of power and access to land, “who does what with a place. Who has the power to say what is done with a place,” she said.

“Public art is about access to me,” she said. “That is the main point of public art – that people who wouldn’t necessarily go to a museum or be able afford to go to a museum or have the time or whatever, people who wouldn’t have access to that kind of art, they get to have access to it.”

The community engagement for that project was “very in the moment,” she said. Other projects she has done have included engagement that is done over time, such as in monthly workshops she holds in communities where she is making public art. These types of activities are informing while also creating relationships.

“I like my work to be relational. Art is good when it is relational for me,” she said. “I didn’t just want to be the lonely artist in my studio all the time, even though I’m kind of an introvert – a relational one, I guess.”

Life in Minnesota also a relational project

When she and Jeff moved to Minnesota from Seattle, they bought a house south of Spring Valley sight unseen after being assured major components, such as the well, were in good condition. Over the past five years, their rural home has been modified many times.

A view of the farmstead behind the house that Michelle de la Vega Ludwig now calls home, located in Beaver Township in the southwestern-most corner of Fillmore County. (Photo by Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

“We’ve made a lot of changes to it,” she said. “We’re art people so we’re always making our environment different.”

Some of the major changes, such as refinishing the basement and making an apartment upstairs, were due to caregiving for her parents when they moved in with them more than three years ago.

They have also made many cosmetic changes, using found objects or creating new items. Her husband is also a creative person who is a builder, metal fabricator and talented all-around person, she said. The two have some skills in common, but also contrasting skills, as they became partners in creating a life in Minnesota.

“We made a life together that neither of us could do on our own,” she explained.

Relations extend into the landscape

There is more than just a house on the farmstead they own south of Spring Valley. Her husband built a greenhouse mostly out of some antique windows his cousins gave them along with some wood from a barn owned by other cousins. “We use a lot of salvaged stuff,” she said.

In addition to growing food, they raise chickens, have beehives and tap the maple trees for syrup. They let a lot of fields go wild rather than mowed as they were when they moved there. Although they still have a lot of timothy hay, the fields now provide a lot of habitat for the bees and other pollinators.

Since they moved here, they have focused a lot on learning about the habitat. De la Vega Ludwig said bees, which are wild foragers, help with that because they force her to pay attention to the environment, and the weather, even during winter. “They help me to be very focused on what is going on all the time, which is great,” she said.

Michelle de la Vega Ludwig with Lily, the family’s English setter, in the field last fall at a wildlife management area (WMA) during pheasant season. The couple spends many days field training and hunting with Lily in the numerous WMA areas here. (Photo courtesy of Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

The two like to spend time in wildlife management areas with their hunting dog, Lily, and they both love to fish in the Root River.

She has also become involved with Bluff Country Singers, which performs in Spring Valley at various times, including a concert every April. “I absolutely love the choir. I love being in the Bluff Country Singers. It’s a wonderful community of people,” she said.

This summer, she plans to attend classes on timber framing for women taught by Jenna Pollard in Ely, which is in northern Minnesota. She said she is looking forward to branching out to learn a new skill.

She also devotes time to her parents, previously as a caregiver for three-and-a-half years until they moved into the Spring Valley Living facility for skilled nursing in November. She still sees them nearly every day.

Still involved in professional art

Although her focus on professional art projects has diminished since moving to Minnesota, she is working on a documentary film with Eva Barr, who became a good friend to her after she moved here.

Barr operates DreamAcres, an off-the-grid, organic farmstead that offers educational and cultural programs and grows food east of Spring Valley, near Wykoff. The farm is home of the Dreamery Rural Arts Initiative, a nonprofit which puts on many events and performances throughout the summer months. (Read more about DreamAcres in the Root River Current article, Where Performing Art meets Agriculture.)

The documentary film ties in with de la Vega Ludwig’s interest in land access. The film centers around Minnesota rural landscape and farming culture, and features people living here for years as well as more recent immigrants.

The two, who have been working on it for more than three years, hope to finish soon. The Minnesota newcomer said they won’t have answers, but they are posing questions for people to think about as far as what it means to have access to land along with sustainability and power.

Her recent art integrates with life

“As far as art stuff, I don’t really know what is next. I did that for a long, long time – many, many years,” she said.  “I kind of feel like my life here is my art form now. It’s very creative.” 

However, she said pauses have been part of her process in the past and then life informs her what will happen next. The other times when she has taken long breaks from formal art lasted a year or two, which gave her a chance to just live life.

“Then living life itself is also the art itself…the integration is really essential for me,” she said “I’ve never been one of those persons who could just make art for the sake of the art, necessarily. It always has to be integrated into life in some way.”

Michelle de la Vega Ludwig with a basket of kale grown on the small family farmstead south of Spring Valley. (Photo courtesy of Michelle de la Vega Ludwig)

She recently turned 55 and is involved in the aging of her parents, which is forcing her to think a lot about lifespan – even the lifespan of things she makes in her life. When people are young, there is that feeling of building up your life, your assets, but that changes as people age, she explained.

“I’m not sure I want to keep making a lot of stuff,” she said. “Do I want to make all these drawings and paintings and things that I’m just going to lug around?”

She won’t quit being an artist, though, as the creative process continues to intertwine with her life. She noted that art gets a reputation of being morally superior or always good just because artists are being creative, but she doesn’t agree with that.

“Art is sort of idealized. I think that after so many years of making things I feel like it’s just another thing we do. It’s not some sacred thing,” she said. “It definitely can be meaningful, but it’s just another way of living life.”