Art — on the rocks, please

What: The Art Shanty Project

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., every Saturday and Sunday until Feb. 5

Where: Medicine Lake in Plymouth, Minn.

Cost: Free

Age: All ages

A one-room schoolhouse, a basketball court and a working letterpress sit atop the frozen lake.

Over the next few weekends, the surprisingly cozy community of slipshod shacks that have sprung up on Medicine Lake in Plymouth will play host to marriage ceremonies, dance parties, fashion shows and sling shot lessons.

“I had an idea to do a fashion photo booth for an Art Shanty,” said Danielle Everine, a Minneapolis fashion designer and Project Runway alum.

From the outside, the resulting Sashay Shantay Shanty looks like the attic of a grandmother’s house. And the inside is outfitted with the homespun eccentricities of a rugged grandma’s house — a real wildebeest hide hangs in a corner, and treasure chests are packed with homemade winter wear. Wood stoves burn in almost all of the shanties, but the feature feels especially appropriate in this one.

“A lot of people don’t know about the local fashion scene,” Everine said. So along with the artists who have helped her create the shanty, she’s stocking it with locally designed garments and allowing people to play around with their own looks.

The other 19 shanties are interactive too. At the Nordic Village Bridge, kids and adults alike take on Danish names, throw on goat headdresses and play out the story of the “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”

The Letterpress Shanty will document the whole shebang with a broadside newspaper composed of tweets hashtagged #shantyQ.

“The audience is really participating in what they’re doing. It’s not something that you come in and look at passively,” said co-founder and director Peter Haakon Thompson.

As they walk from shanty to shanty, rubbing their hands together and hiking up their long johns, visitors pick and choose which shanties strike their fancy — there are no defined paths or time limits. That is, until the bell of the One Room Schoolhouse rings and it’s class time.

The shanties’ themes range from the educational (the folks at the ICE-Cycles shanty will teach you how to ride your bike in the winter) to the purely silly (in the family-friendly Naughty Shanty, visitors can steal cookies from the cookie jar and deface the Mona Lisa).

The idea is that people will have so much fun that they never realize they’re interacting with art.

And people didn’t have to be trained visual artists in order to build a shanty.

For Thompson, ideas outweigh credentials — he didn’t ask for résumés or exhibition histories during the application process.

Anyone can be a shanty-builder. This year, a group of adjunct professors in the University of Minnesota’s architecture program created a shanty in which you lay in a hammock and observe the sun through prisms.

“There was a knitting shanty that my mom and her friends had for a couple of years,” he said.

Thompson wants his patrons to re-evaluate where art belongs. He’s been fighting the good fight since 2004, when the project was born out of admiration for ice fishing shanties and fascination with unregulated public spaces.

After going on hiatus in 2011, the Art Shanty project is now a biennial affair.

“The project has grown much faster than our capacity as an organization has,” Thompson said.

In the off years, he wants artists to break out their shanties in more unexpected places, like parking lots and backyards.

The shanties will have the same effect whether they’re set up all together in Plymouth or dispersed throughout the state’s lakes and neighborhoods. The unpolished structures are a reminder that art can be experienced anywhere by anyone.