John Davis

2025 Cut/Paste Publication Feature

Just a few miles from the Canadian border, and fully accessible by snowmobile, kayak, and cross-country skis, the new RiverPlace in Warroad, Minnesota, may well be the most out-of-the-way arts center in America. Designed to serve a rural community of about 1,800 residents, Executive Director John Davis ’84 knew he needed to invite as many locals as he could to consider the possibilities before its official opening last fall.

“People still like to romanticize the idea that ‘If you build it, they will come,’ but that never works,” says Davis, who led nearly 400 of his new neighbors (including all the third graders in town) on hard-hat tours of the $20-million facility, asking for their ideas about how to bring the space alive. Without that buy-in, he says, “You can build it and they won’t come at all—instead they’ll point their fingers, mock it severely, and tell you everything you’re doing wrong.”

Davis speaks from experience. His unconventional career path has taken him from painting houses and teaching community-ed art classes, to being recognized as a national expert on creative placemaking, using arts to revitalize small towns. In the 1980s and ’90s, he persuaded New York Mills to renovate the oldest brick building in town, turning the space into a cultural center that’s become a national model for reimagining rural Main Streets. In the 2000s he took that same approach to the whole town of Lanesboro, Minneosta, positioning it as an art campus—the first small town in the U.S. to do so. Two years ago, Davis agreed to come out of “semi-impoverished retirement” to activate and program a new arts center in Warroad, a community better known for producing windows and hockey players. The challenge appealed to his spirit of inclusivity: “If you’re an arts organization in a metro area of two or three million people, you just need to get a certain percentage of those people to show up,” he says. “In a town this small, the audience is everyone.”

It may be no surprise that Creative Problem Solving was Davis’s favorite class at MCAD, where he once talked his way into a hospital, asking if they needed anything that could use some redesigning. Listening closely to the nurses’ suggestions and complaints, he came up with a new design for a bedside table in the neonatal, intensive-care unit that the hospital went on to deploy. “I’m not even sure if I got a good grade in that class, but it reshaped how I looked at problem solving,” Davis says, recalling professor Jerry Allan’s reaction when Davis complained that he didn’t have enough money to do an assignment the way he had wanted. “He shot me a look—kind of a smirk—like, really? Once that sunk in, I started seeing that barriers can’t be an excuse for not doing something.”

Davis also credits MCAD’s critique process for helping him to succeed in places where there’s been no precedent for what he’s proposing. “In art school, you get used to having things rejected, and hearing people say ‘no,’ which helps you to build up a healthy respect for criticism,” he says. “But it taught me that there’s also something oppositional about creativity. If you take everything at face value, how are you ever going to innovate? When other arts organizations have told me, ‘That’s not how you do this,’ it just makes me more determined. If everyone says, ‘This is wrong,’ then I must be on the right track.”

Though he was originally attracted to outstate Minnesota for its quiet life and cheap studio space, Davis admits that getting the state’s newest art center up and running leaves him little time for painting and drawing. “Now I like to say I’m a social sculptor,” he says. “I like to sculpt visions for communities.”