It's 50 degrees in Minneapolis. Goodbye, ice shanties.

It's not every art installation that instructs visitors to take small steps, like a penguin. But then again, nothing beats the Art Shanty Projectsin which intrepid Minnesota artists in insulated jumpsuits and ice clips annually recreate traditional ice fishing huts called shanties in their own eccentric style on a frozen lake in Minneapolis.

The structures they devise – such as a 'Hot Box Disco Inferno' wrapped in space blankets, with a pulsating LED floor – draw thousands of visitors to a temporary public space that resembles a Burning Man on ice.

This year it was thin ice.

The idea that 19 artist shanties would rise on Lake Harriet – Bde' Unma in the Dakota language – for this three-weekend event was never a foregone conclusion. A cold snap in late November, followed by a balmy spell in early January and then subzero temperatures led to wildly inconsistent and potentially dangerous ice conditions on many of the state's famed 10,000 lakes. This winter, four fatalities have already occurred because people drove vehicles onto the ice. In late December, more than a hundred people had to be rescued from an ice floe that broke away from a fishing area on a lake in northern Minnesota.

But on Jan. 27, for Art Shanty's opening, Harriet was covered in ice 12 inches thick, and some 10,000 people showed up on skates, fat-tire bikes, and sleds packed with bundled little ones to interact with crazy interactive cabins.

Then, this week, March-like temperatures wreaked havoc on the event, leading organizers to conclude the lake was no longer safe for crowds. They ended the program on Thursday. Moving the structures to the coast, which is snowless and muddy, was not an option.

“It was 52 degrees yesterday,” lamented Erin Lavelle, the projects' artistic director, “and 32 degrees at 5 a.m. – but only for two hours. We didn't want to end up in an emergency situation.” The artists, dressed in life jackets, began to dismantle the huts one by one.

At least two other cultural events and numerous ice fishing tournaments were also canceled due to rising temperatures.

Declining ice has become a status quo in Minnesota. Winters have warmed five to six degrees since 1970, “one of the strongest signs of climate change,” said Kenneth Blumenfeld, a senior climatologist at the U.S. Department of Natural Resources. The current peak, with highs of 40 to 50 degrees, is due to natural El Niño weather patterns on top of human-induced climate change, he said.

“We see where things are going, so there is a bittersweet edge to our festival,” said Kate Nordstrum, artistic director of a concurrent event called the Great Northwhose partner organization, US Pond Hockey Championships – which draws players from all over Belgium – was canceled due to water on the ice.

To safely house the slum village and its visitors, provincial officials required the lake's ice to be at least 10 inches thick. Immediately after New Year's, Lavelle began drilling a hole in the ice and sticking her bare arm into the icy depths to assess the results. On January 18, Lavelle postponed the event for a week, and last weekend the long-awaited day when the ice was smooth and pristine finally arrived. “I think I'm the only artistic director in the country who wields an ice auger,” she said of a tool that resembled a giant corkscrew.

Opening weekend highlights included “Klezmer on ice”, where spectators danced the hora without slipping. Then there was “Fro-Gahhh,” the opposite of hot yoga, in which the ice was littered with colorful mats and yogis in hats and boots stood staring down, their breathing visible in the cold.

In the center of the former village green stood a bright red 'shantiquity' hut, a reconstruction of the original barracks – part clubhouse, part art studio – built twenty years ago by artists David Pitman and Peter Haakon Thompson on a lake. west of Minneapolis. In keeping with Art Shanty Projects' DIY aesthetic, the insulating walls were made from gym mats recycled from Minneapolis public schools, with Covid barriers on the windows.

“Frozen lakes are beautiful, desolate places where you wouldn't expect to find art,” Thompson said. The artists' mission was to engage viewers as active participants; more than half of the project's $200,000 annual budget typically comes from donations from visitors and goes toward paying the artists. Those funds are now at risk, organizers said.

Like snowflakes, which were conspicuously absent, no two shanties were the same, each built on ski-shaped planks that allowed them to be moved close to shore when fickle conditions arose. “People park their sense of decency at the edge of the lake,” said Robin Garwood, a 44-year-old graphic artist and installation artist who was on his fourth barracks. It was called 'NatureGraafter' and was a tribute to the Minnesota wilderness, with images of animals, plants and aquatic life, beautifully wood-burned onto planks.

Garwood, who soloed the length of the Mississippi River, an odyssey that took 84 days, has a deep reverence for his homeland and the winter that is part of a Minnesotan's identity. But he gradually accepts the inevitable. “We can't depend on reliable winter ice in Minnesota,” he said. “We are about to lose a lot of things we love about our state.”

Some of the shanties' themes presciently focused on the warming planet. In one, called “A Poem for Entangled Living,” a young team of environmentalist printmakers created a pyramid with see-sawing arms, intended to suggest a world out of balance. Visitors added their own spicy quotes and images. The idea was to “address climate grief,” says Dio Cramer, 26, one of the creators.

Young architects were also drawn to shanties, a very different exercise from the stereotypical exercise of designing a first home for parents. In an effort packed with cleverness, four University of Minnesota College of Design graduates built a hut from construction debris that doubled as a xylophone, with a dismantled fence and sawed-off struts from a metal bed frame. They handed out xylophone mallets to those waiting in line.

Jerry Carlson, an emergency medical technician, helped his family create a mock “Banned Books Reading Room” with crocheted blankets, a fake fireplace and shelves full of banned books, and paper flames in the pages. Among them were EB White's classic 'Charlotte's Web' (banned by a Kansas school district) and Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' (banned in at least two states).

Carlson grew up ice fishing, a sacred tradition in the Upper Midwest, where anglers typically pursue bass and walleye (and are often fortified by alcohol). Before the current tricky conditions, most Minnesota lakes were dotted with colorful shanty towns and sometimes custom-built RVs with underwater cameras that projected fishing strikes onto 65-inch flat screens, a phenomenon captured in the YouTube series “Show us your Shanty!”

On Wednesday, he said, a man in an ATV misjudged the conditions and rolled his four-wheeler onto what he thought was solid ice. Before his vehicle sank in icy open water, he was rescued by Carlson's EMT colleagues.

So this Sunday's nighttime walk through illuminated ice sculptures – including the Icecropolis and Icehenge – has been moved to the country. “It's a battle to keep them from melting,” said Claire Wilson, executive director of the Loppet Foundation, a group that is committed to getting people into nature.

As long as they still could, the exterior painters of minnesota set up their easels and captured greens and blues in the icy landscape that perhaps only the eyes of their artists could discern. The shanties were splashes of color in the distance. “It's a dynamic environment,” says Jack Dant, a product development engineer who paints for fun. “Every time you look up, it's different.”

Mikha Dominguez, 36, who moved from Caracas, Venezuela, to teach Spanish and Portuguese at the Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji, Minnesota, had infused his cabin with a fever dream of a tropical paradise filled with blossoming trees. He built “La Casa de los Sueños de Colores” (“the House of Dreams of Color”) with his German husband, Alexander Aleman. Last weekend, Dominguez fit the bill, dressed as a billowing psychedelic blowfish that engulfed most of his face. (“Listen,” he said to a reporter, “it keeps me warm, okay?”)

On Thursday he dejectedly dismantled the barracks, which stood in about two inches of water. “It felt like a humid summer morning with steam coming out of the lake,” he muttered about the warming trend.

Still, he was grateful that their slum paradise had lasted two days. “I think land is more predictable,” Dominguez said. “But there is power and beauty on the lake.”