Led by multidisciplinary artists Colin Kloecker and Shanai Matteson, Works Progress engages an expansive network of artists, designers, organizers, researchers, educators, advocates and other creative people to realize imaginative public art and design projects that are rooted in place and purpose. Find us on Twitter: @works_progress 
 
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 About Works Progress Studio: 
 
 We're a public art & design studio whose collaborative projects catalyze relationships between people, place, and environment - helping to enable new possibilities for artistic expression, civic imagination, and participation in public life. The bar employs the motto "Water is all we have," and allows visitors to sample flights of tap water free of charge, so they can taste the difference between private well water and public tap water. We give it away for free; it’s primarily Minneapolis tap water, but we’ll have other local metro area taps, some rotating taps, maybe some time tap waters from other parts of MN. The project is set to open its first brick and mortar location in its home state of Minnesota in order to combine with an art studio and hopefully extend its reach. "The most important thing is that we're actually combining the Water Bar with a public studio, which we're thinking of as an art sustainability studio and incubator, intended to build local projects with other artists and designers, all about water and environmental sustainability at the local level," Matteson told MinnPost.
– You could sit at home and drink your own tap water, or you could visit Minneapolis' Water Bar and drink tap water in the company of others. Shanai Matteson hopes you'll choose the latter option. Yes, Minneapolis will soon be home to what UPI calls the world's first "full-fledged bar that will serve exclusively water products." But you can "cool it with the eye-rolling" and comments about "crazy hipsters," notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Water Bar will be an art installation and all water will be free. Back in 2014, Matteson and Colin Kloecker opened a pop-up water bar through which artists, water researchers, and other community members served tap water to more than 30,000 people in Minnesota, Arkansas, Illinois, and North Carolina. Water Bar will be a permanent extension of that project, though a GoFundMe page notes an opening date has not been set. "Water is not something people think about, but we have potential water shortage problems and water quality problems," Matteson tells MinnPost. After tasting water in different areas, she says it became clear "where water isn't quite so abundant or where cities don't have the same level of treatment methods in place." Staffed by engineers, city employees, and environmental experts, Water Bar will be "a place to talk, to quench your thirst, to inquire, and to share personal stories and reflections," and sample different tap waters, according to the bar's website. The bar will also be combined with "an art sustainability studio and incubator, intended to build local projects with other artists and designers, all about water and environmental sustainability at the local level," Matteson says. (One business sells New York tap water for $2.50 a bottle.)