Written by: Katherine Goertz
Since the days of flour mills and robber barons, a few blocks of downtown Minneapolis had been at the center of the Minnesota art scene. In the 1880s, Minneapolitans bid for cultural legitimacy with art exhibitions held in hotels and storefronts. In the 1890s and 1910s, a small two-studio brick building at 712 Hennepin hosted a raft of Twin Cities artists, the Art League collective, and the first years of the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts.
In the 1960s, while the area’s fortunes had fallen far enough to be considered Minneapolis’ “Skid Row”, art galleries with a counter-culture bent opened their doors and exhibited Pop Art, Trash Art, and conceptual art to students, businessmen, and curious onlookers.
But it was the 1970s and 1980s that pushed downtown Minneapolis onto a bigger artistic stage. The rundown buildings of the Warehouse District were attractive to young artists in search of large studio spaces and low rents. A cohesive and collaborative gallery scene developed, from the uber-avant garde Rifle Sport Alternative Gallery to the Soho-style white walls and blonde wood floors of the commercial galleries of the Wyman building. The New French Bar was a gathering space for artists, a Minneapolitan version of the bars and cafes of 1920s Paris.
As a critical mass of artists and art spaces gathered, a cohesive and tight-knit art scene developed with a reach far beyond a small cluster of blocks around the south bank of the Mississippi River.
Art scenes are fickle and fragile creatures, always on the move and subject to the economic and cultural changes that surround them.
Several changes in the late 1980s and the early 1990s took down the Minneapolis downtown art scene. Private and corporate collectors, who had once viewed art as a financial and cultural investment, found their fortunes curtailed by the recession and stopped buying art. First Bank had been the most important collector in the Twin Cities, acquiring a dizzying number of artworks from many galleries and many local artists. But, by 1988, First Bank was facing financial losses and a cultural problem: In a time when layoffs were common, to be seen buying avant garde art was a bad look. The bank’s reversal of its collecting cut the art scene off from a major financial lifeline. Also affected was the unofficial center of the art scene, the New French Bar, whose closing in 2001 inspired the Star-Tribune to write, “If the downtown art galleries closing in the ’90s were the canaries fainting in downtown’s cultural coal mine, the New French is Big Bird.”
But financial changes were not the only factor, nor likely the most significant. While the area had been the target of city development plans since at least the early 1970s, art and artists had been overtly included in these plans throughout the 1980s. But by the end of the decade, the sports-centered and wholesome entertainment vision the city had for the area fashioned a new Warehouse District. Its inhabitants had been transformed from artists and gallery-goers to tourists and game-goers.
To learn more about this story and discover how the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District formed, visit the Arts District Welcome Center at the Timber & Tie Building, 904 14th Ave NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413 – open second Saturdays between 12 PM and 4 PM or by appointment.