The Art (and Food) Lovers’ Guide to Minneapolis

Art Museums

At the Walker Art Center you will find a permanent collection of nearly 12,000 works of modern art by some 2,300 artists, plus special exhibits, performances, films, and a fine library and archive. But if you’re looking for a cathartic morning, may I suggest not even stepping inside? The adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden,which the Walker operates with the city’s parks and rec department, is free and open from 6 a.m. to midnight, 365 days a year. When I arrived right at 6, it seemed like one of the quietest places I’d ever been, despite being barely removed from a major road. Of course, its Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–88), the Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen sculptural fountain, is a symbol of the city, but I was there for two other works.

Okciyapi (2021), a commissioned piece by Twin Cities–based artist Angela Two Stars, a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, provides a space to gather. A concrete spiral serves as shared seating, and with its metal plates bearing words and phrases written in Dakota, it’s also a place to consider language and how we speak with each other, and a place for reconsidering values.

When you’re ready to leave the Sculpture Garden, follow a series of walkways and stairs that run behind the Walker and are nearest to the parking garage (trust me). Soon you will approach a tunnel leading to a subterranean room. This is James Turrell’s Sky Pesher (2005). In many ways it is the typical, perfect Turrell recipe: a concrete bunker encircled with benches and punctuated by an aperture in the ceiling, open to the sky. In the early morning, the sky was bluer than anything I’d ever seen before, and clouds sat still above me as I lay flat on the chilly floor gazing upward. While Okciyapi is about learning through togetherness, Turrell’s work offers solo contemplation and mediation. It’s about finite days and infinite possibilities, devotion, and transcendence.

For a trip through history or around the world, try the encyclopedic Minneapolis Institute of Art, which has more than 90,000 artworks from six continents spanning about 5,000 years. It offers many opportunities to enter the past by viewing its immersive “period rooms.” But in the galleries and far away from all other institutional workspaces, seek out The Curator’s Office (2012–13), a time capsule, circa 1954, created by artist Mark Dion. A cramped habitat bursting with vintage elements, it contains a Polaroid Land Camera, a dark wood card catalog, a painting resting on a thick wood easel, designer lamps, and pencil-filled coffee cans. There is also a stylish and stocked Art Deco bar caddy and an Underwood Model 150 typewriter resting on a desk.

The space is well lived in: Cigarette butts flood an ashtray; muddy galoshes sit beside two worn leather suitcases. You get the feeling that the elusive “curator” stepped out and will be back any moment. Or maybe not: The extended wall label tells the tale of Barton Kestle, a curator of modern art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, a disciple of MoMA director Alfred H. Barr—and a figment of Dion’s imagination. As Dion tells it, Kestle disappeared after “receiving a summons from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in Washington, D.C.” He boarded a train for Washington and was never seen again. Dion used the curator’s effects to build a composite of his beliefs and politics, the relics of an eccentric, mercurial man working in a period of social and political strife. His office is forever frozen in time.

The Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota campus is an excellent example of the work of architect Frank Gehry, built in 2011. Remember to button up your coat if standing outside to admire its striking crumpled-aluminum façade, which calls to mind another Gehry work, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown L.A. The museum houses a collection of more than 25,000 pieces, but one installation in particular makes my heart race: Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz’s Pedicord Apts. (1982–83).

Part of the artists’ Spokane Series, it was created by salvaging materials from a soon-to-be-demolished derelict residential hotel that was once considered grand before falling victim to a severe lack of care. The Kienholzes deconstructed parts of the real building piece by piece, pulling out baseboards, moldings, brass doorknobs, light fixtures, and then reassembling them into this work. We enter via a seedy corridor, then peek down a long, hardwood-paneled hallway with six closed apartment doors. If you are brave enough to lean against any of the six doors, suddenly muffled sounds can be heard on the other side. As you eavesdrop, you hear the inner lives of the residents. Apartment A is watching a game show; Apartment B is home to a growling dog. There is a party, a couple fighting, a toddler crying, and the play-by-play of a Dallas Cowboys versus New Orleans Saints football game. There is a sense that the past never dies and that our truths do not remain locked away.

Alternative Spaces

After her recent starring role in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, the Hmong-American artist Pao Houa Her is all over the Twin Cities. Literally. She has work in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and she recently had a solo exhibition of black-and-white landscape photos, “Paj qaum ntuj/Flowers of the Sky,” at the Walker Art Center. But the most memorable opportunity to see Her’s work is in St. Paul as part of an ongoing exhibition with Midway Contemporary Art (one of the most fantastic alternative art spaces around). This exhibition of four light boxes can be found in the West Building Food Court of the HmongTown Marketplace. Many Hmong fled Vietnam after the war; a large number settled in Minnesota, with the great majority settling in Minneapolis–St. Paul. Her’s works in the dining area reflect her experience as an immigrant who spent her formative years in refugee camps in Thailand.

If you want an experience that’s as uniquely Minnesota as it gets, try Art Shanty Projects, a four-weekend winter art festival that invites artists to design a temporary structure based on the ice-fishing shacks that pop up on lakes across the north. (Think of Burning Man, only frozen.) Initially the brainchild of artists Peter Haakon Thompson and David Pitman, it is now run by artistic director Erin Lavelle, with festivities on Lake Harriet (or Bdé Umán in the Dakota language). Of the many fun aspects of the Shanties is how they encourage fun with events and performances such as last year’s Fro-gahh (frozen yoga), hula-hoop jams, and a costume performance called Fashion Disasters.

Books

Art meets bookmaking at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, a space for innovation and pushing the boundaries of what a book can be. The folks there do everything from offering classes on letterpress printing, bookbinding, and papermaking to exhibiting works made on site and examples of inventive books from afar.

Ever wish the bookshop in your city’s local contemporary art museum would just let you take home some exhibition catalogs and monographs, if you promised to bring them back? Well, in 2007, Midway Contemporary started the Midway Contemporary Art Library, with thousands of titles from publishers from around the world. The coolest thing is that there’s no fee, and no membership or library card is necessary.

Leave it to the land of 10,000 lakes! Paddle up, tie a line, and come aboard to flip through the waterproof bins and custom bookshelves of the Floating Library, perhaps the only collection of artist-made books that live onboard a ship and are accessible only by boat. Trying to figure out where to start? No worries. There are always Floating Librarians there to give recommendations.

Public Art

Regrets, I have a few. My days in Minneapolis were limited, and the itinerary was packed, thus leaving me unable to see Prince’s custom shoes exhibition on view at Paisley Park. Instead I did what I could and visited the recently installed, 100-foot-tall Prince mural by Hiero Veiga, located near the southwest corner of First Avenue and Eighth Street downtown. One of the most iconic bars I can think of, First Avenue, is just across the street. It’s among the country’s longest-running independent music venues, and Prince used the club in as a setting in the film Purple Rain.

Along with a small group, I was invited to make the pilgrimage to pay respect and collectively grieve at George Floyd Square, the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. The barricades have come down, but the “autonomous zone” remains. Walking down Chicago Avenue, you pass the first of two fabricated-steel Black Power fists created by the artist Jordan Powell Karis with Chicago Avenue Fire Arts. A hand-painted sign announces, “You Are Now Entering the Free State of George Floyd.” From the sidewalk, we viewed a work of art painted on the street by Mari Mansfield, The Mourning Passage (2020), bearing the names of 168 BIPOC individuals killed by the police.

Every day people come to the intersection of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue to pay their respects, remember, and heal. Community members estimate that these visitors have left more than 5,000 offerings of art, signs of protest, letters, flowers, poetry, songs, and many other ways people express their hope and pain, and they are preserving this history. The George Floyd Global Memorial has developed a conservation room at the Pillsbury House & Theater where “caretakers” tend to fragile offerings or those weathered or harmed by the elements. The organization has been creating exhibitions of these offerings.

My mind kept flashing back to how I first saw this neighborhood on television. It was depicted as some war-torn Thunderdome on American soil. Now, though, it’s mostly quiet. And it’s a neighborhood I know, a neighborhood that looks just like places I’ve lived in half my life. The layout of the streets, the storefronts, and the physical structures all feel so familiar and so far removed from what we watched on television just two years ago. But also, not. There is a weight that is always there.

Food and Drink

Granted, it has been a while since I was here last. Still, on my previous trips to the Twin Cities, the food was centered on trendy “New Nordic” counterbalanced by Juicy Lucys (one of those hyper-local specialties that all quality cities possess, this one consisting of a cheeseburger with the cheese melted inside the burger). What at the time felt a little bit one-note has been replaced by a vibrant food scene that arose, forgive the pun, organically. As the demographics have shifted, so has the food. The Hmong refugees began arriving in the mid-1970s, and Minneapolis–St. Paul now has the largest metropolitan concentration in the country. There are also thriving populations of Somalians, Liberians, Ethiopians, and Ecuadorians, each and together creating a culturally rich and culinarily diverse place to eat.

At Owamni by the Sioux Chef, a restaurant celebrating indigenous cooking, the meal was simply transcendent. I started asking about getting a reservation as soon as I landed at the airport; the repeated line was that the wait was a solid three months. But traveling solo and being happy to sit at the bar has its benefits. Owamni has won kudos for its decolonized menu, which uses only ingredients that come from the land—animals, freshwater fish, wild plants, heirloom fruits and vegetables—and none of the foods brought by European settlers, such as dairy, flour, refined sugar, beef, or pork.

I started with the Blue Corn Mush with maple, hazelnut, and berries, then moved on to one of the specials: a variety of squashes of a bed of black bean puree with greens and berries. For drinks, I chose the La Reyna IPA from La Doña Cervecería, a local brewery that celebrates Latino and Minnesotan cultural vibrancy. That was followed by a Last Fathom Wild Rice Lager, a nutty, Munich-style dunkel made with Minnesota wild rice by Lake Monster Brewing in St. Paul.

Despite my sitting at the bar, the meal became communal. To my right, a woman explained that she had just returned from a two-week hiking trip where she ate only what she could carry. She ordered a five-course meal with one item from each section of the menu: Game, Plants, Native Corn Tacos, Salads, and Corn Sandwiches. The woman to my left sat down and immediately ordered two servings of the Red Cliff lake trout with white bean spread because her co-worker had told her it was the best thing she had ever eaten.

It’s a holiday tradition in my household to have a sampler platter delivered from Minneapolis’s Herbivorous Butcher, easily the best brother-and-sister-owned vegan butcher shop I can think of. Pop in for incredible eats, like the chicken bacon ranch hot panini or the sweet potato and chorizo rajas hot panini. Or head to the siblings’ new fast-casual fried chicken spot, Herbie Butcher’s Fried Chicken in South Minneapolis, for a bucket and a biscuit.

A team of four owners, including curator Esther Callahan, recently opened Arts + Rec Uptown, a creative reuse project they describe as an “immersive dining space.” Equal parts restaurant, nine-hole mini golf course, alternative art gallery, black box theater, and speakeasy for Minnesota-themed cocktails, it’s a place where art lives throughout.

In the restaurant you can order such earthy fare as mushroom crostini, cheese curds, chestnut soup, and a hot chicken sandwich; there are even crickets to snack on if you have the urge. The cocktail bar offers classics with a local twist, like a Scandinavian gimlet or a Minneapolis mule, and quirky offerings like the Red Headed Step Child, a glowing blend of whiskey and ginger.

When you’re done dining and drinking, get a ball and putter from the mini-golf hole designed as a record shop (complete with vinyl for sale). Other holes feature a car wash; a sauna; the Rheinlander Hodag, terror of the northern Wisconsin pine forests; and a tribute to Sheriff Val Johnson, who in 1979 was on patrol in northern Minnesota at 2 a.m. when a beam of light from a UFO engulfed his squad car, which was found sitting sideways on the road with the windshield shattered. A hoax? Who knows?

Located inside Graze Provisions + Libations the Union Hmong Kitchen is a space presided over by chef Yia Vang, often credited with bringing Hmong food to a wider audience. My go-to, off the Zoo Siab menu (which translates from Hmong as “happy” or “gratified”), was the sweet chili–marinated tofu with purple sticky rice, fried brussels sprouts, and lettuce wrappers. A side of chilled khao sen noodles are a must. Chef Vang is also the host of Relish, a Twin Cities PBS web series that journeys through cultural heritage in Minneapolis–St. Paul communities through the personal stories of chefs and their food.

I am forever a sucker for a good natural wine and tapas bar. At Bar Brava on a chilly day I had a warm tomato with kale, lapsang souchong, shirodashi, and a couple glasses of Frank Cornelissen’s Susucaru Rosso. The wines, unfiltered and made from organically farmed grapes and wild yeast, are excellent. 

What I found in Minneapolis is a city whose visual arts scene is still very much in flux. Minneapolis and St. Paul have always thrived in their duality of having internationally renowned institutions alongside groundbreaking spaces run by spirited artists in backyards, on front porches, in basements, and even in decommissioned churches. There has always been an unwavering belief that being creative is never done and that perseverance and work pay off in the end. This sentiment is still present, though perhaps less intense. This is a metropolis still living in a racial reckoning, where curators, artists, and institution heads are now committed to listening so they can better reflect the city, or Twin Cities, that they represent.