The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

On a chill December night last year, hundreds of artists and art lovers of a certain age poured into the Minneapolis Institute of Arts to view a departed friend’s art collection. Dressed in eclectic attire, including one necktie that had formerly been its wearer’s ponytail, they milled about, hugging and shouting and laughing. They seemed thrilled to see one another, to see their art on the walls, and to recall, loudly, the rare and raucous scene they had created two decades ago.

Back then, in the mid-80s, the scene’s center was the New French Bar, where artists congregated and onlookers eavesdropped. On warm Friday afternoons, downtown workers who fancied themselves even halfway hip would take a late lunch there. They’d head down a long, dark, narrow hallway speckled with tattered posters, cross the creaky, worn wooden floor and sprawl on the slatted bench against the wall. They’d sip wine, eat crusty bread, and turn the crisp, green apple slices in the spinach salad into finger food. The lucky ones snagged a table on the loading dock where, across a vast, unobstructed expanse of rubble, they could watch the sun set and soak up arty vibes. The food was good, but the creative energy was better. And so far, no other bistro in town has managed to replace that intimate, funky ambience.

In the 1980s, Minneapolis reveled in an unprecedented—and so far unrepeated—boom for artists, dealers, consultants, critics, publications—any entity that could attach itself to art. Featuring thronged art crawls, ambitious galleries, and legendary personalities, the scene was also an aberration, many believe, a charmed confluence of burgeoning trends and random circumstances. Nationally, art was hot everywhere, a sweeping trend fueled by media hype and easy money. Locally, the boom begat a memorable decade created by the combination of a geographic center, a strong community ethos, and substantial corporate, government, and philanthropic support.

“I refer to it as the happy time,” said Scott Seekins, the bespectacled and head-banded figure best known for his distinctive dress code—summer whites, winter blacks. “I am art,” he has been known to say; perhaps more to the point, he is a strolling repository of local art history, one who observes social trends with a discerning eye.

Seekins and others are quick to point out that the local 80s scene didn’t erupt from fallow ground. In the 60s, Andy Warhol visited here, as did famous empaqueteur Christo; Gordon Locksley and George Shea famously invited the latter to their Mount Curve mansion gallery, where he wrapped nude young women in cellophane to serve as centerpieces for an oft-recalled gala. Seekins remembers the crowd at the Black Forest Inn and a Twenty-sixth Street scene in full flower in the 70s (perhaps due to its proximity to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design), long before a downtown scene emerged. “The very first thing I remember downtown was the E. Floyd Paranoid gallery. It was very obscure, a tiny gallery in the Shinders basement in Block E. One guy—kind of strange—ran it,” Seekins recalled. “He’d go through the dumpsters at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, then try to sell what he found.”

On Nicollet Mall, Gallery 12 at what was then Dayton’s was going strong; Glen Hanson worked there before launching his own Hanson Cowles Gallery on Second Avenue North and Fourth Street, right near the New French, where the Urban Wildlife Bar recently closed. Hanson’s landlord was Robert Thomson, a Warehouse District pioneer who had spotted the dilapidated building’s potential in the mid-1970s and leased it; he opened an art-framing shop there, precursor to his Thomson Gallery. But first-gallery bragging rights went to the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota in 1976, when this feminist collective of forty artists graduated from a collection of slides in a file drawer at St. Catherine’s College to a gallery in a former wholesale showroom in the Wyman Building, just down Fourth Street at First Avenue North.

Other artists were also banding together. In 1975, Seekins, Dick Brewer, Leon Hushcha, Herb Grika, and others formed a cooperative called Fort Mango, which moved a couple of times during its eight-year run, eventually ending up above the Loon Bar on First Avenue. A couple dozen patrons supported them, paying studio rent and expenses in exchange for selecting art pieces once a year. “We had really good patrons, and we sold a lot of art,” recalls Brewer, who is known for his sculptures and relief paintings on Plexiglas.

But in 1980, not much else was happening. Ronald Reagan had just been elected, economic growth was slow, and at 13.6 percent, inflation was through the roof. Jean-Michel Basquiat, soon to become a celebrity, was homeless in New York. In Minneapolis, the neighborhood that would become known as the Warehouse District was a sleepy little outpost of used-clothing stores and seedy watering holes, with no streetlights, no sports bars, no cops—and plenty of cheap space for young artists to take over and make into studios.

There were a lot of them, too, as art schools were turning out record numbers of students—not all of whom ended up in New York or L.A. “If you graduate a dozen painters a year in a state, that doesn’t quite make a community. But if you have a class of thirty, they’ll network in various ways,” said Stewart Turnquist, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts staffer who has run the Minnesota Artists’ Exhibition Program since 1977. “It’s one thing to deal with art because art moves you, but if you have living artists, it’s all the better. They turn out to be pretty interesting themselves.” Turnquist recalled one Minnesota artists’ exhibition show, Five Geniuses, which included Herb Grika’s motorcycle; visitors could mount the bike and take a simulated ride around a track. That Grika was deemed a “genius” inspired some disgruntled viewers to return their show invitations ripped into pieces.

In 1983, the fledgling scene in downtown Minneapolis got an influx of artists from St. Paul, including freelance photographer Larry Marcus. He had been living in a building on Wall Street, where tenants could build out the rough, raw space as they pleased, and where it was rumored that the absence of heat between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. encouraged closer bonds than might otherwise have occurred. Then an art-resistant landlord took over. “The way I heard the story, somebody sabotaged the furnace,” Marcus said. “By October 1, they couldn’t put the heat on, and we all got evicted.” Marcus, along with his studio partners Ann Marsden and Gus Gustafson, landed in the Wyman Building, which was fast becoming the epicenter of the gallery scene and eventually housed as many as twenty galleries.

Gustafson, a talented, teddy-bearish Mr. Congeniality known for plugging strangers’ expired parking meters, became the scene’s mascot. He seemed to be everywhere and know everyone. He was a photographer whose cash-strapped artist friends often asked him to record their work in exchange for a piece of art. By 2003, when a heart attack abruptly ended his life at age fifty-four, he had amassed an impressive collection. It was these “friends of Gus,” many of them now notable artists, who thronged to the MIA last winter to celebrate his influence and reflect on shared pasts.

“It was a very lively community, with lots of interesting characters. We were all relatively young, full of energy, full of the desire to make, talk, and live art,” Marcus said. “And among other things, we liked partying and having a good time.” There was the time, for example, that Fort Mango members donned white tuxedos and red, white, and blue corsages for a “Joan of Art” party honoring Joan Mondale, a noted arts activist who earned her moniker during the Carter Administration, when her husband Walter was vice president. And yes, she showed up, Seekins recalled, with her photo-phobic secret-security entourage in tow.

When they weren’t honoring political dignitaries, artists were trying to raise enough cash to pay the rent. Seekins remembers cohosting one rent party with sculptor Aldo Moroni, whose works now grace the General Mills and Ninth Federal Reserve Bank lobbies among other places. “Aldo was watching the door and charging for beer, and I was supposed to be playing records,” Seekins said. “He forgot to watch or got drunk or something, because at the end of the evening I asked him how much money we made. He said, ‘You made thirteen dollars and I made fourteen dollars.’ ”

Another party attracted a crowd to the Harmony Building at Third Street and Second Avenue North, where The Replacements were recording. About five hundred partygoers, including vice-squad members disguised in artist garb, allegedly attended. When “the party is over” came blaring through the police bullhorn, it was recorded for posterity on The Replacements’ Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash—and in the memories of those who lost their rent money or spent the night in jail (or both).

“Now the cops see artists as an economic entity, so they leave us alone. We weren’t bothering anybody,” said Moroni, who currently has a studio and runs a gallery in the California Building in Northeast Minneapolis. “But then, they didn’t know who we were—and we didn’t know who we were.”

He recalls days spent working at the Skunk House, which now houses Origami, the noted sushi restaurant, but then was the run-down home to Moroni and about ten other artists committed to living a “rustic, pirate life.” They’d work until 10:30 or so, head to the New French to see who was there, then swipe a couple of bottles of wine at closing time and go back to the building’s one chic amenity, a sauna, which by then was “full of poets, artists, and deadbeats. We’d go on until sunrise, then crash, then get up and do it all over again.”

As The Replacements could attest, art wasn’t a solo scene. The era’s creative outpouring spanned several genres. The “Minneapolis sound” emanating from First Avenue just down the street was making national waves; Prince recorded live tracks for his sixth album, Purple Rain, there in 1983. Terry Lewis and Jimmy Jam Harris founded Flyte Tyme Productions in 1982 and scored their first Billboard top-ten hit in 1985. In 1984, the Utne Reader launched as an alternative publication that would eventually garner several nominations for National Magazine Awards. And throughout the entire decade, advertising agency Fallon McElligott Rice (now, as Fallon, celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary) was making a national splash by winning the country’s top creative advertising awards, thus focusing the spotlight on the broader Twin Cities commercial arts community.

Meanwhile, the art market was heating up across Europe and America, from Kansas City and San Francisco to Seattle and even Fargo. By the mid-80s, the U.S. economy had weathered the 1981-82 recession, inflation was dipping to a decade low of 1.9 percent, and Basquiat’s paintings were going for twenty-five thousand dollars. Some of his fellow “neo-expressionist” artists in New York, like Francesco Clemente and Julian Schnabel, were enjoying six-figure incomes while critics celebrated the waning of cool, cerebral minimalism and the waxing of this volatile and passionate style. The public, some claimed, had been bored and baffled by art for a decade and were ready for change. Not coincidentally, baby boomers who were at last making money were christened “yuppies”—just in time to hop aboard the art market’s bandwagon.

“It was a pretty artificial time in a lot of ways. Everything was blown way out of proportion,” said Thomas Barry, who long had a gallery in the Wyman Building, which he just relocated last May to 530 North Third Street, in the newly christened “North Loop” of the Warehouse District. Together with Fort Mango artist Dick Brewer, Barry had operated the Barry Richard Gallery in the early 80s before opening his own in 1984. “We were selling a lot of work in those years. There was something going on if not every day, then at least every week. It was by no means a normal situation. It was the gold rush,” he said.

Apparently, cocaine flowed as freely as cash. “It was a wild time. Just about everybody was somehow altered,” Brewer said. “We went crazy for a decade. Mount St. Helens exploded and so did I. I was out there on the deep end, but I think a lot of other people were out there, too.” As Moroni described it, “It was a stockbroker/coke-freak kind of deal. Those hypertensive go-getters—that was their game. Art was one of the ways that they expressed themselves.”

While galleries cultivated yuppie tastes, cash-rich companies helped underwrite the art scene by creating a solid collector base. Art became serious business as law firms, insurance companies, and financial-service firms hired consultants to build collections. At First Bank System (now known as US Bancorp), curator Lynne Sowder assembled “one of the most radical corporate collections of contemporary art in the country,” Deborah Gimelson wrote in the New York Times in 1994. Sowder arrived at First Bank in 1980 and inherited “about a thousand duck prints—we called it Art Ducko,” she told Gimelson. By the time she left in 1990, she had acquired a collection “valued at more than twice the $5 million it cost,” wrote Robert Atkins, the art columnist for the Village Voice.

Though she was not universally loved by local artists, Sowder was bold, decisive, and revered for her knowledge and power. She “removed art from the realm of the trivial and invested it with fresh, non-symbolic purpose,” according to Atkins. She and associate Nathan Braulick saw the First Bank visual-arts program as a way to transform the corporate culture and get people talking—to management as well as one another. Employees did engage with the art, in a Scandinavian sort of passive-aggressive way. If they didn’t like a painting, they set it askew or obscured it with potted plants. Atkins’ article referred to a 1986 survey of First Bank System employees in the Twin Cities, in which only twenty-five percent of one thousand respondees indicated that they liked the FBS art; sixty-nine percent did not.

Undeterred, Sowder conducted art seminars and eventually set up “Controversy Corridor,” where art pieces were exiled when at least six employees voted “No, thanks.” Yet employees could also choose art for their offices and were encouraged to organize exhibitions for the bank’s public galleries. While padding the pocketbooks of local as well as national and international artists and dealers, Sowder also raised art awareness and discussion to unprecedented levels, at least among several thousand First Bank employees.

While corporations poured money into the local scene, philanthropic and government institutions did their fair share. McKnight, Jerome, and Bush Foundations and the Minnesota State Arts Board all funded artists. “Four local funders—that was unheard of in the eighties, and still unheard of today,” said Neal Cuthbert, who moved from Detroit to Minneapolis in 1980 specifically for the art scene, and who currently directs McKnight’s arts program. From 1983 through 1985, McKnight approved thirty-two arts-related grants, totaling more than two million dollars. It is still the state’s largest private arts funder.

Opportunities for local artists mushroomed when 1984 legislation created the Minnesota Percent for Art in Public Places Program, which called for large building projects to designate one percent of their construction or renovation budgets for buying or commissioning original art. Artists also could apply for Bush Artist Fellowships, available since 1976, and funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest.

While they didn’t live well—no cars, no TVs, no balconied condos—artists could forego day jobs. More often than not, they lived where they worked. One gritty but engrossing location was the then-derelict Block E on Hennepin Avenue, where crime was high—forty-five robberies were reported between June 1 and September 30, 1986, for instance, compared with seven one block away on Nicollet—and traffic was heavy. If their muses left, artists could always sit and watch forty-thousand cars go by each day. Or grab a whale of a drink at the notorious Moby Dick’s, spend $3.43 at Best Steak House for a twelve-ounce sirloin, baked potato, Texas toast, and salad, or peruse whips and edible underwear at Fantasy House.

When the Rifle Sport arcade vacated a twelve-thousand-square-foot space on the second floor of one Block E building, artists moved in. Rent was incredibly cheap: two to three dollars per square foot per year. Colleen Barnett, a student, bronze sculptor, and purported risk-taker, lived in the huge gallery space—in a pile. Her colleagues likened her abode to a beaver’s dam made of books, plywood, canvas, and debris, beneath which, it is rumored, she sometimes slept.

“I first met Colleen at four or five in the morning. I’d been up all night painting when I heard this noise in the hallway,” said Julie O’Baoighill, a painter and performance artist known as JAO, who had a studio across the hall. “She was moving this giant piece of furniture that I couldn’t believe she was moving by herself. I don’t think she ever slept. She didn’t really have a bed.”

Barnett and Bill Taylor officially opened the Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery in September 1985. Other alternative galleries—Circus to the Trade, No Name Exhibitions (now the Soap Factory)—flourished as well, at least by reputation. Punk rock bands, outrageous parties, and creative antics kept the buzz alive. JAO remembers the time Steve Grandell (now known as “Venus,” lead singer for the band All the Pretty Horses), managed to drive a small, wildly painted car through Rifle Sport’s door and part way up the stairs. “People would open the door, see the car there, and close the door. Then they’d peek in again,” she said, laughing. “Art was selling fairly well at the time,” JAO said. “Even Rifle Sport made a profit, and that was big news.” Indeed, Los Angeles collector Frederick Weisman bought a painting from a Rifle Sport artist. Meanwhile, a passel of more-conventional galleries—Oulman, Groveland, Flanders, Bockley, Artbanque, M.C., Hastings Ruff—were making even more money. Things got better still after Warehouse District gallery owners had a marketing brainstorm: They’d pool their resources and sponsor an art crawl. Every six weeks, hundreds of voyeurs in smart attire and quirky earrings poured into downtown for the much-anticipated event. It was a place to see and be seen, and perhaps buy a piece of art that would elicit comments from passersby. Galleries were often so crowded that lines actually formed to see the art, and hungry artists looking for free wine, cheese, and pretzels had to arrive early.

“Nothing demonstrates the unprecedented expansion of the Twin Cities art scene better than the 21 Minneapolis galleries that will premiere new shows tonight,” proclaimed Star Tribune critic Mary Abbe (Martin) in 1989. “That’s right, 21—not counting the birthday party Walker Art Center is throwing today for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden or three other gallery shows that opened Friday night, one of them in St. Paul. Two-thirds of these galleries didn’t exist five years ago. Fortunately, quality is also on the rise.”

But the happy time was about to end. When 1990 dawned, Rifle Sport was gone. The gallery was breaking even in 1988, when the city announced plans to raze Block E. It survived its move to the Fawkes Building near Loring Pork for more than a year, but sales declined fast. The stock market had crashed in late 1987, ending the longest bull run in history and leading to rampant layoffs—as well as a sharp downturn in the millions that companies had been channeling into the arts. Prominent art collections implied conspicuous consumption, and that made stockholders nervous.

“We thought it would go on forever, but clearly it did not. It was much more a function of style—a fad—than a deep-seated commitment to art,” said Brewer. Added Barry: “The train came to a screeching halt, and people flew off as fast as they climbed on a few years earlier.”

Many companies had acquired art for the wrong reasons: public relations, cachet, image, investment—“reasons that weren’t really about an appreciation of what art is and what art can be on its own terms,” said Don McNeil, art curator at General Mills for the past thirty years. “It was very fashionable. The biggest mistake some corporations made was in feeling that this was really going to help their image, make them seem more refined and classy.”

Some people never fell for the hype in the first place. Brant Kingman, a painter and sculptor who spent seven years in New York hobnobbing with Keith Haring, Warhol, and Basquiat, returned to Minneapolis in 1984 after being shot by intruders. “It was so much more dead here,” he said. “The one problem that Minneapolis had, and still has, is that it suffers from the ‘I’m not Chicago or New York’ syndrome. Certain dealers looked to those cities for leadership and chose artists from those cities to be their stars, and local artists may have suffered because of that.”

As art lost its luster, downtown artists—some three hundred, according to Moroni—lost their base. Target Center opened in 1990; sports bars soon followed. “There was a big, sweeping change in the marketplace,” said Cuthbert. “Rents went up, the cultural vibe changed, people spread out, and the community dissipated.” The Warehouse District changed from an artists’ neighborhood to an entertainment destination. Unlike writers and playwrights, who have the Loft and the Playwrights Center, visual artists had no organization or physical place to rally around.

Yet some fifteen years later, the art scene may well be rumbling again. A number of figures from the 80s—Brewer, Kingman, JAO—still make their livings as artists. The several thousand artists who live in the state face fierce competition, but funding hasn’t declined; in fact, the McKnight Foundation distributed about twenty-seven million dollars in arts-related grants between 2003 and 2005, compared with nearly nineteen million dollars in the mid-nineties.

“Some of the energy is coming back,” said McNeil. He still acquires between ten and twenty works a year to keep the 1,400-piece General Mills collection as current as possible. He grouses about the decentralization—“In the eighties, you could go downtown and see ten or fifteen galleries in one night. Now you have to hire a bus or something”—but lauds the new galleries and new wave of young artists.

Although the Wyman is not completely bereft of art spaces (the relatively new Gallery Co is showing work on the second floor), today’s scene has sprawled. In 2003, Minneapolis designated the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District as the area bordered by the Mississippi River and Broadway, Lowry, and Central Avenues; just off Central, the Northrup King building is home to 130 artists. A fifteen-year Arts Action Plan is under way, and the annual Art-A-Whirl, while less intense, is still reminiscent of the old art crawls.

“I think it’s more vibrant than ever,” said Turnquist, pointing out that both the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center have expanded and enjoy record membership levels. “The number of artists has increased, and as you look into the group, you see not only the abundance that results, but also the different viewpoints. While older artists are still making significant art, the younger ones are naturally looking for new ways of seeing, so they’re adding to the mix.”

“We have a lot more possibilities now. I think the area is in renaissance again. Things are happening,” said Todd Bockley, who moved his gallery to Kenwood last year, reopening it nearly a decade after leaving the Wyman Building. Despite the quiet location, about 150 people turned out for a January opening. Bockley is excited about the maturation of local artists (in one show he featured “Warehouse vets” Glen Hanson, Philip Larson, and Stuart Nielsen) and the earnestness of local buyers. Minnesota collectors are unique, he believes, because they’re fad resistant; they “don’t buy with their ears,” but trust their instincts instead. “There’s something really beautiful about buying art because you love it and enjoy it and live it,” he said.

“I’ve seen more energy in the last year or two than I’ve seen since the happy time,” Seekins admitted. Life is still hard for him and others like Brewer and JAO, though they get by. But even when art went wild, no one got rich and no one got famous. Kingman says that while this area—which Seekins calls a suburb of Sweden—is full of talented, hardworking artists, the local scene has never managed to elevate them beyond regional status.

“There’s been a burst of things happening, but it’s never going to be an art center. It’s not like New York or Paris, it’s just not, and probably never will be,” Seekins says, resignation in his voice. “I stay here for the fishing.”