WHEN telling someone to meet you at the upstairs lounge at Minneapolis’ Chambers Hotel for a drink, make sure you know you can get away with using the bar’s actual name: “Red, White and F—–g Blue.”
The bleep-worthy bar was personally named by owner and avid art collector Ralph Burnet, an homage to the neon artwork by Brit bad girl Tracy Emin that dangles from its main wall.
Bullishly charming — and himself often Emin-style profane — Burnet is a real estate developer by trade but has become Minneapolis’s homegrown answer to Charles Saatchi.
Much of his blue chip collection — heavy on British YBAs like Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume, as well as New York mainstays like Jude Tallichet — festoons the walls of his all-white boutique hotel, Chambers. There’s a well-respected gallery tucked just off its lobby, showing rotating exhibitions, and Burnet even screens video art in the corridors — the raunchier stuff’s relegated to after 9 p.m. — allowing interested guests to dial up the sixty odd works directly on their in-room TVs.
“People invest money here instead of wearing it,” he laughs.
His love for the arts isn’t just a pose: politically active Burnet spearheaded the ‘Yes’ vote on the constitutional amendment that Minnesota’s voters passed at the last election.
Economy be damned, Minnesotans agreed to up taxes, raising an extra $80m a year: some of the windfall’s earmarked for the environment but the rest will be spent on the arts. If only they could pick a senator as decisively.
Burnet’s electoral success was significant in many ways. New York may boast about Broadway, big concerts and BAM, but slipping a tax like that past the voters in the Big Apple is all but unthinkable.
Voters’ enthusiasm in Minneapolis is the clearest sign that the city’s reputation as a countrywide cultural HQ isn’t all hype and hot air. Many cities outside New York claim that the arts thrive in their regenerated downtowns, but few can back up the claims (take that, Miami).
Minneapolis is a very large exception. Playwrights and script mavens have often used it as a base and backdrop, from Sam Shepard and Diablo Cody to the Minnesota-born Coen Bros. Prince and Flyte Tymee — the svengali producers who string-pulled for Janet Jackson when anyone still cared — are local legends.
When a study commissioned by Central Connecticut State University touted a rundown of the most literate cities in America recently — a study cooked up using bookstores per capita and other ad hoc data — Minneapolis was a clear first place (twin city St Paul snagged third.) “The Lion King” tried out here in the summer of 1997 at the Orpheum Theater, and most of its cast transferred to Broadway with the show later that year. It’s clearly the stuff of local lore: One person boasted, a little too precisely, it was 92 percent of the actors.
But unlike New York, with its galleries hunched together in Chelsea and official Theater District, the arts scene in Minneapolis is unassuming and scattered. Galleries and theaters are all too easy-to-miss in that humble, Midwestern way. Strolling around, first impressions of the city are architectural: a slew of well-preserved red brick buildings downtown, so many clock towers that are a holover from the railway heyday and amid the gleaming new skyscrapers downtown, the bizarre but beautiful Foshay Tower. It’s a 28-story, deco-era ego trip thrown up by the namesake businessman who promptly went bankrupt and had to sell the pile (it’s just been rejigged into an endearingly retro W hotel — owned by Ralph Burnet, of course).
But tucked away amid the soaring buildings there are world class arts institutions, two above all that anchor the city’s claims.
Originally, the Guthrie Theater and the Walker Center shared a common site, but three years ago the former decamped to a brand new purpose built pile on the waterfront, just after the Walker had unveiled its enormous expansion by Swiss starchitects Herzog and DeMeuron.
The Walker, with it 385-seat theater, 40,000 sq foot gallery spaces and 11-acre sculpture garden, is a catch-all monolith that produces dance, performance, plays, films and art shows year-round. The entire operation has just been taken over by a new director, having lured rising star Olga Viso from the Smithsonian last year (Ralph Burnet helped with that, too) Tall, elegant and raved-about by even her rivals, Viso is about to reinstall the entire collection at the end of this year to try to make the Walker even more high profile. She, too, was amazed that Minneapolis’s reputation as an arts hub wasn’t undeserved. She still marvels at how involved and supportive the local community is.
“The Walker is deeply held and understood by the community,” says Viso. “They may not always like what they see, but they believe it’s important for artists to experiment.”
That live-and-let-live Midwestern-nessess has allowed experimental spaces to thrive here aside from the Walker. John Rasmussen runs Midway Contemporary Art, housed in a low-slung building skulking on a side road in a residential ‘hood north of the river; it’s a combination art book and magazine library plus contemporary gallery space.
Rasmussen was born locally, but worked at a gallery in New York before returning to set up the center in 2001 — like “The Lion King” transfer, he and his fellow Chelsea-trained galleristas underscore how the Minneapolis arts scene is a feeder for the bigger budgets and egos in New York (no wonder one local nickname for the city is the Mini-Apple) New York looms as large for Tim Peterson, who runs another non profit space on the south side, the Franklin Arts Center.
He laughs when recalling how PS1 xeroxed one of his shows six months after it was mounted at the Franklin but gave his team no credit (in the last three years alone, Peterson’s sent work from here to the Whitney and Brooklyn museums, as well as pesky PS1). Peterson was another Minneapolis native who decamped elsewhere for training before coming home to the quirky, isolated arts hot house here.
“Minneapolis is a cultural island. We have our hands waving in the air, saying ‘Look at us!’ It’s part of that crazy Midwestern ethic of ‘everybody does well'”, he chuckles.
But after three days pounding the sidewalks and galleries here, it’s evident that Minneapolis’s reputation for arts isn’t undeserved; but what’s harder to Braille is why.
One simple reason is money. Dozens of blue chip corporations — more than 40 NYSE members alone — are headquartered here, and most are famous as companies-with-a-conscience, like Target, Aveda and 3M. Their founders’ names (the Target-owning Daytons more than anyone) are plastered on arts projects and plaques across the city.
It dates back to the mid-20th century, when those atomic-era cashed-up industrialists felt a civic responsibility to tithe their good fortune back to the city.
What’s more, arts funding here isn’t conditional and money’s given without strings, which not only means that more experimental — read: shocking — art can be bankrolled (remember Burnet’s R-rated Emin) but also that museums’ operating costs, from cleaning to staff salaries, can be offset that way.
Months after arriving, the Walker’s Viso is still stunned at the support her museum enjoys.
“I didn’t realize how deeply the commitment to creating world class things in a smaller city went, that it wasn’t surface. And culture is valued so deeply in a mass way — it’s not just a small group of elite people.”
For example. Viso’s Walker is among the top 5 most visited museums in America, though the city’s population doesn’t break 400,000. (To be fair, the metropolitan area, which includes St. Paul, tops 3 million.) Population is also crucial for its thriving arts scene: just small enough for there to be easy access to the mayor but large enough to reach critical mass.
Ironically, though, the real reason Minneapolis has a boast-worthy arts scene may be down to the one thing it’s already famous for: terrible weather. Video artist Nathaniel Freeman moved here with his writer wife Emily and he sums it up best.
“Everyone knows everyone and attends each other’s events. They’re so supportive. The weather sucks in the winter, which keeps people in their studios, but come spring, the weather is good and the days are so long people want to come out.”
Translation: six months stuck inside means artists will create things, while six months mingling helps them hype it and make connections over cocktails. No doubt, “Red, White and [Expletive] Blue” is a favorite hangout.
SERVICE ON THE SIDE
There are dozens of must-see arts sights in Minneapolis — but these are the top 10.
1) First Avenue (www.first-avenue.com)
A top notch rock venue that attracts every impressive mid-career act that pitstops in Minneapolis — this month, that includes Lily Allen. It’s also where the Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum and Atmosphere got their starts.
2) Franklin Art Works (www.franklinartworks.org)
Opened in 1999 in a onetime porn theater, this 9,000-sq foot building has three exhibition spaces. It specializes in premiering work, with a skew towards black artists like Wangechi Mutu and Kehinde Wiley.
3) The Guthrie Theater (www.guthrietheater.org)
Founded in 1963, this hotbed of top tier drama is now housed in a purpose-built gleaming black spaceship idling on the side of the Mississippi river designed by Jean Nouvel. The upcoming season, just announced, includes productions of “Macbeth”, “A Streetcar Named Desire” and a special stage adaptation of Noel Coward’s iconic movie, “Brief Encounter”. This summer, the disappointing onsite restaurant is set to be replaced by a Danny Meyer-at-MoMA-like café.
4) The High Point Center for Printmaking (www.highpointprintmaking.org)
Founded by husband and wife Cole Rogers and Carla McGrath, this is part exhibition space, part workshop. The printmaking complex offers studios for local artists, walk-in sessions for amateurs and an onsite gallery where boldfacers like Carlos Amorales can display their print-making collaborations with the High Point team.
5) The Loft Literary Center (www.loft.org)
For more than 30 years, the Loft has hosted creative writing classes, readings and bookish events with everyone from Salman Rushdie and James Fenton to the late Allen Ginsberg.
6) Midway Contemporary Art (www.midwayart.org)
Come here for first exhibitions from emerging artists, both local and national, as well as the chance to browse a raft of arts books and magazines in the roomy library.
7) Playwrights Center (www.pwccenter.org)
Run by Polly Karl, this lures playwrights and directors to Minneapolis from across the country — to workshop together in writing labs, and through philanthropy-funded fellowships for specific commissions. There are regular, staged public readings of new plays.
8) The Walker Arts Center (www.walkerart.org)
The category-killing arts center, it stages high profile visual arts shows — currently, the Elizabeth Peyton round-up that debuted at the New Museum — as well as dance (Merce Cunningham’s ‘Ocean’ project last year in a granite quarry) and experimental theater. A bonus: average ticket prices for performances is only $20.
9) The Weisman Art Museum (www.weisman.umn.edu)
Housed on the campus of the University of Minnesota in a signature twisty silver Frank Gehry building — it was one of his first museum commissions and he’s about to build an extension — this impressive, if smallish, museum has rotating shows as well as displays from a permanent collection that includes Chuck Close, Sol Lewitt and Andy Warhol.
10) Radio K (radiok.cce.umn.edu)
And don’t miss alt-rock Radio K, run by the University of Minnesota, which hopscotches between three different frequencies daily — most think it’s thanks to budget problems.