Each year on the third weekend in May, over 50,000 art lovers descend on more than 100 locations across Northeast Minneapolis’s Arts District for Art-A-Whirl, the largest open studio tour in the United States. In 2024, over 1,000 artists participated in the event that will celebrate its 30th anniversary in 2025.
While the event has been happening for decades, in recent years the efforts of PF Studios have helped young and emerging artists of color enjoy the benefits of the experience.
A project of Public Functionary, PF Studios works to create and cultivate a space for BIPOC and other marginalized artists in Northeast Minneapolis’s Northrup King Building. The warehouse complex is now home to more than 350 tenants comprised mostly of artist studios that anchors the Art-A-Whirl event.
“We wanted to be able to take advantage of this building, this space, as a resource,” Leslie Barlow, Public Functionary’s PF Studios director, said of establishing space in the Northrup King Building in 2019. “We wanted to bring more young artists of color into the building, which historically has not been the demographic represented in the building.”
Today, they have four studio spaces where 25 artists-in-residence are currently building and sharing their practice. One of the spaces is used as an incubator residency for early-stage artists. PF Studios also has three community studio spaces for emerging artists with a few years’ experience as well as two gallery spaces—one on Northrup King’s first floor and another on the second.
For PF Studios artists, Art-A-Whirl is often an affirming experience. “What’s beautiful is that, for our artists, there’s this huge built-in audience of folks who come through every year and are just genuinely excited about art,” Barlow says. “I’m not saying it’s a piece of cake—it’s a lot of work to participate. But [the artists themselves] don’t have to do any promo in terms of getting people to come out.”
Not every PF Studios artist participates. Some find the experience overwhelming while others’ work just doesn’t lend itself to the physical artifact work at the heart of Art-A-Whirl. But for those who do participate, they have conversations about what they want the experience to be for them, whether their goal is to sell work or simply share it and practice talking about their work with the public.
“It’s also a practice of endurance,” Barlow says of the three-day event that includes engaging with thousands of visitors. “But for a lot of artists in the program, it builds confidence in talking about your art and also claiming the ‘artist’ title in a way. For a number of artists in our program, this is their first studio space and might also be the first time that they’re really pursuing art professionally.”
This is why Barlow likes to remind Art-A-Whirl visitors that in addition to buying art, the event is an important opportunity to affirm the careers of the artists they meet—especially the early-career BIPOC artists working in a mainstream art world that often overlooks them.