NEMAA History
As with many great ideas throughout history, it all started in a bathroom. In 1996, long before the brewery scene, the bustling restaurants, and the big crowds, a small group of artists gathered in the Thorp Building at David and Lois Zabel Felker’s International Gallery of Contemporary Art to plan out an art crawl. The downtown Warehouse District scene was drying up, and artists had begun settling into cheap studio spaces in the abandoned factories in Northeast, creating a fledgling creative community in search of an audience.
During one of those early meetings planning out the first studio tour, artist Juris Plesums spotted a billboard through the bathroom window: a spiraling ribbon logo labeled Whirl-Air-Flow, an air conditioning company. The group took this inspiration and ran with it, and the first Art-A-Whirl was born. With a swirling tornado illustration by R.W. Scholes and financial backing from City Council member Walt Dziedzic, the inaugural festival took flight and, much to the artists’ surprise, turned out to be a big hit with attendance somewhere in the hundreds.
During one of those early meetings planning out the first studio tour, artist Juris Plesums spotted a billboard through the bathroom window: a spiraling ribbon logo labeled Whirl-Air-Flow, an air conditioning company. The group took this inspiration and ran with it, and the first Art-A-Whirl was born. With a swirling tornado illustration by R.W. Scholes and financial backing from City Council member Walt Dziedzic, the inaugural festival took flight and, much to the artists’ surprise, turned out to be a big hit with attendance somewhere in the hundreds.
“We were all surprised that we got people,” artist and longtime NEMAA board member Dean Trisko told Sheila Regan for a 2020 article about Art-A-Whirl’s 25th anniversary. “Felker predicted it, and he was right that they would come.”
The next year they decided to make things official, and the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association was formed with the primary focus of organizing the studio tour event. Within five years, NEMAA — in collaboration with the City, the McKnight Foundation, and local developers — had drafted a fifteen-year Arts Action Plan establishing the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District and guaranteeing that this amazing neighborhood kept its identity as a haven for creatives.
In the twenty years since, NEMAA has done just that, growing into an eclectic community of roughly 1,000 artist, gallery, nonprofit, business, and community members. As Art-A-Whirl has grown in popularity — some estimates put 2022 attendance of the annual weekend event in mid-May at 100,000 — NEMAA has worked hard to forge strong partnerships with all of the amazing new breweries, restaurants, and music venues in the neighborhood, ensuring that artists still take center stage at the event that made Northeast so cool in the first place.
Of course, the 25th Art-A-Whirl was not what anyone could have expected, arriving just two months into the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. But NEMAA, like its artist members, proved nimble and resourceful, pivoting to an entirely online festival — and clocking record sales for some artists at a time when they needed all the help they could get, which proves not just that NEMAA was there for the artists, but that the Northeast community was, too.
Now gearing up for the 28th annual Art-A-Whirl (May 19 – 21) and boasting several other popular events and initiatives (the 10x10 Fall Member Fundraiser, the Fall Open Studios weekend, and partnerships with local organizations like Public Functionary to connect artists to opportunities), the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association is ready for what’s next. And it all came from a handful of artists almost thirty years ago, dreaming big in a bathroom and creating a full-blown tornado out of thin air.
by Russ White, Casket Arts Building artist & former NEMAA board member (2015-18)