Online Extra: View picks from our favorite up and comers
Art-A-Whirl, which takes place May 16–18, checks the boxes for some of my greatest enthusiasms: new and original art, community, boldness, and surprises. Throw in local craft beer, food trucks, and a springtime afternoon in Northeast Minneapolis, and you pretty much have to pull me away with ropes and wild horses.
It also reminds me of a very enduring and sturdy piece of advice I was once given and which has held true: You will never regret spending money on a piece of art that you love. And, chances are, you’ll find something—a painting, a sculpture, a work of glass, a photograph—at Art-A-Whirl that will speak to you. It will whisper wordless truths about your world, about your vision of things. And even if it costs a few bucks more than you originally planned to spend, you’ll take it home with you and it’ll be yours. And every time you look at it, you’ll find your relationship to it deepening, shining always-changing light on who you were the day you decided to buy it and who you might be in the infinity of tomorrows (and even who you might choose to leave it to someday, in that very-distant future that hurls toward us like a runaway train).
The fact that thousands of folks wander through Northeast Minneapolis this weekend on what is inevitably one of the first truly warm and inviting stretches of the season—that doesn’t hurt in the slightest. This is a weekend of reawakening, unfolding, and celebrating. Get out there with an open eye and an open heart, and see if there’s an art find calling your name. Changing the things on your walls can change the visions in your head.
