Yesterday was the first Thursday of the month, which means that many of the Northeast Minneapolis galleries and studios were open to the public for visits. If you’ve ever been to Art-A-Whirl, you know that there’s more to visit than can reasonably be accomplished and it’s all crowded. The First Thursday program allows us to visit these studios and galleries in a less crowded atmosphere and to spread it out over some months, allowing us to focus on one area at a time. Last night, I decided that I was going to give the Northrup King Building a thorough visit. I failed.

The Northrup King Building houses more than 130 artists and arts-related businesses, and most of them were open to the public last night. The studios are distributed across three floors of the sprawling complex, and I had two hours to get my visiting in. That works out to about 1 minute per studio, not counting walking time. It turns out that there were other pitfalls awaiting me, too.

• The first problem is that several of the studios and galleries were offering snacks or drinks, and Icebox Gallery hosted a music event to open two new shows. I tried to keep my snacking to a minimum, but I did linger at a few galleries to munch a cookie and look around.
• The second problem is that I ran into a friend, Kyle Osvog. Kyle makes these incredible ceramic sculptures. I hadn’t seen him for a while so I chatted with him for a few minutes, catching up on his work and life.
• The third problem is that some of the art really caught me. It was the kind of work that commanded my attention, forcing me to spend more than my allocated 1 minute to really address it.

In the end, I ran out of time and had to cut my visit short. I’ll have to go back some time, but that’s OK — there are 12 First Thursday’s in the year.

Related posts:

1. First Thursdays Arts
2. Watch your back, it’s an Art Attack!
3. St Paul Classic Cookie in Danger of Closing
4. May Day Cafe apparently has hawesome peanut butter cookies.
5. St. Paul Art Crawl