March 10, 2025
Art-A-Whirl®: A Brief History of Year One
How a handful of artists in 1996 created a tornado out of thin air, a Northeast arts festival that has endured for a quarter century
By Sheila Regan
You probably know Art-A-Whirl as the frenzy of art, music, food, and beer that overwhelms Northeast with 40,000 people every single May. But the very first one, in 1996, was a much more ad-hoc affair. Artists used sandwich boards and spray-painted banners to alert neighbors from Northeast Minneapolis about the event. There were no breweries back then, no live music fanfare, and NEMAA did not even exist yet.
It all began after the great migration away from the Minneapolis Warehouse District and downtown, when many artists found themselves pushed out of their former studios. This was spurred by rising rents, a s well as the city of Minneapolis’s decision to demolish what would later be called “Block E,” which was home to numerous artist studios and galleries, including the Rifle Sport Gallery. Meanwhile, sluggish sales spurred other galleries and artists located in the Wyman Building to leave the Warehouse District throughout the 1990s.
Here in Northeast Minneapolis, in the empty industrial spaces once used to manufacture tires, to mill grains, and even to make bomb components during World War I, artist studios and small galleries began to crop up. “We had this whole scene going that was really underground,” recalls Dougie Padilla, an artist who was working in Northeast during those years. Amidst this D.I.Y. atmosphere that had cropped up in the industrial neighborhood, in waltzed an artist named David Felker and his wife, Lois Zabel Felker, who together would come up with the idea for Art-A-Whirl and get the festival off the ground. A Vietnam War veteran, Felker had used grant money from the G.l. bill to earn three art degrees. His first teaching position was in the remotes of Alaska on a military site, and later he was the director of a nonprofit gallery called the International Gallery of Contemporary Art while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Felker was initially just passing through Minnesota from Alaska. He was slated to begin teaching in Turkey and was planning to move his family overseas before his assignment began, but two things stopped him in his tracks: Felker’s father-in-law passed away, and the institution in Turkey told him they didn’t have enough money to bring him and his family after all. Instead, Felker found work doing fine art restoration in Northeast Minneapolis and opened up a branch
of the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in the Thorp Building. Immediately, he fell in love with Minneapolis. “I had a wonderful feeling of being in the state,” he says.
Felker’s gallery operated much the same way he had curated while living in Alaska for 15 years, by showing his own work as well as the work of other artists. “For me it was a gift I could share for other people,” he says. “It became a philosophical circumstance of opportunity.”
Felker credits his wife, Lois, with the idea to start an artist studio tour, similar to something they had tried while living in Anchorage. “She was the one that first set that in motion,” he says.
The Felkers began to host meetings in the gallery, where artists gathered to talk about the possibilities of a studio tour event. Pete Driessen, whose studio was in the California Building at
the time (he now works out of the Casket Arts Building), recalls a salon-like atmosphere at those early meetings. “It was kind of a mix of younger artists and mid-career artists looking at ideas of economic autonomy,” says Driessen.
Soon the festival had a name: Art-A-Whirl, inspired by the Whirl Air Flow Corporation sign across the street from the Thorp Building, which artist Juris Plesums eyed from the bathroom. That sign also provided inspiration for the first logo, a tornado drawn by R.W. Scholes, an illustrator who had just left Milkweed Editions. Scholes was recruited by Howard Christopherson, an artist and committee member who also ran Icebox Quality Framing and Gallery — Northeast’s very first art gallery — which is still open today in the Northrup King Building after many years on Central Avenue.
They even got some grant money for the event, thanks to the City Council member Walter Dziedzic. Felker showed up at Dziedzic’s office, made his case, and would up with a check for $2,000.
“The next thing you know, we had a bus going around, and had some money for posters,” Padilla recalls. “So Walt was key. Other than that it was going to be much more underground.”
Most of the artists that first year were based in the S&M Building, the Thorp Building, and the California Building. There were also artists in the Grain Belt Complex, several studio buildings throughout the neighborhood, and Icebox Gallery, with 21 locations in total participating.
Dean Trisko, one of the original participating artists and a current NEMAA board member, remembers turnout as being in the hundreds, at least. “We were all surprised that we got people,” he says, laughing. “Felker predicted it, and he was right that they would come.”
“The first few years, we had zero budget to work with,” remembers artist Lisa Elias, who often used to host music events in her studio during the early years.
Elias also remembers quite a different neighborhood, with many European immigrant communities living in the area. She had a 99-year-old neighbor from Russia and other neighbors from Poland, Germany, and elsewhere. “It was cool to see everyone in the neighborhood wandering about the studios,” she says.
Besides the open studios, the first Art-A-Whirl featured artist demonstrations, music performances, buses that brought people between locations, and in Felker’s Gallery, a screen that offered direct communication with the concurrent Brighton Festival in England.
“Middle American Meets Middle Street, Brighton, UK,” one poster read. “Computer available for public access, Saturday & Sunday to interact on the World Wide Web link with Brighton, and be a ‘virtual’ part of Art-A-Whirl.”
Felker set that up through his connections with American Express. “That was all new technology,” he says. “It was interesting that American Express had that capability for us. By golly they did something that was just incredible. We had direct communication with an international festival.”
The spirit of artists in Northeast Minneapolis band for the benefit of all continued as the years progressed. NEMAA was formed in 1997 to facilitate organizing the festival. Heidi Andermack, who was an early Art-A-Whirl Catalog Editor in 1999 and Board Chair of NEMAA by 2000, said the gentrification issues that plagued artists in the Warehouse district came back again. To help protect the arts community that had been developed, NEMAA got some grant money from the McKnight Foundation and, in collaboration with the City, created a report that would be the basis of the Arts Action Plan, published in 2002. The Northeast Minneapolis Arts District was born.
For Andermack, the growing power of NEMAA is linked to the success of the arts festival. “It was through Art-A-Whirl that all that was made possible,” she says.
