An annual arts crawl reaches the age of maturity at its fifth year. At least that's how Dudley Voight sees the
FLOW Northside Arts Crawl, which at the ripe old age of five will once again enliven West Broadway in Minneapolis this Saturday.
"At the fifth year, you can ask different questions," Voight says. "We're not going away. What are our goals? That's really pretty fun."
FLOW is not standard gallery-crawl fare, although Voight says her inspiration for it came from the regular jubilance of monthly crawls in the Warehouse District in years past, when that downtown slice of North Minneapolis teemed with visual arts venues.
Businesses that aren't art galleries play a big role in FLOW, hosting art shows and performances. A highlight this year is
Catalyst Community Partners' newly renovated 5 Points Building at Penn and Broadway, now home to KMOJ-FM Radio ("The People's Station"), which will host three floors of exhibits and arts activities.
Familiarity breeds interest in art, says Voight. One measure of FLOW's impact is that businesses on Broadway now routinely have art on their walls throughout the rest of the year.
"It's an invitation to people to come into our community, into our space," she says, and the art they'll see is a sample of what the community has on offer. "All the things that happen at FLOW happen all year round in north Minneapolis."
Source: Dudley Voight, FLOW Northside Arts Crawl
Writer: Chris Steller