Looking Back on 20 years: Blaine Garrett on Building Community

Blaine Garrett and Russ White at the Gamut Members Gala, 2023. Photo by Caleb Timmerman. 
 

Over the last month, we've been sharing Q&As with former MPLSART staff learning about the history of MPLSART and the wonderful cast of folks who have kept it going for 20 years. We covered Emma Berg, Kristoffer Knutson, Katie Garrett, Russ White, and Nicole Thomas. Next up, we're going to start profiling current staff, starting with Blaine Garrett, who along with his then partner Katie Garrett, relaunched MPLSART in 2015 and continues to wear a variety of hats today - including planning this weekend's 20th anniversary party. See you there. 

 

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Laura Laptsevitch: 2025 marks 10 years since you and Katie relaunched MPLSART. Looking back, what was your original vision for the platform?

Blaine Garrett: When Kristoffer and Emma announced they were shuttering MPLSART in 2014 after 9 years, Katie and I tossed around the idea of asking if we could keep it going. It was such an important resource, we just felt it had to continue. A number of artists had reached out to them to help, but Emma and Kristoffer were really looking for someone to fully take over operations. Katie and I had a unique set of skills - software engineering, marketing, design, project management, etc, that could help keep things in-house. We were also both artists too and involved in the local arts scene in various ways for years. A Facebook comment and a few meetings later, Kristoffer and Emma sold the site to us for a dollar. We relaunched in April 2015 with a party at Public Functionary.

Back then, our core vision was inclusivity and sustainability. Rather than listing just a few exhibitions per weekend that we might be attending, we wanted to put it all out there so our audience could self curate which exhibitions they wanted to attend. We also expanded our area to cover galleries in St. Paul and partnered with spaces such as Rochester Art Center that heavily showed Twin Cities artists. There are a lot of “circles” in the local arts community, and we wanted to get those circles to cross pollinate. Editorial also became far more important to us as outlets like Vita.mn and City Pages closed down and the main newspapers focused their arts writing on the museums. Generally expanding what MPLSART does was also a great way for folks to discover art that would otherwise fly under and better engage with the arts.

At the end of the day, we wanted to support artists and galleries - the local arts infrastructure - and we believed getting more folks into the gallery and drawing more attention into the local arts scene is the best way to keep the arts supported. Our internal motto was "Make Art Easy". 

 

Screenshot of the fateful Facebook thread that started the conversation about giving the site new life, 2014 

LL: What motivates you to keep building community through MPLSART and your other projects?

BG: Honestly, I’ve been building community and bringing people together in some fashion most of my life and I’ll probably do it until I die. There’s just something about introducing someone to something cool or helping uplift people doing great work that fills my cup.

I grew up in Northern Wisconsin in the 90s and back then every little town in the tri-county area had highschool kids starting some sort of funk or punk or metal band. My first show was when I was 14 and my friend's older sister invited us to see some crust punk bands from Menomonie play a town hall to about 20 kids. There were info tables with zines and flyers for veganism and social justice. The bands, the audience, everyone had a hand in putting the show together because they wanted it to exist. It was very inspiring to 14 year old Blaine. Around the same time, schools were starting to have computer labs with internet access. I got a couple Programming for Dummies type books and some friends and I made a website to organize and promote DIY shows around the area. Kids from all these various towns would print off flyers from the website in their computer lab and hand them out around their school. You could easily get 100 kids from a 75 mile radius to go see 5 bands in the town hall of some unincorporated village in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin once per month. We even put out a compilation CD in 1999 featuring 20+ bands from the area as a fundraiser to buy a proper PA system. A lot of people helped make it all happen, but I felt like the website really helped facilitate it and bring those people together to make it all happen.

I loved helping organize shows and the community building aspect was so fulfilling. Coming from a small town, a small world, throwing shows really got me seeing how powerful bringing people together could be. Also that DIY ethos of the era really stuck with me. 

When I was in college in 2001, I started a similar concept but for art where artists could post their work online and talk to each other via message boards. It was an international site with hundreds of artists from all over the world, but I started doing more “offline” things locally. Eventually, I turned it into a non-profit with some friends and we were organizing exhibitions around the area including a series of group shows at Stevens Square Center for the Arts and a massive group show Picasso’s Illegitimate Grandchildren (PIG) at Frank Stone Gallery in 2006.

After that, I started collaboratively painting with some friends under the name “Dim Media”. We did a lot of live painting for DJ sets and created a few murals around town. We had a handful of exhibitions and it was a lot of fun. 

However, I was missing organizing and saw relaunching MPLSART as an opportunity to get back to my old DIY music roots and help promote and organize in the local arts community. 

 

Photo from Picasso's Illegitimate Grandchildren exhibition: Charles Denton, Anya Dikareva, Blaine Garrett, Joe Lipscomb, Sara Sosa, Mel Castillo, unknown, Tina DeRungs. Artwork shown: unknown, Andrew Kastenberg, Victor Yepes, 2006

 

LL: What have you learned from working on MPLSART, and what are you most proud of?

BG: Funding the arts with your wallet is critical. Grants are an important part of funding the arts locally but grant boards are fickle and grants are not meant to sustain an artist's entire career. We have to be financially supporting the arts if we want them to continue to exist. 

Outside of the Sketchbook Project, which we’ll come back to in a moment, I think I’m most proud of keeping the flame alive for MPLSART. It feels like my duty for the last 10 years. I know people would keep making art and having exhibitions if it didn’t exist. However, when I travel I try to find the equivalent of MPLSART in other cities, it just doesn’t exist in most places. If you want to go see art in other cities, Google maps is about as good as you can do.
 

Blaine Garrett and Anita Kolman of Kolman & Reeb Gallery at the MPLSART Relaunch Party at Public Functionary, 2015

 

LL: As an artist, what insight have you gained now working with MPLSART?

BG: As an artist, when you’re applying to calls-for-art and don’t get in, it’s easy to feel like there’s some sort of conspiracy at play. But now that I’ve been on the other side, working with curation, I see it differently. For big group exhibitions like Gamut’s annual C4W shows, or even something like the State Fair fine art exhibition, they get an overwhelming number of submissions. The curators are trying to shape a cohesive voice and vision for the show. Sometimes your work just doesn’t fit the direction they’re going in at that particular moment. It’s not personal, and it’s not about your work being “not good enough.” That was a big learning moment for me: realizing how much thought goes into building a show, and how it’s really about creating coherence rather than excluding anyone. Once you start working with galleries and curators more, you realize they’re just people too, doing their best, making decisions, trying to put something meaningful together. There’s a lot less gatekeeping than we might think. If anything, it makes me feel like we should be collaborating more, because at the end of the day we’re all just people working toward the same goals.

 

LL: Tell us about the 2020 and 2021 MPLSART Sketchbook Project.

BG: During the pandemic, I coordinated a series of traveling sketchbooks that local artists would contribute a page or two of work to and then hand it off to the next artist. What started off as a fun thing to do with artist friends grew into a collected print book. The Minnesota Museum of American Art purchased the original sketchbooks at auction for their permanent collection with all the proceeds being split among the artists. It was a huge success and probably one of the most impactful things I have ever done. 

It brought a lot of joy and helped a lot of artists feel part of something during the pandemic when so many were feeling isolated and aimless. It helped me survive that time as well. I had just left a pretty stressful job right before the pandemic hit and with hiring frozen I was planning on focusing on MPLSART full-time. A lot of those plans went out the window as galleries and the rest of the world shut down. Our whole thing is to get people to go out and be social and see art, but there was no “out” to go to. Then George Floyd was murdered and the city was turned upside down. We were really close to calling it quits during that time. However, come July, it felt safe to be sitting in back yards with folks and I started bringing a sketchbook to pass around to artist friends to add to. It grew organically from there and by the end of 2020, 68 artists had contributed. Chatting with artists on their front stoop socially distanced for a few minutes was most of my social interaction during that time. I really needed it. Having the The Minnesota Museum of American Art pick up the sketchbooks was the perfect end to the two years of the project. I got pretty emotional the first time I saw the sketchbooks on display during their remodeling fundraiser event in 2023. I made a lot of good friends through the project and I think it helped MPLSART focus more on supporting artists and building community through art.

 

The MPLSART Sketchbook Project books on display at the Minnesota Museum of American Art for Here Now, 2024.

 

LL: You also contributed to the Sketchbook Project as an artist. Can you talk a little bit about your work?

BG: For several years I was part of the artist "collaborative" Dim Media working with three really good artist friends. We created a number of murals around town, had a few “solo” exhibitions and did a lot of live painting for charities and dj sets. Those years were a lot of fun working so closely in a creative collaborative context.

Lately, I’m really casual with my own artist practice. I’ve illustrated some books, contribute to zines occasionally, participate in Inktober, and have kept a daily drawing journal going on 15 years now. I’m hoping to get back to my own artistic practice more in earnest soon before the powers that be revoke my “artist card”.

 

Top: One is Enough, Dim Media, 2011, 18" x 18", Spray paint on upcycled brick.
Bottom: Digital portrait series, 2020-present. Kelsi Sharp, 2020, Kristoffer Knutson, 2024

 

LL: What is something you think most people do not realize about MPLSART?

BG: I think sometimes people think we’re a lot larger of an organization than we are. Since its founding in 2005, the core team has always been at most four people. We’re all wearing multiple hats and doing a lot of the work in our spare time. We’re not a 501c(3), not because we’re not doing non-profit work, but because having a board and many of the other things that come with being a non-profit organization are a lot of additional overhead. In the last couple years, we've been fiscally sponsored by NEMAA and I think we complement them quite well. Fiscal sponsorship has allowed us to get a few grants for specific projects but also made us ineligible for many. We heavily rely on revenue from the gallery memberships, tips, and some amazing advertisers. In general, I hope folks know that we’re actual human beings and not some faceless media company or have some massive endowment. Hey, maybe someday, but not today nor the past 20 years.

Also, it is worth mentioning that Katie and I amicably divorced in 2023. We're still good friends and she's even coming to town for the 20th anniversary party. She's no longer actively involved in MPLSART but still a huge supporter. I only mention it because we're pretty private people and never felt the need to make a big public announcement. However, we still get emails addressed to the both of us etc. 

 

Blaine Garrett and Reggie LeFlore at Reggie's 2021 Gamut solo exhibition. Photo by Cassie Garner.

 

 

LL: The 20th Anniversary Party is this weekend. Tell us what’s in store.

BG: We are having a small selection of artwork from a few artists we’ve worked with over the years: Russ White, Philli Irvin, Melissa Sisk, Sean Ferris, Miku, Marjorie Fedyszyn. Also HOTTEA, Hibaaq Ibrahim, and Roshan Ganu are doing site specific installations that I am really excited about. As an added bonus, there will also be the murals from the Time Capsule project that Southside Preservation Society hosted a few months back. Briar Bar will be having a cash bar. JAM E.Z. and Cassie Garner will be DJing. There will be a photo booth. There will be dancing. Most everyone that has worked on MPLSART over the years will be there. I’m really excited for it. While you're there, be sure to pick up a MPLSART 20th anniversary sweatshirt too. They’re real comfy and help support our programming.

But yeah, the party is really a celebration of the artists, curators, gallery directors, cultural workers, collectors, and art lovers that have helped make the local arts scene so amazing over the last 20 years. We’ve been through so much: recessions, a pandemic, important spaces closing. But through it all, we continue to have this really rich visual arts scene that a lot of places do not have and it deserves to be celebrated. We’re living in difficult times right now and the future is uncertain. I think we all could use a little joy and reflection, even for one evening, to appreciate where we have come from. My hope is that the evening is full of love and inspiration and will be a good kickoff for another 20 years.

 

LL: That's wonderful. What is next for MPLSART?

BG: While we've been focused the past few months on planning the party, we’re having a lot of side conversations around what the next 10 years look like. What are the needs of the community moving forward and how can MPLSART best address those needs. Many of the needs will be the same as they always have been: cultivating collectors, drawing in more folks from outside of the arts community, supporting artists so they can make the work that has a greater impact on the community. However our approach may need to be different than it was when, say, Emma started the site in 2005 or when Katie and I took it over in 2014. Social media didn’t exist in 2005 so that was a focus when we relaunched but now social media is destroying civilization so we’ll probably be scaling that back. Editorial continues to be important and we’re building a great editorial program after Russ took off his editor hat earlier this year to focus on his own artistic practice. In a general sense, again, thinking back to the DIY roots days, we need to get more people involved. That might look like a board of directors, that might mean creating more meaningful opportunities for folks to get involved in small ways. That might mean doing more outreach and creating more IRL engagement. That might mean selling art via the website. In 2015, I don’t think most people were comfortable buying a $5000 painting online but I think that has changed quite a bit in the last 10 years. Our project coordinator Anika really wants to do a print edition and I’m all for it. We’ll also be launching a membership program in 2026 so stay tuned for that.

Personally, after the party, I'm taking a bit of time to focus on my art, friends, family and generally get my chill back. ◼︎

 

Blaine Garrett 2025. Photo by Acacia Bjerke.

This Q&A is part of series of articles about the fine folks that have helped make MPLSART what it is over the last two decades. Celebrate our 20th anniversary with us September 27th, 2025 from 6-10 at Southside Preservation Society.