Looking Back on 20 Years of MPLSART: Kristoffer Knutson on Being the Original Social Media

Banner image: Kristoffer Knutson and Lori Barbero at Deuce Seven's 2006 SooVAC show. All photos ripped from the depths of Facebook, unless otherwise noted.

 

Last week, we shared a Q&A with MPLSART's founder, Emma Berg, who started this site way back in 2005 as an events calendar and personal blog. This week, we're taking a walk down memory lane with Kristoffer Knutson, who came on as a site partner soon after, helping relaunch the site to be more aesthetically engaging and practically sustainable. Together, the two ran this site for nearly a decade before selling it to Katie and Blaine Garrett for a dollar ten years ago. 

Knutson is a prolific producer and creative enthusiast in his own right, a kind soul who came up in the DIY days. For all involved, MPLSART has always been a hustle, a labor of love in service to the artists and arts audiences here. Over the years, Knutson has put his energy into a variety of other creative pursuits around town, as well — in the agency world, as owner of ROBOTlove, and now as a project manager with Juxtaposition Arts.

 

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Russ White: I wanted to start by having you walk me through your history with the site. Also now we’re coming up on this anniversary — 20 years is wild. How does that feel?

Kristoffer Knutson: Yeah, when I saw it was 20 years, I was like, what? But I am reminded of that often — that time was so intertwined with ROBOTlove which closed 15 years ago and people still bring it up. It feels like yesterday that it was happening. And then in many ways, it feels like a lifetime ago.

So really the connection came from my store. ROBOTlove opened in 2004 next to SooVAC’s original location on Lyndale at 27th. Emma had been a customer and was showing up frequently with her then-partner Ben Olson, an amazing painter. She began talking about this website that she had called MPLSART. I loved the idea of a place to go to find events and gallery shows. I was also starting to meet the artists that she and Ben were hanging around with and I was interested in supporting them in some way. I felt like MPLSART was a natural extension of the artistic community that I was trying to build at ROBOTlove. 

So eventually, sometime around early 2005 or something I said, I’d like to help you make this bigger. I proposed an investment of my time and set aside a small bit of funding to help hire a developer named Seth Walker to boost the site up and make it something more. His design aesthetic was right — he had designed and built ROBOTlove’s site, and he knew how to tackle the back-end coding. We basically sat down with him and said, what would the site be if it was souped up?

But it was always Emma's and she was the origin of it — it was her vision. I’ve always tried to use what I have to support creative people like her, that are doing amazing things. And I loved the way that she used photos from the openings to give this energy to Minneapolis's art scene.

 

ROBOTlove, inside and out. Photos courtesy of Kristoffer Knutson.

 

RW: Well, as an events website, this is something I've always thought about: how important to the art is the party? Because they're a little bit different. Openings are kind of the worst time to see the art because there's often too many people standing in the way. What's that relationship, do you think?

KK: I think it's about building some momentum around things, or maybe rotation around things, so that there's some little spin-off that makes people think "I want art," or "I want to see the art." I mean, surely, I don't know what the number might be, but 80% of the people that are at the openings aren't really there to collect art. And then there’s, and I'm sure you yourself have seen that small contingent of people that are there just to eat. I also appreciated that Emma was really always very deliberate about not showing the artwork in the photos of the openings because she wanted people to go to see the art themselves.

There was definitely some thought behind it, but I think it was about making it a place you wanted to be. And then if that could in turn become supportive of the artists that were involved. That was the goal.

 

Top: Kristoffer Knutson and Emma Berg talk to Raul Osario in 2012. Bottom: Knutson with Lance Robertson, aka DJ Lance Rock, in 2010.

 

RW: The way that you and Emma ran the site, we’re talking about sort of the early blog life of the internet. Did you find that social media started changing how y'all approached the site?

KK: I mean, we're talking 2005 to what, 2014? Something like that? There wasn't really Instagram at that time but Facebook had started to be more prevalent. Now, it's the decline of our civilization, for sure. I don't know! This maybe sounds pretentious, but I think that we were social media in some ways. You were seeing how people were out socializing. There wasn't the dialogue, there wasn't the back and forth, but I think it was like, “Hey look, a picture of you at that event got posted.”

So people would look out for the updates. If I remember right, we tried to post regularly every Tuesday, which was when the photo galleries were uploaded. So there were definitely people on Wednesday who were thinking , “Oh, pictures are up. Did I make it?” Which is a weird thing to think about.

 

RW: No, that's cool. I mean, it's a very aughts kind of internet thing, I think.

KK: Yeah, there were definitely things happening elsewhere that we fit into. A key inspiration was the arts calendar Fecal Face in the Bay Area, which was amazing. And there was Cobrasnake, he was a photographer in Los Angeles deep in the hipster scene. I wouldn’t say were were trying to do what he did, party pics, but that's why people went to the site — they would go to look for listings, but they also came to see themselves.

And we used that as an opportunity to promote the artists around us who were making really great work and still do today. The idea was, while you're here, you should look at Drew Peterson. You should look at Isaac Arvold’s work. You should see Ben Olson’s paintings, and Eric Inkala’s. There were fun perks to being “media” as well. When we were invited to the press preview the first year of the Haunted Basement at Soap Factory we were like yeah, we'll promote that! Sure. Let's go! I think maybe it was a stretch, but it's kind of art related, right?

 

Screenshot of the 2006 MPLSART Relaunch Party event listing, after Knutson helped revamp the site's interface.

 

RW: So in looking at the site now, do you recognize it as something you helped build? Do you see the work that you did reflected in it in its current form?

KK: Yeah, I do. I think that the essence is still there. I think that Katie and Blaine were really respectful and deliberate about embracing the aesthetic of it and not just trashing it and making it something completely different. And that was important to Emma when we signed the papers. We made it clear that, you've got a year to do this, and if we don't like what you're doing, it's coming back.

 

RW: Oh, no shit? I didn't realize there was a clause.

KK: Yeah, like I said, it was Emma’s vision and we didn’t want that to be left behind. I think that they did a great job of maintaining that and really recognizing its personality and then adding some more meat to it, right? With your input and with others. And I think the editorial side got really strong. The idea that it has become a voice for the arts and the cities — I think that's something we touched on with blog posts and visiting guest writers but I love what it's become now and that expansion of the site.

 

RW: So, having had that front row seat, do you have a diagnosis of the art scene in Minneapolis — how it's grown and changed? It's a very open-ended question, but how are things different than they were 20 years ago? What do you think is successful? What do you think we should work on as a community?

KK: I think that one of the things that I've really come to recognize, having been born and raised here in Minneapolis — and I'm sure this is true of other cities — is the cyclical nature of it all. I don't think when we were running MPLSART I said, oh, this is novel. I mean, maybe the form that it took; it was maybe something interesting because of the times and the technologies available to us and things like that. But I knew that there had been a warehouse scene. I knew that there had been a scene in the nineties. I was aware that what was happening at that time was by no means the end all. And I also knew that there was going to be a new wave after us. And I think that what's encouraging is that we're definitely in that time now, 20 years later, with really solid, strong gallery representations, whether that's Hair & Nails or Night Club or even David Petersen who's been here all along. I’m happy that we were able to play our part in this timeline. 

I think with social media, it's different the way we experience events now. I mean, clearly I'm 20 years older now too — I'm not as keen to be the last one at an opening anymore. But certainly there’s still people going to galleries and there are still shows. I love that the galleries are able to be smarter about how they sell the work and market the work through social media. And the reach that has. I mean, just this week when I saw Jerry Saltz posting about Lauren dela Roche and Tia Keobounpheng, I was like, oh shit. That’s great. 

It’s a different scene than it was 20 years ago. There was a sense of if we do really cool shit, someone's going to see it. But now I think that we know that even if you're doing cool shit, you have to get it out there somehow.

 

RW: So you coming to the party on the 27th?

KK: Yeah, I’m coming to the party on the 27th! I'll be there for sure, dude. It's going to be a blast. ◼︎ 

 

Photo by Christian Erickson, circa 2009.

 

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, at Southside Preservation Society. We look forward to seeing your lovely faces at the party.