Spoonbridge and Cherry Anchors a Busy Art-Fair Weekend

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Art Fair drew a steady weekend crowd to the lawns around Spoonbridge and Cherry, the towering sculpture that has become shorthand for the city itself. Artists set up among the garden's permanent collection of more than sixty works, turning the grounds into a temporary marketplace wrapped around a permanent museum.

The Mother's Day weekend timing did its usual work, pulling families and brunch crowds through the booths across both Saturday and Sunday. By midday the lawns were full of strollers, picnic blankets and shoppers working the rows of tents.

Art among the art

The fair's setting gives it a character no convention hall could match. Shoppers move from a vendor's table of prints to a monumental bronze and back again, the temporary and the permanent side by side. One moment you are haggling over a small ceramic piece; the next you are standing under a Calder or beside the Spoonbridge, the two experiences blurring into a single afternoon.

That juxtaposition is the whole appeal. A fair in a parking lot is a shopping trip; a fair in one of the largest urban sculpture gardens in the country is an outing — a reason to spend a few hours looking, whether or not you buy a thing. The permanent collection sets a high bar, and the visiting artists rise to meet it.

A marquee event, conveniently next door

For neighbors in Lowry Hill and Kenwood, the garden's proximity made the fair an easy walk-up — the kind of marquee event that happens, conveniently, next door. While visitors drove in from across the metro and hunted for parking, locals simply strolled over, which is one of the quiet luxuries of living beside a destination park.

That accessibility cuts both ways for the neighborhood: a busy weekend means crowded lawns and full sidewalks, but it also means one of the region's better free art events is, for residents here, essentially a backyard affair. Most years, locals would take that trade.

Why the garden makes the fair

The Sculpture Garden is operated by the Walker Art Center in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, and it is free and open year-round. That public, no-ticket character is what lets a fair like this work as a community event rather than a gated one. The art is for sale; the setting never is — and the setting is the reason it all draws a crowd.

It is also a reminder of what the garden does for the neighborhood the other fifty-one weekends of the year: a free, walkable, world-class place to picnic, push a stroller, or simply stand under a giant cherry on a spoon and feel, briefly, like the city is showing off just for you.