Midway Contemporary Art is an artist-run gallery led by just four people—but you wouldn’t know that just by looking at it. In fact, their new facility off Broadway and Marshall was constructed, in part, with director John Rasmussen’s own two hands. The artists who run Midway have renovated 1509 NE Marshall Street from the ground up with the same careful hands and attentive eyes they would a sculpture. “It’s been a very hands-on project,” says Rasmussen of the building the nonprofit organization acquired in 2021. The previous owner, also an artist, seemed keen on preserving the property’s arts-focus when selling it to Midway. “All four of us are either practicing or former artists, and we’ve really come at it from an artistic perspective.”
Of Minneapolis’s handful of noteworthy contemporary art galleries, Midway enjoys significant cultural cachet in the art world, earning them a reputation which precedes their DIY ethos. “At our core, we work with emerging artists and mid-career artists,” says Rasmussen. “Artists seem to really enjoy coming here and pushing the boundaries of their practice in ways that they might not be able to if they were working with a commercial space, or if they haven’t had the opportunity to work with an institution,” adds deputy director Meagan McCready.
In partnership with the Berlin-based architecture firm b+, Rasmussen and McCready, along with programming manager Kelsey Olson, have worked meticulously to help realize the firm’s first building in the United States—and the latest iteration of Midway. Every detail of the building’s construction was executed to the degree of excellence. Each light fixture, electrical wire, and window pane was placed with care. The entire building is an exercise in green architecture and “adaptive reuse”; it is, itself, an art piece which draws from and responds to the environment, resources, and material culture of Minneapolis.
“When I founded Midway in 2001, I was an artist, and I wanted a space for my work to some degree,” says Rasmussen. “It was a struggle for me to find a space that was championing the work that I was really interested in, and that I was making.” And so he took matters into his own hands. In 2020, Midway left its previous, longstanding location in Marcy-Holmes to briefly set up shop in a smaller space around the corner, before finally making a new, permanent home for the gallery and library in the reconceptualized limousine garage at 1509—with plans laid for an expansion.
From its design to its purpose, Midway’s new facility is practical. The new building does not necessarily represent lofty new goals for Midway, whose programming will remain focused on its three core pillars: their exhibitions, their artist grants, and their library. Rather, the new facility is a hard-earned space that better suits the actual stature of Midway, and further cements that they are here to stay. “We aren’t trying to grow, or add, or ‘get big.’ We just really needed a place where we can do what we do,” says McCready.
Midway is not just an art gallery, it is also an archival art library. And Midway is not just a gallery and library, but an institution which provides support for living, working contemporary artists through stipends and exhibitions. Being a mid-sized arts institution uniquely positions Midway not only to be able to sculpt their new space into exactly what they want it to be—but also to support the projects that are most important to them.
“We really are proud to run the Visual Arts Fund, which is our re-granting program for The Warhol Foundation,” says Rasmussen. “It’s sort of an incubator for the next generation of art spaces in the Twin Cities.” Since 2016, the VAF has provided substantial funding for over 50 arts projects. Often small art galleries and independent publications receive funding. This year, jurors for the VAF submissions will select six projects to receive $10,000 grants, and applications open September 1.
This model for artistic support is underutilized in the United States, according to Rasmussen. Artists Space in New York City, The Brick in Los Angeles, and the Renaissance Society in Chicago support contemporary artists in similar ways. “These aren’t collecting institutions. They’re presenting institutions that are often developing new work, and often the work from those exhibitions then goes into museum collections,” says Rasmussen. “Na Mira, whose video installation contrapunctual was here two years ago, is now in the Walker Art Center’s permanent collection. So we see ourselves as a production space, in a sense.”
The first exhibition in the new space is reserves with K.R.M. Mooney, a conceptual artist from New York who has visited Midway several times—not just in preparation for the exhibition. Midway worked with Mooney to fabricate a whole new body of work for the show, says Rasmussen.
Reserves is a series of industrial, minimalist works. Delicately crafted shadow boxes with tiny metallic sculptures inside dot the walls. If wiring up a circuit breaker were “fine art” and not a trade, this is what you might imagine your electrician crafting up. Stacks of concrete slabs and ceramic cylinders are strewn about the main room. The materials in reserves reference resources used in the built world, and muddle the distinction between commonplace materials and artistic media. The metalwork eventually oxidizes, their shiny surfaces responding to the environment.
The library was a significant motivating factor for Rasmussen and McCready to scout out a new home for Midway. “We have 12,000 volumes and the architects planned space for it to grow up to 30,000 volumes. The new building is a much larger facility for the library collection, which is growing,” says Rasmussen. In fact, the library’s collection recently made a significant acquisition, when artist and friend of the gallery Silke Otto-Knapp passed away. “We acquired her whole personal library archive,” explains McCready. Midway will now have the appropriate space to house the artist’s archive on site—an important resource for artists, historians, and other visiting researchers.
“When I first started working at Midway, like, 16 years ago, it was the place where you could have access to artists from outside the Twin Cities in a really intimate setting,” muses McCready, whose vision for Midway’s new space is for it to be a place where people—whether visiting artists or artistic locals—really want to be.