Minneapolis gallery offers $1 each for unloved paintings to up-cycle

Clean out your art-storage closets and haul your "unloved, neglected and unwanted paintings" to the Northrop King Building in NE Minneapolis where Kolman & Pryor Gallery will pay to take them off your hands.

Through January 2, Kolman & Pryor Gallery will pay $1 each for every painting delivered to its north Minneapolis warehouse studio regardless of the picture's style, subject, quality (or lack of quality) and no matter whether it's done on canvas or wood panel, framed or unframed. Artists Patrick K. Pryor and Jodi Reeb plan to re-cycle and up-market the art for a future exhibition to be announced in spring.

Dentists inspired the Art Up-Cycle program said Pryor, the gallery's co-owner and curator. At Halloween some dentists run candy buy-back programs that pay kids for candy they've collected from neighbors. Taking the candy out of circulation saves teeth and encourages kids to make "a healthy lifestyle choice" while still having Halloween fun.

Likewise, "Art Up-Cycle gives new life and purpose to unwanted or neglected art," Pryor said in a statement. The gallery hopes that both collectors and artists will turn in canvases rather than "sending them to the landfill or selling them at a garage sale or consignment shop." Any paintings that he and Reeb don't recycle will be given to Free Arts Minnesota.

The gallery specializes in colorful Midwestern abstractions, but for Art Up-Cycle anything and everything is welcome. Early deliveries include sentimental reproductions in faux-rococo frames, kid stuff, impressionist wannabes, and large helpings of generic kitsch.

"We're not at all about judging the work people bring in," said gallery co-owner Anita Sue Kolman. The goal is just to encourage "artists and collectors to think about a new creative future for the works that no longer speak to them."

(Buy back program ends January 2. Kolman & Pryor Gallery, Studio 395, Northrop King Building,1500 Jackson St.,NE, Minneapolis. Open Saturdays noon to 4 p.m. 612-385-4239 or 612-280-7812 or www.kolmanpryorgallery.com)