Minneapolis awards $200,000-plus in grants for Vibrant Storefronts Initiative

The city of Minneapolis announced Friday afternoon five winners of the first Vibrant Storefronts Initiative.

Created by the city’s Arts & Cultural Affairs Department, the program offers up to $50,000 to artist-run organizations to subsidize the rental of vacant Loring Park storefronts. The groups can use the properties for a variety of projects including art shows, pop-up shops, art and production studios and office space.

“Artists have a long history of challenging perspectives, of incentivizing economic development, and what we’ve seen historically is that when an artist comes in, they rejuvenate the neighborhood, but then when values go up, the rents get jacked through the roof, along with those values, and the people that made these neighborhoods get displaced,” Mayor Jacob Frey said. “The whole idea here is that we’re able to keep people and retain and highlight art.”

The 2024 awardees include Blackbird Revolt, an abolitionist design studio; Black Business Enterprise, an art activation hub that offers artists and business owners supportive resources; Twin Cities Pride, an organization that’s more than 50 years old and seeks to create a safe space for LGBTQ cultural celebrations; Flavor World, a creative hub for Twin Cities artists, focusing on talent of the next generation, and Skntones, a creative production and marketing agency that will host art exhibitions and focus on underrepresented voices.

The organizations will rent space at 1128 Harmon Place, 1201 Harmon Place, 1218 Harmon Place and 1227 Hennepin Av. S., properties that have been vacant for four to six years.

The winning organizations were selected from 43 applicants and will have the storefront space for two years, with a chance to renew. There will be another Vibrant Storefronts application round after the city approves its next round of budgets.

The initiative is part of the cultural districts policy in the Minneapolis 2040 comprehensive plan, which emphasizes creating community-based ambassadors, supporting temporary arts activations and bolstering cultural festivals, events and spaces.

“This transforms our organization to have a physical space,” Blackbird Revolt co-founder and creative director Terresa Moses said. “Whenever we do activations, we have to rely on other spaces, rent out things, see what people’s schedules are.”

Similarly, Antione Jenkins and Anthony Brown of Skntones have moved around to short-term spaces across the city, done pop-ups and even worked with Kanye West at the Target Center, but they’ve never had a place they can call home for their business.

“We brought in a lot of people from outside the city to our city, so now it’s like, OK, now we have a storefront,” said Jenkins of Skntones. “Let’s get the most attention that we can here in our home, and blow these things up and get more people to come back to see that beautiful city, to see what we see.”

This is the pilot program, Johnson said, and it will hopefully expand to re-energizing other neighborhoods around Minneapolis.

“We suggested this as the first pilot because there were a lot of turnkey spaces, and we wanted to see how we could make it work here first,” said Ben Johnson, director of Minneapolis’ Arts & Cultural Affairs Department. “It’s really about a downtown district, so we thought about here because we were reimagining with artists here, the relationship between the Walker Art Center and downtown. It’s a walkable campus of places, and it just felt like the right spot.”

In October, the city announced the winners of its Cultural Districts Arts Fund, awarding nearly $700,000 to arts and business organizations across the city.