Tiny St. Paul museum is gaining larger audience

A museum in the Midway area of St. Paul is looking for "artists, makers, and historians of all types to create and curate monthly exhibits." There's a $250 stipend and three primary criteria for exhibits: They must relate to the area, engage the audience and not be too fussy.

Oh, yeah, there's one more — they have to fit into a teeny, weeny space.

Welcome to the Smallest Museum in St. Paul, a real-life, curated museum that fits into an old fire-hose cabinet on an outside wall of the Workhorse Coffee Bar at 2399 University Av. W. In the year and a half it has filled its space — 2 feet tall by 3 feet wide and just 11 inches deep, the museum has garnered national and local arts funding and featured the work of more than a dozen artists. Exhibits have included a miniature movie theater screening a real film, tiny make-believe animal species of Minnesota and a miniature crocheted version of the coffee shop itself.

"Once people notice that it's there, you always see people coming just to look at it," said Anne Jin Soo Preston, a Minneapolis artist who curated the crocheted coffee shop, complete with little coffee mugs and even a miniature laptop, back in February. "It is a small space. And it makes you think totally differently because the scale of it is so small."

She added: "It's such a great space because it's open all the time. Anyone can go."

The museum was Shannon Forney's idea. Forney has loved and promoted the arts for years, working for the nonprofit Metropolitan Regional Arts Council. So, even before she and partner Ty Barnett opened the coffee shop in May 2015, Forney applied for a Knight Arts Challenge grant to help them do more than just hang local artists' work on their walls commission-free. "We hadn't even signed the lease yet," she said.

The $5,000 grant they received allowed them to pay stipends to artists to convert the fire-hose cabinet into ever-changing museum exhibits. While the display is tiny, Forney's larger goal is to develop an ever-growing relationship with its artists and the neighborhood at the far west end of the Midway area, in what the city has classified a Creative Enterprise Zone.

Artist Yousif Del Valle lived in the area during the disruptive construction of the Green Line light rail train. He has also seen anger toward the train turn to enthusiasm, as the Green Line rumbles past the coffee shop about every 10 minutes. Del Valle created a tiny movie theater that continually showed a tiny film of a train coming into a station.

"I work in small scale, so the venue and the nature of the cabinet was pretty appealing to me," he said.

While many of the exhibits have focused on small versions of bigger museum counterparts — a past exhibit showed tiny imagined animal species, another showed frog specimens — Del Valle said he thinks the museum's popularity and exposure in the larger community will continue to grow.

"I think it can be more than just a little curio cabinet," he said.

Coffee shop customer Jeremiah Ellison regularly stops by the shop for coffee and to view the museum.

For Macalester College paleontologist Kristi Curry Rogers, the challenge is not to make a miniature version of something, but to find specimens that fit into the small space. Starting in December, she will show a couple bones from a golden retriever-sized "tiny" dinosaur found on Madagascar, as well as fossilized teeth marks of a T-rex type dinosaur also from Madagascar.

She and her husband go to the coffee shop often, Rogers said, and "thought it would be cool to have an exhibit."

"We love the opportunity to put the research we are doing on display in a quick and easy way," she said. "Having such a small space really allows you to personalize the science a little bit more."

Forney, who hopes that new grant funding will eventually allow her to offer larger stipends to a wider array of artists, wants her little museum to simply "delight pedestrian traffic."

For more information about the Smallest Museum in St. Paul, go to smallestmuseumstpaul.com.