Soap Factory

On Thursday I walked up to what looked like an old abandoned brick building. What I was looking for was an art gallery. The address that I was looking for was 518 2nd St. SE in Minneapolis. I drove by a few times before realizing that I was looking at the building I was supposed to be going into. After squinting into the shadows for a few seconds I finally noticed the sign that said Soap Factory. Finally.....my destination.

So what is this place your wondering? The story is long. Almost as long as the history of the Twin Cities. Back in 1892 this building was owned by H.R. Carpenter's Union Railway Company. It was used as a storehouse for the railway. Originally built as a one story building, after only a year H.R. Carpenter was able to add two more stories because of the power and wealth of the railroad. However luck was not on Carpenter's side. In 1907 J.J. Hill and his Great Northern Railway was able to buy out Carpenter. He ran the warehouse until the power of rail started subsiding. Through the 1910's and 1920's the building was run as the Grant Storage Battery Battery Company and the Whaler-Barnes Food Products Manufacturing Company. In 1924 it finally became what it was longest known for, a soap factory called National Purity. This company made all things related to cleaning cow milking products. They stayed in business until the 90's and then moved to another more modern facility.

In 1987 there were two people who were looking for a space to house art that was not the refined gallery that most artists aspire towards. They wanted a spot for the starving artist. The ones with the biggest ideas and the smallest budgets. These two people were Jim Tittle and Laurie Muir. They had their little galley, called No Name Gallery, at 100 1st St. No in Minneapolis but were looking for something bigger and better. One day Jim overheard a realtor talking about a building that he was trying to sell. It needed structural and electrical work and needed an updated fire sprinkler system. Jim took the idea back to Laurie and they decided to go for it. They moved into the the building in 1995 and changed the name to Soap Factory right away. It took awhile to get cleaned up and repaired. They had to hold shows before they even had the heat working. But finally they had a large enough space to use for all the beginner artists out there, or the artists who just wanted an alternative space to a fancy gallery.

Walking up to and into the building is fun, especially if you haven't been there before. You have no idea what to expect. It's dark and looks dingy, but you know your going into a historic place. It has a lot of little rooms and a lot of big rooms. Feels like nooks and crannies. The floors are wood and are uneven, but in some places the floor is stone. And then you look at the walls, you would expect them to look just as run down as the floors but they are not. They are nicely finished and waiting for new art to be put on them.

One of the first things that you see when you first walk into the building is a cloud of white umbrellas. At first I thought this was just a decoration that the gallery had put up so you knew you were entering, but soon found out that it is art greeting you at the door. Adam Parker-Smith is the artist behind this idea and it is called Umbrella Cloud. He has these clouds of white umbrellas in various different places around the Soap Factory building, usually near a window or light source. It really helps to brighten up the dark corners. I like how he was able to take such a simple object as an umbrella and turn it into art. They are practically piled on top of each other so you cannot see through the mass of nylon.

After getting through that first cloud of umbrellas you have to cross an art barrier. A two inch wide and many many feet long pile of white items line their way across the entire gallery. It appears to go through walls in a never ending line. The miniature junk yard items in this work of art are everything you could imagine. Old tires, parts of fence, oil barrels, refrigerators, and cars are stacked and stretched so that you have to step over this in order to go further into the gallery. Brett Smith is the creator of this piece and he rightly calls it Barricade. This was my favorite artwork in the gallery because I had just never seen anything like it before. It left me wondering "who thinks of this stuff and why"?

My second favorite was called Memory Eternal by a woman named Lauren Herzak-Bauman. She made a very large piece of art that is 10x20 feet. It is set in a large room that is mostly dark. There are only a few dim sources of light. This is four large circles laid out on the floor formed of broken pieces of white porcelain. The edge of each circle touches the others. So you have this large organized mess on the floor that some how makes a lot of sense. The artist had a description of how she deals with depression and she was trying to represent how her thoughts run together. How she is fine in one area and another, but on the edges those issues touch and chaos happens.

I really liked the Soap Factory. I liked how it was laid out and that it wasn't a clean space where you needed to be quiet and well behaved. It seemed to bring out the real meaning in the art and how the artist was feeling. It was comfortable and used feeling. Kids could run around in there and it would be okay. A bum could wonder in, and it wouldn't matter. Also, it can be inspiring to a person who maybe isn't a mainstream artist. They have a space to express themselves without worry.


I wish I could have taken more photos, but wasn't able to. The ones I have here are of the outside, and give a bit of an idea how the inside looks. If you click on this photo and look very closely in the windows you will see the words Soap Factory spelled out.