“Do you think AI would give the radish a butt?”
This is the question MPLS Piecycle Club poses in a recent Instagram story. As Vangelis’s “Tears in the Rain” (the song with the monologue from Blade Runner) plays over the video, a hand with a paint brush emerges, and then decisively, delicately traces a single well-placed line on a purplish-red root vegetable.
Maybe AI wouldn’t give a radish a butt, but MPLS Piecycle Club co-founder Levi Mills certainly would.
Piecycle Club, which organizes family-friendly bike rides to area coffee shops, bakeries, and cafes, got its start in the fall of 2022. Mills and fellow Piecycle co-founder Terri Lindenbaum have been close friends since college, and they both moved to the Twin Cities several years ago. Mills and Lindenbaum love bikes—he was a bike commuter, she did triathlons—but upon arriving in Minneapolis they felt sort of like they were watching the bike community from the outside, “not cool enough for it, in some ways,” Mills says.
By early 2022, they both had had kids, which made it seem even more difficult to get involved—you won’t find a lot of people at weeknight crit races with a Burley trailer in tow.
So they had an idea: “What if we just do the thing we already do with our young children, where we go to cafes on Saturday or Sunday mornings, and we make a group out of it?” Mills explains.
Their inaugural ride was to Wild Grind, the (since shuttered) daytime cafe arm of Wild Mind Artisan Ales. Roughly three other families showed up that they didn’t know personally, and Mills and Lindenbaum were delighted. “People actually came,” he remembers thinking.
Beginning with that first ride, Mills has designed and created all of the promotional posters for MPLS Piecycle Club. And they’re really, really great. For example…
And…
And my personal favorite…
Mills isn’t an artist by trade or training. “I have an iPad, that’s my first qualification,” he says. His day job is in marketing, but it’s the kind of work that can leave you feeling a little creatively stunted; he needed an outlet. “It was a way to convey the whimsy of the ride—it took the pressure off the bike ride by saying, ‘This is the mood. It’s very silly … just come have fun.’”
As AI slop advertising becomes increasingly prevalent, Piecycle Club’s hand-drawn posters, with their joyful cycling animals and anthropomorphic pastries, feel all the more whimsical. In fact, Mills says the advent of AI event posters has discouraged him from doing digital art—even though, yes, he knows he drew the graphic by hand.
“I have a very distinct style with digital drawings that I know I could plug into Claude and have it do a very good job replicating," he says. “And that bums the shit out of me.”
That’s why Mills finds himself increasingly drawn to making physical cut-paper collage graphics like the art for this Saturday’s ride to Radish Farm Stop. The actual, tactile work of cutting and placing paper to create something is much harder (if, sure, not impossible) to replicate with AI.
The physical posters are more challenging and more rewarding to make. But they’re also even more time-consuming than the digital ones, and Mills shares another trait with any artist worth their salt: a tendency to procrastinate.
The art with the squirrel riding its bike to Seward Cafe, for example, with “charmingly last minute” in the bottom lefthand corner? Piecycle posted that poster to Instagram the night before the ride.
“There’s one where I literally didn’t finish the graphic, so I took a video of me working on it and just said, ‘Please come,’” Mills laughs.
Hey, good art takes time, something you have precious little of available to you when you’re a parent. Just look at all the tiny little letters in that Radish ride image up top! People love the posters regardless: “Sadly not local. But just need to kudos this ride call art. It’s rad!” one Seward squirrel poster commenter wrote.
Because of the sporadic nature of the rides (and the occasionally belated sharing of timing and route info), the best way to keep up with MPLS Piecycle Club is on Instagram, but you can also sign up for email updates at pie.bike. The group size swells and shrinks; sometimes there are just a handful of families, but at its largest, Piecycle Club has welcomed around 80 people. And there’s pretty much always a sweet treat involved.
“It’s the best way to get children to endure any length of ride—the promise of a donut at the end,” Mills says. (For what it’s worth, I know plenty of adults for whom this is also true.)
All of the rides take place at a lowkey “pastry pace,” and there are even “mini pie rides,” with extra-short distances and easy routes so kids can ride themselves.
Someday, Mills’s kiddos might even find themselves enlisted in Piecycle Club’s anti-AI art-making movement.
“My kids will crawl up on the work bench and be like, ‘Can I help?’ And I’m like, ‘honestly, I wish you could,’” Mills says. “‘When you’re old enough to cut out tiny letters…’”
