Matt Pogatshnik likes to walk.
For the better part of a decade, the Northrop neighborhood resident has strolled south Minneapolis’s streets, his preferred way of unwinding or just getting out of the house. At first, those routes took him along familiar, popular paths: meandering along Minnehaha Creek, for example, and getting a “reward beer” at Sea Salt before heading home.
But before long, he started taking the alleys instead. That’s when he began to notice the garage murals. And once he noticed them, he couldn’t stop. For several years, Pogatshnik has been posting pictures of the garage murals he passes to Instagram: corvids sharing an orange, Harley-Davidson reapers, wildflower poems of “remembered hues”, a wand-wielding wizard creating a fantasy world for a cat.
Pogatshnik says he was a little inspired by Andy Sturdevant’s MinnPost column The Stroll, a little inspired by those completionists who run or walk every street in the city, and a little inspired by the Situationist International art movement. “French guys in the ’50s and ’60s, Guy Debord and all these weirdos,” he chuckles.
“The situationists’ thing is that under capitalism, we all exist under the thrall of the spectacle that’s distracting us from authentic human experience,” explains Pogatshnik, and, yes, he does have a fine arts master’s degree. “Consuming stuff, and paying attention to all the stuff that the spectacle throws at us, keeps us from becoming fully realized humans experiencing life as it should be.”
Both his walks (which he undertakes with no plan, with no system) and the garages he documents (which are “doing something to a semi-public space that’s throwing off what you would expect to see”) are examples of the situationist ideal of breaking through the spectacle.
Pogatshnik’s walking philosophy borrows from Debord’s concept of dérive, which is French for “drift.” It’s a strategy that encourages aimless, unplanned walking journeys through urban environments to explore how they’re constructed and how that makes us feel. He doesn’t keep track of addresses or locations for the murals he stumbles across—just snaps a photo and posts it. To date, he’s documented more than 300 garage murals under the hashtag #mplsdérive.
And Pogatshnik isn’t the only one fascinated by south Minneapolis’s flourishing alley art scene.
Christian Huelsman’s interest in alleys began in Cincinnati, where he grew up, and where he was the victim of a crime in an alley that was poorly lit, trashed, and overgrown.
“In the aftermath of that, I started thinking about public space,” says Huelsman, a city planner by trade. “I started thinking about how these disused public areas like alleys and hillside stairways in Cincinnati’s neighborhoods didn’t seem to have the level of advocacy that they deserved.”
Noting that neither the city nor residents took care of these public places, Huelsman helped found the nonprofit group Spring in Our Steps, which hosts alley and stairway clean-ups and pop-up activations. When he moved to Minneapolis, he wanted to continue celebrating those underused spaces. And so, beginning in his Longfellow neighborhood, he started exploring a new set of alleys, documenting the art he encountered on—you guessed it—Instagram.
While Pogatshnik drifts through Minneapolis’s alleys, Huelsman's method is a little less rambling and random. “I started to map them, as a planner likes to do,” he says. He created Google Maps that are color-coded by neighborhood: “21 neighborhoods, hundreds of murals,” he says. He even mapped out bike routes that traverse the alleys, and hosted “art in alleys” bike tours in collaboration with the Hennepin History Museum.
(You can check out those routes on Google Maps here and here.)
So yes, these alley enthusiasts differ a bit in their approaches. One is a wandering artist confronting the spectacle, the other a city planner collecting data, concerned with public spaces. (“Of course he has maps,” a bemused Pogatshnik responds upon hearing about my chat with his counterpart.)
But both projects exist at the intersection of art and accessibility and urban exploration. Pogatshnik and Huelsman believe you’ll see a different side of the city when you travel by the alleys, almost as if another map is layered on top of our world. If you slow down for a second or take the less-traveled route, there might be some “weird, cool stuff down there,” as Pogatshnik says.
And both want to share that joy with their fellow Minneapolitans, be it by Instagram or bike tour. Many of Pogatshnik’s photos were displayed on the walls of May Day Cafe this summer, and they’re now hosted on the side of his own garage.
There’s an element of activism here as well. Huelsman points to a 2006 effort by former Minneapolis City Council Member Robert Lilligren to make it illegal to walk or ride a bike in alley segments of blocks where you don’t live. Ultimately, that measure wasn’t approved, but not every city has alleyways that are as accessible as Minneapolis’s.
“There are some cities in the United States where they have signs that say, like, ‘This is not for through access. Not even people,’” he says. “You want to fight for public space rather than hand it over to people who would make up rules like that.”
Huelsman’s maps are the most thorough documentation that exists of south Minneapolis’s alley art, but they haven’t been updated since about at the start of the pandemic in 2020. (He no longer lives in Minneapolis; he’s currently based in Philadelphia and has plans to relocate to Duluth.) That means there’s a whole wave of murals, including those that went up throughout the city following the murder of George Floyd, that have not been mapped.
For this reason and others, Huelsman hopes that maybe someday another local will pick up his mapping project.
These projects are by their nature ever-evolving, and that constant change is part of what makes them endlessly interesting. The same walls get painted over with new murals; up-and-coming artists add their work to previously blank surfaces. People pick up paintbrushes themselves—splashing their garages with naturescapes, political messages, or scenes from Star Wars—or commission local artists like Black Daze or Goons to add their own flair. It all gives the alleys a different texture than what you see from the road.
Pogatshnik likens these colorful displays to Amish quilts, the complicated, geometric patterns that emerge from a serious, plain culture. “It’s sort of the same thing with these garages—we’re all stoic Minnesotans who mostly keep to ourselves, but then, in the alley, it’s totally OK to kind of fly your freak flag,” he laughs.
Or maybe the alley art shows how the south Minneapolis mindset is a bit different from Minnesotan qualities more broadly. They’re especially concentrated in neighborhoods like Powderhorn, Central, Standish—the more freak-flaggy sections of the city, known for their punks and puppets, their tall bikes and great big Mad Max-ian May Day celebrations.
“We like to break the mold a little bit,” Huelsman says. “We like to challenge the status quo.”
