Night Club III: ISO the Perfect Closet
Following along as a gallery finds its third home, and the new ethos to suit it
Jan 21, 9:00AM
Tour #1 – Telephone Building
I woke up early. The car is barely warm, but it’s time to get to Northeast. I have been invited by Emma Beatrez and Lee Noble of Night Club gallery, to tour a potential space. I look forward to the discussions ahead and am hopeful about the prospect of Night Club being in a space that was, at one point, used by Midway Contemporary Art for their art-research library.
The snow is falling one flake at a time as I shuffle up to the front doors of the “Telephone Building.” We all shake hands and exchange names, and I nod politely, silently following the group into the basement.
It has a lot of character: concrete, bricks, terrazzo floor. Down in the basement, we find lots of office cutouts, while the room we tour is unique in some ways, it also appears as if drywall has been propped up against quick 2×4 framing, allowing the owners to rent out more units with less space. Thin windows at the back of the room, close to the ceiling, give a 35mm view of the sky and stick-like vegetation growing on the side of the building.
The property manager lets us know that there are no events allowed without prior notice.
Everyone knows this isn’t the one.
Tour #2 – 2010 Hennepin
Fluorescent lights flicker on, a pale green hue cast into the diffused light of the north side of the building. Winter sun streams in. A former General Mills lab, now artist-run.
We look at a number of offices being marketed as artist studios, each one a barbarian product of its time. This compound is the place where Honey Nut Cheerios were invented, the tour guide tells us.
We tour a space with antique lab equipment, complete with six sliding glass doors that protect water and gas lines. Smoke residue and ash still behind the doors, I imagine the burners being fired for life to combust products and gather a calorie count.
Another bust.
We then meet for horchata, espresso, and black tea nearby. We talk about the landscape of property available–the conditions, amenities, features.
Everything feels like it might fall apart, save for the layers of reinforcing latex paint covering everything, year after year after year. The locks all jiggle, the door handles are loose. The drywall is turning to powder, there are holes in the ceiling. The adhesives have yellowed.
This is not just the condition of a few of the studios, but the general aesthetic of many of the cheaper buildings and spaces in Minneapolis–or should I say the affordable ones?
How many coats would it take to shrink the room by an inch?
Emma: “Well, what’d you think?”
Lee: “That was interesting…”
Me: “That space in Northeast was kinda cool–kinda clandestine?” I offer. “But the landlordiness…”
Lee: “Doesn’t seem like it would work at all. Plus I was saying as soon as I left there, ‘Are there any businesses that aren’t next to a salon?’ Everything is next to a salon.”
Emma: “There were no salons in there, but there was an aerial studio.”
Lee: “I’m sure there’s a yoga studio somewhere in there.”
The space was still in need of serious repair before any occupants could move in, and the amount of money every space seems to charge out of necessity puts it all out of reach.
Lee: “I think it’s weird that they’re basically just carving up this, like, decrepit, vestigial, industrial building that no longer serves its purpose, and just selling it to artists, you know? It’s so nuts–I think it’s kind of sad. It’s already a museum. We’re already living in a museum… the whole world is a museum.”
Emma: “I mean, it’s too expensive, but I like that they left it like that.”We continue to commiserate, until I ask, “What are you looking for?”
Lee: “A place that doesn’t exist, I think… have you seen the vintage store that’s in an old White Castle on Lyndale?”
Me: “Yeah!”
Lee: “That’s the perfect spot! That’s the idea.” We laugh.
“A tiny 300ft standalone, baby storefront, would be the greatest thing ever.”
Me: “So, are you looking for weird?
Emma: “Yeah. I’m–I’m happy with weird.”
Lee: “I’m totally open. Like, I think I would rent a closet somewhere if it had the right access.”
Jan 24, 6:06 PM
(3 days later)
Emma and Lee text me a listing for a space they just toured in North St. Paul. The space is a tiny storefront shack attached to a house. There’s one bathroom, a parking lot in the back, and direct access to the street.
“It’s perfect,” they say.
We agree to sit down to discuss these new developments, Night Club history, and plans for the future.
Feb 4, 6:45PM – Emma & Lee’s Home
Now in a more intimate setting, we take some time to settle in. Emma tells me, with excitement, how close they are to getting a key to the space. They’ve just signed the lease. It’s locked in.
Night Club has been in operation since 2019, beginning as an after-hours club focused on conceptual art during the pair’s graduate studies at MCAD. Its transformation, due to the pandemic, was partially inspired by the house galleries and garage galleries that necessarily shuttered their doors at the time.
We pause to remember several of our favorite spots: Sadie Halie, Fogstand, Pancake House, and more.
Emma and Lee felt that, due to their unique apartment layout, they could begin to show artwork in their front room. Very briefly Night Club was meant to be open by appointment only, but soon became a place with regular openings.
Sagittarius was the first and last show I saw at Night Club’s iteration at their home. I’m always rallying for this type of experience, even if I don’t particularly like the work that’s on the walls.
I asked them to reminisce briefly about their time showing artwork in their home.
Lee: “The best thing was just hanging out with artwork that we really liked all the time.
Emma: “Yeah, that was so nice.”
Lee: “Just so many different paintings and stuff. We got so much good stuff through here that we really liked, and we were just…[feeling] this is what it would be like if you owned this really expensive thing.”
Emma: “Just sitting here with it, living with it… It’s pretty intense but really, really fun.”
Buoyed by the assistance of a Visual Arts Fund grant in 2021, Night Club was then able to unfurl into more public programming. Through the Downtown Alliance program in St. Paul, they occupied a vacant storefront for the better part of two years.
The space in Lowertown was a barren, street-level unit underneath a parking ramp, which Emma and Lee transformed into a venue that could host a wide range of things: installation, sound, music, projection, sculpture, and visual art. I asked them to recount a few vivid experiences from their time in Lowertown, which included the sound igloo of Metrodome by Nick Chatfeild-Taylor, the compelling performances and religiously maintained installation of Calvin Stalvig, and the sheer amount of bodies that turned out for the inaugural opening in 2023 of Julia Garcia’s exhibition Sawgrass.
Emma: “I mean, it was crazy, the day that Julia’s show opened kind of made me feel like, ‘Wow. Oh my God! What the fuck is going on?’ There were like 300 people there. That was insane! I was not expecting that.”
Lee: “Yeah, the entire time.”
Emma: “People were there before it even opened.”
Lee: “It was so, so many people inside that the windows were foggy.
Emma: “It was wet and dripping.”
The Lowertown gallery (occasionally referred to as 𝒩𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝒞𝓁𝓊𝒷 𝐼𝐼) held 10 shows in total, but Lee and Emma don’t have much of a feeling of ownership over it–only in the facilitation of possibilities, and as hosts to the creative vision taking form.
Emma: “It was nice to experience something that felt like it wasn’t even ours necessarily, it kind of took its own sort of–”
Lee: “It had its own kind of life.”
Emma: “It felt less personal, being out of our home, and that was kind of nice.”
Lee: “I felt like, we just kind of turned it on, and then it ran for a while, magically… We did some shows where we just sort of turned the space over to someone. Not to a person but to like a show.”
If there is any philosophy of Night Club, it is one only of participation. It is something that exists as a product of interest; of collaboration, of being part of a conversation. While on occasion the work might be perceived as confrontational, antagonistic, or–god-forbid–weird, these are not the only markers that make Night Club what it is. Success, for Night Club, is not measured by patrons purchasing artwork. It is the great waft of breath steaming out and down the front window.
North End, St. Paul
Nestled in the North End neighborhood of St. Paul, Night Club now moves up and away from Lowertown. And though the next iteration of Night Club (𝒩𝒾𝑔𝒽𝓉 𝒞𝓁𝓊𝒷 𝐼𝐼𝐼, perhaps?) must exist in a space that can accommodate only a handful of people at a time, the 64 square foot storefront is another opportunity to rethink what we understand as a viewing experience: where art lives, and how to change that relationship.
Emma: “It’s smaller in person.”
We laugh.
I was surprised at the location,” I say.
Lee: “I know… It’s not where we were looking for, but it’s such a kooky, funny space that we were just like, all right, I think that’s it, you know?”
Me: “And you were looking for kooky?”
They both smirk and roll their eyes as they say in unison, “Yeah…”Emma: “I’m excited about it. I can’t believe that we found it.”
Me: “Tell me again how you found it.”
Emma: “I was just looking on Facebook Marketplace and I was messaging a ton of people. It was just one of the few that we looked at. Then I was just looking at the spaces around it, and there’s a Thai restaurant and a weird bar across the street that serves Chinese and Vietnamese food. And a huge grocery store.“
Lee: “Yeah, an Asian grocery store, a laundromat. So it seems like there’s actually stuff on the block.”
Emma: “Oh my gosh and right by a hardware store.”
Lee: “It’s a living breathing neighborhood.” he says with a sigh of relief.
Me: “What kind of installs do you want to do? You said you’re not going to be doing crazy installs.”
Emma: “Well it’s just actually less material.”
Lee: “Just less, but, hopefully, we can get really weird with it.”
Lee: “I think it’s good. It’s gonna make it a lot easier for us to work with different people. Potentially, hopefully, we can reorient what an exhibition constitutes; what it is, or what it can be. We could do more focused shows–like, we could do a show that’s one painting perhaps. Hopefully, that just makes it a lot easier for us to approach artists.”
Emma: “And people we probably couldn’t have worked with before. I think just logistically. And I think I would like to do more solo shows than group shows, just because it’s so limited in that way [the space]. With our other space, we weren’t able to do a solo show with too many people, just because we didn’t have the budget for that–”
Lee: “–and they had to make so much work!”
Emma: “I think we have to completely change what we’ve done in the past…It’s a whole different thing. And I think the way it functions is gonna change drastically–physically, If you think about it–since there can only be like five people max in there at once.“
Lee: “Yeah, it’s not gonna be opening-oriented. We’ll probably still have them… but I think we’re going to need to dispense with that in some way. The restrictions of the space are going to make it so that it’s a more personally-oriented show.”
Emma: “Yeah, it’s not gonna be like a mixer in the gallery.“
Lee: “I want to make it so one person can come and look and take their time with it, you know? And they might even have to drive pretty far to get to it, or whatever. That’s just a reorientation of the kind of scale of what galleries do.”
Emma and Lee are both artists in their own right. Lee has been a part of a few recent group shows and two solo shows at Dreamsong in Northeast. In his work, drawing on vintage horror imagery and terror-inspiring fonts, the grotesque and camp merge into the tension of an awareness-and-bondage-to unease.
Emma has concurrent showings at the Los Angeles Felix Art Fair (helmed by good friends Hair + Nails Gallery) and in New York City. During our conversation at their home we sat beneath her finished work of a lone cheerleader. Pom-poms skyward, smoke curling insidiously around the backs of her knees. In Emma’s work too, tension is present in the composition–illuminated from behind, a circle of fire closes in on the subject, reaching for the burning midwest landscape in the twilight.
We chit-chat about art as the world is on fire; good for us.
When asked about their simultaneous labors, we find that the move to scale down is as much an exciting choice as one born out of necessity.
Emma: “It is very hard to have an additional large project when we’re both working full-time. So this is, I think–”
Lee: “–A modest, manageable project”
Emma: “Yeah, I think this is something that a lot of people could do and it’s not too overwhelming. You know what I mean? I think we just ended up finding the spot that makes the most sense for us at this time. And doing something that is completely opposite of what we had been doing is really exciting.”Averse to self-aggrandizing they suggest we pivot the conversation;
Lee: “We should stop talking about our stupid vision. Like, we don’t have a vision.”
Emma: “Yeah, we’re not doing anything special.”
Lee: “No. Just, we’re doing a modest project.”
Emma: “Shifting, paring down. Yeah.”
Lee: “More recklessness in exhibitions. Ahaha”
Emma: “I think it’s just, we’re just shifting.”
Lee: “Shifting.”
In the North End, you’re in the grip of something much more private–a concentrate, a demi-glace, an incubator, a bouillon cube that blooms in the pan and thickens the broth of the collective consciousness.
Lee: “We’re gonna show what we like, and as I think you know, I like artwork–or I’m interested in showing artwork–or looking at artwork even if I don’t like the piece. It’s more about, ‘oh that is giving me an interesting interaction with the piece.’”
Emma: “A human feeling.”
Night Club exists for its own sake–not in opposition to anything, and also not in support of any other kind of model. It’s like sharing a song, or a playlist with a friend. We get to see the work because they are seeing the work. A gift of sharing, of hosting. While we can’t prognosticate about anything to come, without expectation there can only be successes.
And I find that just being brave enough to say that you like something isn’t a strength embodied by a majority.
Lee: “What is a solo show, you know? Now it’s going to be something different. I mean, it’s not like we’re the first gallery–”
Emma: “–that’s had a really tiny space! Ha.”
Lee: “But, you know, that does change things.”
Night Club‘s new location will open Spring/ Summer 2025.
Emma Beatrez (b. 1995, New Prague, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. They graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2020 with an MFA in Interdisciplinary Visual Studies and received their BFA with an emphasis in painting at North Dakota State University in 2018. Represented by Hair + Nails gallery in Minneapolis, MN.
Lee Noble is a musician and artist from Nashville, TN. His music has been released by labels such as Bathetic, Hands in the Dark, Longform Editions, and Moon Glyph. He has performed at venues and festivals in the US, Europe, and Japan. His second solo exhibition of artwork opened at Dreamsong, Minneapolis in 2023.