In a city with three months of summer and nine of everything else, we plan around the calendar more than most places. The State Fair is a regional anchor. Art-A-Whirl is a full Northeast neighborhood opening its studios at once. Twin Cities Pride is one of the largest in the country. Winter Carnival is older than the modern Olympics. Here is the year, in order.
A juried art fair held on the Stone Arch Bridge and along the Mississippi riverfront, with a music stage, food, and one of the most genuinely beautiful settings of any art fair in the country. Free.
Three days of free jazz on multiple stages in downtown St. Paul, anchored at Mears Park. Local headliners, national touring acts, and a downtown that fills up with people listening to live music. Free.
One of the largest Pride festivals in the country, with the festival in Loring Park and the Sunday parade running through downtown. A real civic event the entire city participates in, regardless of identity. Free.
A celebration of St. Paul’s historic Rondo neighborhood, the African American community whose heart was destroyed by the construction of I-94 in the 1950s. The festival commemorates the neighborhood that was and the community that endures, with a parade, food, music, and a deep historical exhibition.
A Minneapolis civic festival that has been running since 1940. Block parties, a torchlight parade, milk-carton boat races on Lake Bde Maka Ska, and a Saturday-night fireworks show over the Mississippi. The kind of summer festival that has shaped a city’s sense of itself.
A juried art fair that wraps around Powderhorn Park, with the South Minneapolis lake at the center. More artists, more affordably priced work, and a less corporate feel than the bigger Uptown Art Fair the same weekend. Free.
A 60-year-old juried art fair that fills the streets around Hennepin and Lake. Three hundred artists, blocks of food, two music stages, and the largest crowd of any Twin Cities art fair. Same weekend as Powderhorn, which means most people do both.
Eleven days of independent theater, comedy, dance, and performance across a dozen venues, mostly in Minneapolis. Tickets are cheap, the lottery-curated programming guarantees variety, and the festival is one of the largest non-juried performance festivals in the country.
A series of Sunday street festivals where a major Minneapolis avenue closes to cars and opens to pedestrians, cyclists, food vendors, and live music. Different neighborhoods host throughout the summer. The closest the city gets to a regular European-style streetscape.
The largest state fair in the country by daily attendance and the second-largest by total. Twelve days, almost two million people, and a calendar of food-on-a-stick, livestock barns, grandstand acts, the Miracle of Birth, the butter heads, and a sense of regional ritual that is genuinely hard to overstate. The fair is the centerpiece of the Minnesota year.
Older than the modern Olympic Games. Began in 1886 as a response to a New York reporter calling St. Paul "another Siberia, unfit for human habitation." More than a century of ice palaces, Vulcanus Rex parades, and a thoroughly bonkers civic mythology involving fire and ice gods. One of the great American winter festivals.
A ten-day cultural festival celebrating winter, climate, and the life people make in cold places. Programming reaches across both cities, from outdoor light installations to indoor lectures to a winter cycling event on a frozen lake. The festival that explains what living here in February is actually about.
A weekend cross-country ski festival in Theodore Wirth Park, with races, lantern-lit night skis, and an unreasonable amount of community spirit. One of the largest urban Nordic ski festivals in the country.
A six-weekend holiday market and festival in Loring Park, with a German-Christmas-market layout, ice skating, fire pits, and the city’s most concentrated dose of seasonal cheer. Free entry, frequent live music, and a warming tent that is the entire point on cold nights.
A community-built parade and Powderhorn Park festival run for decades by In the Heart of the Beast Puppet Theatre. Massive papier-mâché puppets, free, and one of the most genuinely Minneapolis events in the calendar. The parade route fills the streets of Powderhorn with thousands of neighbors.
The largest open-studio tour in the country, run by the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association. For one weekend in May, hundreds of artists open their working studios across Northeast. Free, walkable, and one of the best snapshots of the city’s actual creative life. Bring cash.