A Street-Level Gallery Where Artists Set the Rules
You're walking through Lowertown Saint Paul, past the Northern Warehouse Artists' Cooperative—a six-story brick edifice built in 1908 by Northern Pacific Railway and converted into one of the country's earliest artist live-work spaces in 1989. At street level, light spills from a storefront window. Step inside Burl Gallery (formerly AZ Gallery), and you enter a space founded in 1997 as an artist co-op that operates on a radical premise: no submission fees, no commissions on sales, no gatekeeping about medium or content. What you see on the walls reflects work from artists at any stage of their practice, selected through an open, equity-first process that has engaged roughly 900 artists over the gallery's lifetime.
Work by Artists Who Aren't Filtered Through Institutional Hierarchies
The gallery's permanent exhibits rotate, but they share a common thread: they come from artists who might otherwise find barriers to showing their work elsewhere. Burl Gallery operates as a women-led nonprofit with a deliberate mission to remove friction from participation. You'll encounter paintings, sculpture, photography, video, textiles, and hybrid media from emerging practitioners, mid-career artists, and established figures working outside conventional gallery circuits. The selection reflects no aesthetic orthodoxy, no preference for certain materials or subject matter. What matters is access and representation.
When to Go and What to Know Before You Visit
The gallery sits at street level in the Northern Warehouse Artists' Cooperative, near CHS Field and the Saint Paul Farmer's Market in Lowertown. Because the space is run by and for artists, hours and programming evolve with the community that uses it. Before visiting, confirm current hours online or by phone. Plan to spend thirty minutes to an hour, depending on the scale of the current exhibition. Admission is free. The neighborhood itself—Lowertown—contains other galleries and artist studios within walking distance, making it worth treating as a browsing destination rather than a single-stop visit.
Nearby in Saint Paul
The Minnesota Museum of American Art maintains a Project Space at 332 N Robert Street in Lowertown, also featuring rotating exhibits and free admission. The Science Museum of Minnesota and Minnesota History Center both overlook the Mississippi River from West Kellogg Boulevard, a short drive or bus ride away. If you're exploring Saint Paul's cultural landscape more broadly, the Landmark Center (at 75 W 5th Street) houses galleries and exhibits in a restored federal courthouse and post office building.
Start planning your visit to Burl Gallery as part of a Lowertown walk. The gallery's commitment to open access means you're never turning away from a gatekeeper; you're entering a working artist community that built its own space and continues to define what exhibition can be.