After a two-year hiatus from being mainly in-person, the Minnesota Fringe Festival is returning to Minneapolis this summer, running from August 4 to 14. Known for offering an experimental platform for local and national artists, the 29th annual festival will host 595 live performances in 11 days at 11 locations around the city. The festival will feature many different genres of theater including storytelling, comedy, drama, dance, horror, improv, opera, and more.

Just steps from Prince's old haunt, the First Avenue nightclub in downtown Minneapolis, a 97-foot-tall mural of the Minneapolis music icon was unveiled to the public at a “Purple Block Party” on June 2. International artist Hiero Veiga and his assistant Betto pained the new Prince mural on the wall of a parking garage at N. First Avenue and N. Eighth Street. The mural depicts Prince in three phases of his life, based on old photos.

A new show - ‘Back to Workshop, or Everything’s Fine!’ - is an improv comedy show which will run through August. It will be the debut show for Brave New Workshop under the ownership of Hennepin Arts.

The Orpheum Theatre will welcome the show in the fall of 2023 before it makes a national tour. The show was recently nominated for seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical. It debuted on Broadway in 2020 but was paused twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The largest open studio tour in the country will take place May 20-22. 50,000 people are expected to browse art exhibits and demos, take in live music, and enjoy local restaurants and bars.

More than 4,500 fencers from across the country and even international fencers were in town last week for the 2022 USA Fencing National Championships. The event was one of the largest on the convention center’s calendar for this year (in terms of attendance and hotel room nights generated), resulting in a significant and positive impact on the city’s tourism and hospitality businesses and workers. The Summer Nationals featured competitors as young as 7 and as old as 87.

The largest sporting event in the U.S. in 2026 – with 4,000 athletes, 10,000 volunteers, 1,500 coaches, and 75,000 fans – will take place on the University of Minnesota campus and around the Twin Cities. Event organizers estimate the Special Olympics USA Games will bring in $70 million from visitors across North America.

The NCAA Women’s Final Four peaked hotel occupancy rates to 72% on the Friday of the four-day event. According to Meet Minneapolis, this was the 11th highest occupancy rate of any day in 2021 and 2022. The Twin Cities also showed off the ability to host large events over the next few years.

Some of college basketball's best players and teams will be back in Minneapolis soon, coming off the success of the NCAA women's Final Four. The Big Ten women's basketball tournament will be played at Target Center next season, and the conference's men's and women's tournaments will both be there in 2024.

The Minnesota Timberwolves clinched a playoff spot for the first time since 2018 which guarantees at least two exciting home games. Restaurants near the Target Center said it will be all hands on deck to serve the influx of fans for the home games.

The weekly market is open on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. between Sixth and Eighth streets on Nicollet Mall. Small, local businesses will be selling fresh, in-season produce as well as a variety of goods. The Minneapolis Downtown Council has also planned Downtown Thursdays featuring added activities and programming.

Parades, concerts, festivals, trivia nights, movies in the park are back in Minneapolis. Highlights of the summer event calendar include the Twin Cities Pride March, Rock the Garden, the Minneapolis Comedy Festival, the Stone Arch Bridge Festival, Aquatennial, and the Downtown Minneapolis Street Art Festival. Last year, downtown welcomed more than 5 million patrons for major events even as full capacity venues didn’t completely return until fall.

8,000-10,000 people are expected to visit U.S. Bank Stadium for the three-day conference which covers non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the metaverse, and Web3. Celebrities expected to attend the conference include Mila Kunis, Eva Longoria, Steve Aoki, Snoop Dogg, Seth Green, and Pharrell Williams, as well as business executives from major brands.

The weeklong event will take place June 13-19 after a two-year pandemic hiatus. Most shows will take place at The Assembly at the Women’s Club of Minneapolis. Acts include Chris Redd, Maria Bamford, Steve-O, and more.

The Craft Brewers Conference & BrewExpo America took place at the Minneapolis Convention Center May 2-5 and included events across the metro. Almost 10,000 people representing 1,200 craft breweries around the country met to discuss the brewing industry. This presence resulted in an estimated $12 million in local economic impact.

Livability.com ranks Minneapolis 6th, outpacing more than 2,000 cities with populations between 20,000 and 500,000 in this data-driven ranking. The website ranks the cities based on amenities, the economy, demographics, housing, social and civic capital, education, health care, transportation and infrastructure, remote-readiness and a survey of over 1,000 adults. Highlights of the Minneapolis’ grades were its scores in the economy and health.

Jervis White Jr., along with his fiancé Catherine Bigham, runs two businesses in Minneapolis: a food pop-up called Papa J’s Kitchen and Goods, and Black Roots Sauce and Seasoning, an online retailer for spices and cooking supplies. White hopes to one day expand the Papa J’s brand to include a nonprofit called Papa J’s Kiddos, which would host free feeds for families. He is also looking to start a Papa J’s food truck in the future.

North Minneapolis community members met late last month to discuss the future of a year-round swimming and youth development center – the V3 Center. The center will feature an Olympic-sized 50-meter pool, a 25-yard training pool, multi-purpose courts, a running/biking track, a fitness and community gathering space, business storefronts, drop-in childcare, and educational rooms. V3 Sports is the nonprofit organization founded by Erika Binger, an athlete who worked as the first female athletic director at the Jack Cornelius Boys & Girls Club in Minneapolis.

Sarah “Fancy” Lanier-Duncan and Emmanuel “Envy” Duncan – known musically as hip-hop duo iLLism – recently expanded their horizons by launching a creative space for the community. The married couple of 10 years launched The Legacy Building located in South Minneapolis. The Legacy Building includes a vocal recording studio, a rehearsal space, photo/video studio space, and a designated storefront area that will host pop-up shops.

Anissa Keyes may have bought a historic north Minneapolis building with the goal of creating an incubator for Black-owned businesses, but her vision reaches well beyond that.

The “Iron Chef America” champion will open Northern Soul on the rooftop level of the new Ties Lounge complex on Nicollet Mall. The seasonal eatery will open as an all-day menu of breakfast, lunch and dinner with cocktails and a downtown view. Up next for Sutherland will be the first Twin Cities location for his burgeoning egg sandwich chain, Big E’s, inside the Moxy Minneapolis Uptown hotel.

Hunter operates the Twin Cities' first Black-owned plant-based restaurant, Trio Plant-Based, while Jackson is the owner of the plant-based pop-up, Keiko’s Kitchen, specializing in Southern-inspired vegan comfort food. Hunter and Jackson want to give back to the Black community while pushing culinary boundaries to diversify the world of plant-based eating.

Tacos El Primo, begun in Fernando Aguilar Ramirez’s family kitchen, has one permanent food truck at 1405 E. Lake St. and a restaurant at 3909 Minnehaha Ave. Tacos El Primo has a second food truck for catering and party events, and Ramirez is working on a third—a process that takes time because he designs and outfits the trucks himself.

Owamni in Minneapolis named best new restaurant at James Beard AwardsThe award marks the first competitive win in a national category for a Minnesota restaurant. Owamni opened in 2021 to national acclaim and is the centerpiece of the newly developed Water Works Park, which is owned by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and is located on a site sacred to the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. Co-owner Sean Sherman was previously recognized as a cookbook author, and he received a James Beard Leadership Award in 2019.

Local industry veterans have teamed up to reimagine the Old Arizona building at 2821 Nicollet into Eat Street Crossing. The food hall will hold six unique concepts, each with its own identity and look, but instead of bringing outside vendors in, the partners will be creating the food stalls. Along with the six counter-service food stalls, there will be indoor and outdoor seating, event space, and a full bar and beverage program.

JADT Development Group is moving ahead with plans to construct the third phase of its Satori Village mixed-use development in Minneapolis. Led by former Minnesota Vikings defensive back Tim Baylor, Minneapolis-based JADT intends to construct a five-story senior living apartment with 78 just northwest of downtown. The $68 million Satori Village project will also bring a six-story apartment building with over 10 units as well as a four-story loft building with around 20 units and ground-floor retail space.

If approved, the Park Board would sell the carbon-sequestering power of its urban forest to corporations in order to grow the canopy in parts of the city with fewer trees.

A new dual-branded hotel has opened in the former Soo Line Railroad headquarters in downtown Minneapolis. Hawkeye Hotels and Bloomington-based JR Hospitality led the conversion and opening of the eight-story hotel, 203-key hotel.

Up first for the restaurateur and chef is Bar Rufus, a classic French reworking of the ground-floor lobby bar at the Rand Tower Hotel. Later this summer, del Prado will open two more spaces on the hotel’s fifth floor: a large cocktail lounge and terrace called Miaou Miaou, and a restaurant under a retractable roof called Blondette. All three concepts are loosely French-inspired and become increasingly more modern as guests move upstairs.

Target Center’s calendar is filling up fast, putting the downtown Minneapolis venue on pace for its busiest year since at least 2018. Venue manager ASM Global is seeing increased action from non-sports events as entertainers are hitting the road in droves this year after being sidelined because of COVID-19 for much of 2020 and 2021. By the end of the year, Target Center should host between 50-55 events.