By: Mateo Landayan
Art can feel like something you have to travel somewhere else to experience. Museums, galleries, expensive tickets, and my dad’s classic “I’ll go next weekend” excuse can make local art incredibly easy to overlook. But every fall, The Fargo-Moorhead Visual Artists Studio crawl becomes one of the busiest weekends for local art, bringing artists out of their galleries and into their studios.
The Studio Crawl is a free two-day event where artists across the Fargo-Moorhead area open their studios to the public. The events take place October 4 and 5 from noon to 6 pm, giving visitors the chance to see artists working, demonstrate their techniques, and talk about their creative process.
According to FMVA, the event began in 2004 with just 24 studios. Since then, it has grown into a regional art event connecting established artists, newer creators, and the community.
The 2025 event also marked a change for FMVA. Longtime studio crawl director Jon Offutt announced his retirement after the event following years of helping organize and grow the program. FMVA recognized his work in its 2025 brochure and described his impact on the organization and its artists.
Offutt is also an artist himself. His work includes blown glass vessels created through his studio House of Mulciber. He also travelled throughout the region with a mobile glassblowing studio that gives people the opportunity to watch the process happen in front of them.
Other artists have brought their own unusual studios into the Crawl over the years. Karman Rheault once invited visitors into a 100 year old granary named Snowfire Studio to watch metal sculpture being created before walking over to a home gallery and outdoor sculpture garden.
For visitors, the Studio Crawl offers plenty to look at, and probably a few opportunities to realize that “I could probably make that in a couple days” is way easier to say than actually doing it. Artists demonstrate their work, discuss their techniques, and bring visitors into their creative spaces. FMVA requires artists to be present and demonstrate their work throughout the event.
The studio crawl continues to give Fargo Moorhead artists a way to put their work into their community. With studio demos and plenty of art packed into one weekend, it turns the local creative scene into something people can actually walk through, one studio at a time.
