About the People's Museum
A community counter-museum honoring Prince Rogers Nelson.
First presented in 2018 at Solar Arts Building, Minneapolis — where we welcomed 3,000 visitors in one weekend.
The 2026 edition was presented in North Minneapolis, Prince's childhood neighborhood, at Roberts Gallery, 2400 Plymouth Ave N, across the road from Prince's teenage home, with additional exhibitions and programs at the Capri Theater and ColorWheel Gallery. We welcomed hundreds of people to the museum in June 2026. Hundreds participated in our extensive program offerings throughout Prince's birthday month, including in film, art, music, community, family and memory-sharing events.
Free participation, free admission always.
The People's Museum for Prince is a nomadic experimental museum, inspired by the deep, sustained public mourning for Prince, and created to honor the artist Prince Rogers Nelson and his transformational impact on many lives across the world over the past four decades. Collecting stories, artwork and other personal and biographical artifacts, the museum presents a new kind of portrait of the artist via the hearts and minds of his audience. The museum also conducts and presents historical and artistic research on Prince's life and work, as part of its educational mission to deepen public understanding of Prince's legacy and his unique boundary-crossing contributions to the arts.
A Museum Without Walls
The People's Museum for Prince is not (yet) a physical museum. Currently it manifests as temporary exhibitions, in Minneapolis and soon in other Prince cities. Ideally, it may find a permanent home in Minneapolis where it can house and exhibit a living archive of Prince stories, art and artifacts, host ongoing independent and creative research, and, as a place of community welcome, serve as an active resource for Prince visitors and researchers from all over the world.
How We Work
The People's Museum for Prince uses an original participatory curation model in which community members are the primary authors of the exhibition. Rather than presenting an institutional account of Prince's life and work, the museum collects personal testimony — stories, artworks, objects, memories — and treats each contribution as evidence of something real: the way an artist can live inside a person's life for decades, shaping how they understand themselves and the world. We believe collective testimony can be a powerful source of living history and an active contributor to an artist's legacy.
Counter-museum
We use the term counter-museum to help people understand we have a different approach to a regular institution.
The People's Museum is deliberately positioned outside the structures that typically govern who gets to speak about an artist's legacy. Here, the people whose lives were touched by Prince are not positioned as passive consumers with limited agency — as fans so often are. We believe the audience's perspectives, their voices, their experiences of the artist matter deeply, and together they add up to something no single account could: a collective portrait of the artist and why he mattered to so many.
Radical inclusion within professional standards is the methodology: every contribution matters, and every contribution is held with care.
Paisley Park & the Prince Estate
We have great respect for Prince's legacy, in all its forms and expressions. Whilst the People's Museum for Prince has no affiliation or connection with the Prince estate, we honor its work and are grateful Paisley Park remains open as a museum to preserve Prince's home and studio. It will always be the epicenter of all things Prince. Paisley Park is forever in our hearts.
Why Art Matters
Stories and art form the heart of the museum that celebrates the multidimensional impact of one artist on many lives. The museum is founded on the belief of the power of art to sustain, heal, inspire and transform us. We honor Prince by honoring the creative spirit in all people, from all over the world, from professional to self-taught artists, from public, celebrated artists to private artists who may have never shared their work before. We believe in the power of creative testimony.
Scholarship & Research
The People's Museum for Prince is grounded in original research into Prince Rogers Nelson's life, community, and impact. You can read more about the research here.
Sustaining the Museum
The People's Museum has no building to maintain — that's by design. Our costs are modest: space, materials, the infrastructure that keeps the project alive between editions. To date the museum has received no institutional funding and operates entirely through in-kind support, volunteer time, and the generosity of the community it serves.
There are many ways to support this project — sharing your story or artwork, volunteering in person during the June exhibition, or spreading the word. If you'd like to contribute financially, the museum has an open door at Support the Museum — and every contributor receives a Houses of Prince poster as our thank-you.
Bring the Museum to Your City
We would love to bring The People's Museum to other Prince communities beyond Minneapolis. We bring the curatorial framework and growing archive from previous editions, and work with your local Prince community to gather new stories, artwork, and testimony. Every contribution joins the living archive, connecting communities across Prince cities and building a collective portrait that grows with each edition.
This approach honors both the uniqueness of each city's relationship to Prince and the power of collective testimony. Minneapolis and diverse international stories and art can travel to other Prince cities, and those cities' voices join the archive in turn. The museum grows through partnership.
We welcome inquiries from venues, arts organisations, and cultural institutions interested in hosting or co-presenting future editions of The People's Museum for Prince, or in supporting its work. The museum is designed to travel — to other Prince cities, to communities with their own stories to tell.
