PHOTOS: Children's Gallery Opens at Fridley Dunn Bros. Coffee

Customers can enjoy children's art with their coffee drinks through October at in Fridley.

Spoiler alert: The creature crawling above the doorway to the restrooms is a worm, not a caterpillar. So says its three-year-old creator, Byrd Lenzen of Fridley.

The worm sculpture and other artwork on the cafe's walls represents the efforts of about 17 artists from 13 families living in Fridley, Blaine and northeast Minneapolis. The artists range in age from 15 months to 15 years. Their art is in a variety of media: photographs, textile, paintings and drawings.

Friends and family and other fans of the artists came out for an opening reception Saturday morning to see what they had been working on all summer. The patrons of the arts present included Fridley Mayor Scott Lund.

The Fridley Dunn Bros. Coffee has displayed local artists’ works over the years. Steve Gudim, owner of the Fridley Dunn Bros. Coffee, saw third-grader Anna Meisner in the shop drawing one morning and got the idea for a children's art show. Anna's mother () Mandy Meisner knew of several other young artists and offered to organize the exhibit.  

A key volunteer was Teresa Lenzen, Byrd's mother, who commuutes from Fridley to her job as exhibition preparator at Carleton College's in Northfield, MN. She hung the show at Dunn Bros.—drawing on 13 years of experience doing the same at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.