For the past year, I’ve spent every Thursday locked into an abandoned bank vault with thousands of Prince artifacts, attempting to piece together stories about the immense impact of our hometown hero through arrangements of photos, posters, newspaper clippings, purple drapery, and easels. So, so many easels.
Much like Dayton’s put together window displays each winter to get shoppers in the holiday spirit, a small team of us had been tasked with Prince-ifying empty storefronts and windows ahead of the pre-Broadway premiere of Purple Rain, the new musical inspired by Prince’s iconic soundtrack and film that made its debut on October 16.
The idea for the displays was born last fall, when Tim Carroll, an archivist and preservation society manager for Hennepin Arts, stopped by the Michaels store in the Quarry to have a Revolution poster framed. “Huh, more Prince,” sighed Dierdre, the woman behind the counter. She told Carroll that she had a client named Rich who was constantly flooding her framing shop with Prince pictures and artifacts and that he’d just dropped off another item to be framed 20 minutes prior to his visit.
Carroll left Dierdre his information on a Post-it, and a collaboration between Hennepin Arts and Rich Benson was born. Carroll asked Benson if he’d like to show some of his collection in an empty window near the State Theatre, where Purple Rain was set to debut, and they invited me to help curate the items. But as soon as we rolled up to Benson’s storage locker and began moving things into our former bank-turned-impromptu Prince vault at LaSalle Plaza, it became clear that a single window wouldn’t be enough—and that Benson had spent the past three decades amassing the largest collection of anything, let alone Prince memorabilia, we had ever seen.
There were stacks of posters, crates of vinyl, and photographs of Prince in every era, many of which were purchased directly from local photographers. There was fan art, much of it made since Prince passed. And there were binders upon binders of newspaper and magazine clippings, each spanning a single year of Prince’s career.
Benson told us that he fell in love with newsprint as a child, when he got his first job delivering papers and used his earnings to buy Prince records. His passion for collecting accelerated when he acquired a remarkable set of meticulously stored newspaper clippings about Prince from a longtime fan and felt inspired to carry on her work.
I first met Benson when I became a regular at Paisley Park in the 2010s, and at some of the last-minute shows, it would often be just me, Benson, and a few dozen others watching Prince perform on the Paisley stage. Benson started frequenting Paisley in the ’90s, when he first moved to the Twin Cities. He’s seen Prince live a whopping 127 times.
Even knowing Benson’s dedication as a fan—he’s the type of guy who can rattle off the date, venue, and set list for any Prince show and tell you what he was wearing on stage—it was still mind-blowing to see him unpack his collection. Much of it arrived at the workroom in a U-Haul, but each week he somehow managed to bring another poster, another framed object that he had lovingly stowed away. He’s more than a collector of these objects. He’s their caretaker.
“Like I’ve said all along, these are my babies,” Benson said, cradling a previously unseen print of Prince on the Lovesexy Tour that he bought from local photographer Tommy Smith III. When we mentioned we might want to display his Diamonds and Pearls poster, he added he has another mint condition one that’s never even been unrolled.
“I’m glad my collection is getting out from the shadows of storage,” he said. “These are my kids, and they’re running free now. I think it would make Prince proud that his history is being shown in a unique way—free of contracts, free of lawyers, free to the world.”
As a public art installation, the entire exhibit is accessible to all who wander past. For Carroll, the beauty of the collaboration was that it not only filled empty storefronts but put these rare objects on view for everyone. “What Rich has done in collecting this massive archive is an art form,” Carroll said. “And it gives our organization a deep sense of purpose when we are fulfilling our mission of supporting artists and creating educational devices.”
Remembering the Purple One: The Rich Benson Collection is now on view across seven windows on the ground and skyway levels of LaSalle Plaza (the building that houses the State Theatre), with additional pop-ups and installations appearing at the Meet Minneapolis Visitor Center, Gaviidae Common, and other downtown locales.
Remembering the Purple One: The Rich Benson Collection is presented by Hennepin Arts in partnership with The Minnesota Star Tribune and Target at LaSalle Plaza, 800 LaSalle Ave., through December 31, 2025.