Photo: Jahna Peloquin
Nearly two decades after its founding, Spinario Design officially closes its doors this weekend with an everything-must-go sale. The design gallery, founded by longtime vintage and antiques appraiser Peter Dyste in 1996, has specialized in mid-century modern furniture, Scandinavian design, high-quality vintage designer furnishings, imported antiques, original art, and unique objects and oddities culled from every corner of the world.
The sale features 3,200 square feet of items for sale, many of which had never previously been available for sale on the Spinario floor—including a large number of items that had remained in Dyste’s personal collection and storage spaces for decades. Dyste says the sale’s pièce de résistance is an original painting by Grace Hartigan, an American Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School who exhibited alongside Jackson Pollack in the ’50s and ’60s, priced at $6,000. (“Like so many women artists, she never received the level of success that men did,” says Dyste. “She’s every bit as important.”) Other highlights include an ancient Egyptian necklace from the original T.B. Walker collection, marble busts, a tribal statue from Papua New Guinea, figures from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, antique 19th-century dark oak Renaissance revival four-post barley twist canopy bed, a pair of turn-of-the-century carved Hongmu Chinese chairs with marble, a Hawaiian war god figure that a flight attendant brought back from Hawaii in the ’60s, taxidermy animal busts, plus hundreds of pieces of artwork, tons of leather-bound books, vintage Gucci luggage, and hundreds of (mostly classical) records. (View an extensive list of more items available for purchase during the sale at estatesales.net.)
“I’ve done this for 40 years,” explains Dyste on the closing. “I’m just tired of having all this stuff, and I want to not work 80 hours a week. I want to work 10 to 20 hours a week and travel. So I don’t have to spend winters in Minnesota, necessarily.” As for his future plans, Dyste will still do appraisals, and will handle a very limited number of consignments, mainly to place things for people at auctions and sell items online.
Spinario Design technically started when Dyste first signed up for an eBay account around the year 1998. “I was looking at this bronze sculpture I had and that became the name,” he says, referring to “Spinario (Boy Pulling a Thorn from His Foot).” But Dyste has been collecting and selling his vintage and antique finds for the past four decades. He first rented space in the ’80s in what was called Great River Antiques, and later became River Walk (the space is now home to Martin Patrick 3 in the North Loop). Later, he got a basement space on Hennepin Avenue and 27th Street in Uptown with Minneapolis painter Caitlin Karolczak. The pair moved to Grain Belt Bottling House, where they had both storage space for Spinario and a painting studio for Karolczak. From there, they moved to 1300 NE 2nd Street (now home to Dangerous Man Brewing), and in 2012, Spinario moved to its most recent location, at 3338 University Avenue SE in Prospect Park in Minneapolis.
The closing sale runs 9 a.m.-4 p.m. daily from Saturday, October 15 to Monday, October 17 at 3338 University Ave., SE., Minneapolis. Numbers will be given on Saturday at 7:30 a.m. All items under $50 will be 50% off on the second day of the sale, and 70% off on the final day. Anything over $50 will be 30% off on the second day and 50% off on the final day.
Here’s a first look into some choice pieces that will be available at the sale:
Original painting by Grace Hartigan
Tribal statue from Papua New Guinea
An ancient Egyptian necklace from the original T.B. Walker collection
Hawaiian war god figure
by Jahna Peloquin
