This installation of art from the M’s permanent collection, the first in the renovated galleries, fulfills a promise for an expanded and increasingly more diverse M. For the first time in history, the museum can present a wide range of artworks in ever-shifting configurations that highlight the collection’s strengths and make unexpected connections across materials and time.
Artists have always been central to the M, which has its origins in 1882 as the Art Workers’ Guild of Saint Paul. Eventually it became a school of art and in 1927 started a teaching collection for the benefit of art students. In the heart of Saint Paul and embracing the creative energy of all of the Twin Cities, these galleries highlight what makes up the museum. Here the past and the future share space, as we grow our community.
This inaugural presentation of the collection is arranged to emphasize how we connect. Each section of the installation is devoted to a way we relate to one another.
We connect through relationships.
We connect through the cosmos.
We connect through the land.
We connect where we live.
We connect in imagination.
Starting in the first room and winding around the Cass Gilbert Arcade and its interior galleries, these artworks enact conversations, performing a call and response with each other. The M exists because artists are compelled to make, express, document, stand up, speak up, and show their communities. The room you begin in offers an opportunity to meet people represented in the collection—artists and their subjects. Consider this gallery a gathering that welcomes you, inviting you to look and be seen and to ask questions about the relationships between self-portraits and portrait-making.
We connect to one another across communities and across time, uniting generations and sharing traditions. We amplify our love when we get together to know who we are and where we came from—how we landed here at this moment, how we get to where we are going, and where we want to guide the future. Through the land we steward, the neighborhoods we love, and the future we dream of, we are interconnected and depend on each other to make a better world. Artists have always shown us what is possible.
George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919–2000) was an innovative and restlessly curious artist who thrived on meeting new people and exchanging ideas with other artists. He began his career in Minnesota, then worked in New York; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Dayton, Ohio; and Providence, Rhode Island. Minnesota, and specifically the north shore of what the Ojibwe call gichi-gami or Great Sea (Lake Superior), remained his spiritual center. He returned to the state in 1970 to teach in the newly founded American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota.
In the Morrison room we can experience ways of seeing through Morrison’s methods. The Minnesota Museum of American Art had a long relationship with George Morrison and has the most comprehensive public collection of his art. The works on paper in this room are arranged in groups and pairs so that viewers can appreciate how he would approach drawing and painting with similar marks or materials but create variations by changing the quality of a line, the rapidity of strokes, or the brush he used. Although Morrison might be inspired by something outside in nature, his process was often improvisatory, leading to discoveries during artmaking.
The underlying image in much of Morrison’s art is Lake Superior: it was a fundamental reference point that grounded him, bonding his relationship to the cosmos and to creativity. Its horizon line, often in the upper third of a drawing, painting, or wood construction, appears unexpected places, as in meticulously crafted drawings where lines dazzlingly proliferate, like weaving. It is the charged place where everything comes together.
Minnesota Museum of American Art
350 Robert Street North
St. Paul, MN 55101
Located in the Historic Pioneer Endicott
Office: 651.797.2571
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