A dazzling new addition to downtown St. Paul’s art scene

What was once a state-of-the-art shopping arcade has become a glimmering new hall of art, as part of the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s major expansion designed by VJAA Architects. 

Artwork gleams under the yellow light of the ceiling’s stained glass, designed for the original St. Paul building by architect Cass Gilbert about 134 years ago. Rabbett Before Horses Strickland’s “Path to Manitouweh,” (2023), an epic painting depicting mythic warriors atop a craggy golden peak, gets an extra sparkle from the glow of the stained glass.

Gilbert’s ornate design gives a sense of grandeur to the M’s permanent collection, on view as part of the exhibition “Here, Now.” The show takes up the newly renovated arcade space as well as the entirety of the museum’s new wing. In all, there’s three times more gallery space than the museum previously had for exhibitions. 

Once a center of commerce in downtown St. Paul, the Pioneer Endicott perhaps recalls those days of splendor with the M’s new renovation. Walking through the galleries, you’ll get a sense of the depth of the M’s collection, presented with the alluring structure of a beautiful historic building.

As originally envisioned, the arcade was modeled after covered shopping corridors in Paris and other places in Europe that were lined with bustling shops and lit with natural light from above. 

The M’s arcade isn’t lit with natural light, though. Instead, the museum has installed LED lights above the glass, along with a film to diffuse rays through each of the 420 windows, in turn made of about 100 small pieces. 

“The lighting was an adventure, I’ll say that,” said Dr. Kate Beane, the M’s executive director. The M tapped Stonehouse Stained Glass, based in Avon, Minn., to do the painstaking restoration work. The result is a glowing majesty emanating down on the work of artists like Frances Yellow, Frank Big Bear, Wing Young Huie and Miriam Schapiro. 

“We’ve been a little busy,” Beane said. She took the reins at the end of 2021, when renovation plans had been stalled for a variety of reasons, not the least of which were the COVID-19 pandemic and a leadership ouster. Begun first as a project space in 2013, the M launched phase 1 of its renovation of the Pioneer Endicott building complex back in 2018. 

Both the museum’s and the building’s histories go back long before that, just before the turn of the 20th century. 

“Both of these buildings were really created around the same time as our organization was founded,” Beane said. “We like to show the connections between the past and the present, between historic and modern, and to show the ways in which these things can be in conversation in really beautiful ways.” 

The museum and the buildings have rather long and winding histories.

The Pioneer Endicott is actually three different buildings — the Pioneer, built in 1889 by Solon Spencer Beman, and the Endicott, which is two buildings designed by Gilbert and James Knox Taylor, built in an L shape around the Pioneer. Sometime around the 1950s, the stained glass in the arcade was covered up, only to be rediscovered in the 1980s. 

As for the M, it began in 1894 as the St. Paul School of Fine arts, and its many names have included the St. Paul Institute of Art and Science, the St. Paul Gallery and School of Art, the St. Paul Art Center, the Minnesota Museum of Art and finally the Minnesota Museum of American Art, moving numerous times to different locations over the years, and facing financial challenges along the way. 

Beane came to the M after serving on the leadership team at the Minnesota Historical Society, where she was director of Native American initiatives. She was a major player in renaming Bde Maka Ska, and also served on the committee to choose Minnesota’s new state flag design. 

Part of Beane’s focus at the M has been on bolstering underrepresented voices. “As we triple the gallery space, we were really thinking about, what is the diverse representation of the state of Minnesota?” she said. “Where are the gaps in our collection?” 

In Beane’s time with the M, she’s been making acquisitions, with an eye toward collecting works by groups that make up the Minnesota community but didn’t figure into the work the museum owned.

In fact, Beane acquired the first piece of art by a Dakota artist the M has in its collection. It’s a painting called “Smile Now, Cry Later,” by Avis Charley. Beane saw it at the Santa Fe Indian Art Market, and identified with the image of a professional Native woman, who is “essentially trying to exude this level of confidence while at the same time understanding that there’s a lot of work left to do in the world,” Beane said.  

Kylie Linh Hoang, assistant curator at the M, said she prefers using the phrase “historically excluded,” rather than “underrepresented.” 

“That shows the intention of what was happening in these spaces,” Hoang said.  

Hoang worked with guest curator Robert Cozzolino, who joined the team in March, on “Here, Now.” Also supporting the curation was the M’s former curator and director of exhibitions Laura Wertheim Joseph, who has since moved on to a new role at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, as well as Ben Gessner, who is taking on Joseph’s previous role on an interim basis. 

The idea of connections carries through the different sections of the exhibition. The first room focuses on the people who make up the M’s collection highlighted through portraiture. Other sections focus on connection to the cosmos, to land, to home, and to the imagination through abstraction, concluding with a room devoted to Ojibwe painter and sculptor George Morrison. 

Throughout, the exhibition creates dialogue between disparate artists. Wanda Gág co-mingles with Stuart Davis in one moment. In another, Floyd E. Brewer’s painting of Minnesota’s seasons connects to a Clement Haupers’ work through their mutual homage to ice palaces at the St. Paul Winter Carnival. At the end of the arcade, paintings by Frank Gaard and Herbert Bayer look splendid on each side of Judy Onofrio’s audacious “Deep Water” sculpture.

“We are really interested in connections across time, across cultures, across community,” Beane said. “And I think that those sort of connections are really imperative for us in this day and age, to understand the ways in which we can be in conversation with one another and not be divided from one another.”

Cozzolino said he often thinks musically when he’s curating a show. “There’s a lot of call and response between objects that have been set up in these different groups,” he said. “One of the wonderful things about discovering and rediscovering the M collection, I think, for the public, but also for me, is just seeing these cross-generational relationships — how things that don’t seem to have anything in common on paper do when they’re in the same room together.”

“Here, Now” opened at the M on Oct. 17. The museum will host an open house from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Oct. 26. More information here.

Sheila Regan

Sheila Regan is a Twin Cities-based arts journalist. She writes MinnPost’s twice-weekly Artscape column. She can be reached at sregan@minnpost.com.

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