Photographs by Caitlin Abrams
Kristin Makholm, director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art
The M’s executive director, Kristin Makholm
On December 2, at 11 am, the Minnesota Museum of American Art opened its doors to visitors. This event is notable partly because the museum hasn’t admitted any visitors—or possessed any doors to open—since early 2009, when the financially strapped organization abandoned its exhibition space, stashed the art in storage, and practically dissolved for good. Now, contemporary and historical artwork by stars from Wing Young Huie to Paul Manship will line the walls of the historic Pioneer-Endicott Building, in downtown St. Paul. How did it get there? It’s quite a tale.
***
The year: 2009.
The place: a free carrel in the grand old James J. Hill Business Library.
The tenant: an administrator with an art history degree, a personal cell phone, a laptop, and a mission to save something much of the state had given up for dead.
Our carrel dweller? Kristin Makholm, then the newly appointed director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art. Makholm had grown up in Milwaukee, and moved here with her then-husband in 1986 to raise their family. Her most public-facing job until then involved running the galleries at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. When the M, which is what the museum wants to be called now, approached her about taking over the organization, her friends told her, in short, What are you, nuts?
The museum was widely known to be in full crisis mode. After decades of difficulties, it had sold off two-thirds of its art and vacated its galleries. All that remained was a storage area full of Minnesota’s cultural patrimony, the security and insurance bills to cover said storage, a nonprofit board, and a few loyal donors.
True, the holdings in that storage unit were treasure almost beyond value: thousands of paintings, sculptures, craftworks, and more, created by artists either famous today or likely to become famous in the future. It was as if Minnesota possessed one wealthy aunt, and her mansion full of treasures represented our inheritance. But the mansion was gone, and the treasure relegated to a vault.
Against the advice of friends, Makholm took the job. “I had two little kids, and I was divorced,” she says. “I wasn’t able to move. I guess I also thought: If not me, who will do it?”
Now, the mere existence of a public art inheritance, in the form of a museum, doesn’t mean it will be passed on to the rightful heirs. Just ask the people of Fresno, California, whose Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art & Science closed in the first days of 2010, joining some 20 other American museums that fell victim to the Great Recession. Museums die. The Fresno collection hit the auction block at Sotheby’s the following September, and fanned out to millionaires’ homes around the globe. For the M, obsolescence was plan B.
Fancy new museum signage
Fancy new museum signage
“Every day, I’d just go to my carrel, and start calling people,” says Makholm. “I’d say, ‘I have some ideas—would you like to listen?’ I’m a curator and an art historian. I’ve got this collection of 4,000 works of art. It has to stay together. I didn’t have a business degree. I didn’t know how to fundraise. I would never, ever have been able to become a museum director in any other circumstance. But the board took a chance on me. I had my cell phone, and moxie—not much more.”
The world took notice, and it was not impressed. On December 27, 2009, the city’s most powerful art critic, Mary Abbe, of the Star Tribune, weighed in with a year-end award. “Most irresponsible board,” read the headline. “St. Paul’s nearly bankrupt Minnesota Museum of Art hired a new director after running its endowment into the ground, closing the museum’s galleries, storing the art, and dismissing other staff.”
Makholm remembers it now with a haunted laugh. “It really felt like a physical punch,” she says. She stuck to the job nonetheless: calling for advice, money, collaborators.
Two years later, Abbe hadn’t changed her mind, contributing an item to a New Year’s “Get Lost!” roundup: “After 20 years of whimpering, it’s time to put a stake in the heart of this zombie museum. Disperse the collection to other museums and galleries, close up shop, move on.”
***
Let’s time-hop.
The year: 1882.
The place: St. Paul, Minnesota.
Our occasion: the founding of “The Art Guild.” This was the seed for several 19th century institutions that would merge to become the Saint Paul Institute School of Art. This institution—seven name changes and 13 locations later—would become the M.
The 1880s in St. Paul were a time of almost unimaginable growth and development. The U.S. Census counted some 41,000 people in St. Paul in 1880; in 1890, that number stood at 133,000. (Minneapolis likewise exploded in the same period, ballooning from 47,000 to 165,000 residents.) Houses, apartment buildings, office towers: If you could have watched from the perch where the Cathedral of St. Paul would soon rise, it must have looked like the city was sprouting from the earth like a bumper crop of corn. It was a good time to be a builder.
It was also a good time to be a building craftsperson, fashioning wood or plaster moldings, piecing together stained glass, glazing and firing tile. Not just good economically, but good morally. American cities were steaming toward what historians now call the “City Beautiful” movement. This idea held that beautiful cities full of beautiful buildings would engender individual and civic virtue. (A previous urban movement helped endow Minneapolis and St. Paul with their extensive public parks systems in the early 1880s.)
“The market for these pieces is always robust. But once they’re gone, it’s much harder, or impossible, to reassemble a collection.”
—Karen Lemmey, curator of sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
City Beautiful helped establish the market for the various craft trades—the plasterers, wood carvers, carpet designers, and decorative painters—who first populated St. Paul’s Art Guild.
Into this changing St. Paul was born, in 1885, a baby by the name of Paul Manship, the youngest of seven children. His father served as a clerk for the St. Paul gas company. Manship would grow up on Marshall Avenue, and while the family wasn’t particularly artistic, young Paul was. And so, at age 17, he left high school to attend the Saint Paul Institute School of Art.
***
Let’s time-hop again.
The year: 1934.
The place: New York City. Paul Manship has developed from a St. Paul art student into one of America’s best-known, best-paid sculptors.
Manship’s crowning achievement: the dedication of his great glittering Prometheus, commissioned by John D. Rockefeller himself. Surely, you know the statue. It’s the gilded, near-godly almost nude, reclining over the ice rink in Rockefeller Plaza—the backdrop to glitzy tree-lighting ceremonies, and countless television and movie shoots. Prometheus is certainly one of the most recognizable sculptures in America, alongside the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. “People recognize his work even if they don’t recognize the name,” says Karen Lemmey, curator of sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Manship, she continues, “has that really distinctive art deco style. But, in fact, he was one of the leading sculptors who created the visual language for art deco. I think he’s got a fascinating story. He starts out as a commercial artist in St. Paul, he goes to the Saint Paul Institute School of Art, and becomes an internationally known artist.”
Manship kept studios in Rome, New York, Paris, and Lanesville, Massachusetts. Just as significant, adds Lemmey, Manship became an instrumental figure in the advancement of American sculpture, taking a role in the Smithsonian’s early evolution. “When I think of Manship, I think of him through the lens of service. He was on the board in the years before we moved to the patent building”—the museum’s current home—“and he was the one advocating for American sculpture to be available to the public in a free public museum. That legacy is tremendous.”
Upon his death, in 1966, Manship left his private collection to two institutions: the Smithsonian and the M. Curators walked through his studios, taking turns to choose what they wanted. The institution that taught Manship how to sculpt got first pick. The curator selected an art deco marble bust of Briseis, a mythical queen from The Iliad.
Half a century later, after the M abandoned its last real home, in the Landmark Center, the bust languished in storage, along with 300-plus other Manship works.
Rendering courtesy of VJAA
A rendering of Sculpture Court at the Minnesota Museum of American Art
A rendering of Sculpture Court at the Minnesota Museum of American Art
She kept good company, at least. The M held a great number of other treasures, with their own Minnesota provenances: roughly 100 works by the Ojibwe painter George Morrison; paintings by Red Lake native Patrick DesJarlait, who created Minnesota commercial icons like the Hamm’s bear and an updated Land-O-Lakes maiden; paintings by Hastings impressionist Clara Mairs.
With the M seemingly near dissolution, the threat to these works wasn’t the scrap heap. “It’s our public heritage that’s at risk,” explains Lemmey. “The market for these pieces is always robust. But once they’re gone, it’s much harder, or impossible, to reassemble a collection. When you’re talking about an artist who is from a place, and felt positive about his childhood there, how can you value that? The survival of a collection in a place that was important to his work?”
Like seeing a Rodin in Paris, or a Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico, it means something to see a Manship, a Morrison, a Mairs, or a DesJarlait in Minnesota. That goes for scholars and for kids growing up on Marshall Avenue, in Hastings, or on the Red Lake Reservation.
What did the work mean here? Whom could it touch or change? With the work no longer on display, people began to forget what they were about to lose.
***
The year: 2011.
The place: back in that study carrel in the James J. Hill library.
The problem: Kristin Makholm, director of a nearly dead museum, could not afford a postcard, never mind a room with art guards.
“When people walk through the door of a museum and see the works of art on display, what you’re seeing is the very tip of the iceberg,” explains Kaywin Feldman, the president and director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia). “Behind that is acquiring art, storing art, researchers, and curators. There are people who photograph and record the digital presence of the work of art, with video, 3D scanning. There’s the art handlers, the registrars, all of the business side.”
“Restarting a museum in 2018? It is not for the faint of heart. I cannot give them all at the M enough credit for their work. We at Mia are cheering them on. What they’ve done is truly extraordinary. Try getting a donor to write a check for the insurance of a collection that’s in storage while people are predicting the death of your institution!”
Makholm says that in those darkest days, she’d tell herself one thing. “I’m here to resurrect an art museum: That’s the job description,” she recalls. “What I have is art. Let’s see how I can turn that into more.”
She started calling other curators she knew. Would they be interested in a touring George Morrison exhibit? Would they pay for it? Would they assign their own publications department to design, print, and mail a postcard? Would they send a registrar to organize and ship the work? If so, Makholm would call a few more curators and art historians, and get a few essays assigned.
First, Makholm learned to write grants. Then, she undertook a $23 million capital campaign.
***
The year: 2018—right now.
The place: the Pioneer-Endicott Building, at 350 North Robert Street in St. Paul. The Pioneer Building—home to Pioneer Press—came first. The Endicott rose around it, embracing it in an L shape, and took its first tenants in 1890.
That 1880–1890 boom time again, and the birth of the Art Guild, Paul Manship, Clara Mairs. And the age of Cass Gilbert, the preeminent Minnesota architect. The Endicott, with its Renaissance Italian-palazzo motif, represented Gilbert’s first major commercial building. Like Manship, Gilbert would become a national figure: the architect responsible for the United States Supreme Court Building, in Washington, D.C.; New York City’s Woolworth Building; and three state capitols—including, of course, Minnesota’s.
1 of 7
Greenman by Clara Mairs
2 of 7
Glass art by Stephen Rowlfe Powell
3 of 7
Gordon Parks’s Muhammad Ali
4 of 7
Cumulated Landscape by George Morrison
5 of 7
Alec Soth’s Brian
6 of 7
Red Lake Fisherman
7 of 7
Hill Jerome
Developers Richard Pakonen and Clint Blaser bought the building in 2010, and set about overhauling it for the modern residential era. But what to do with the ground floor? Anyone who has spent time in the stretch of downtown St. Paul—between Lowertown and the main Wabasha drag—expects to find nothing but empty storefronts, block after block. But Pakonen knew the M, and Makholm, and her trusty cell phone.
“One thing I can tell you today is that museums are all about relationships,” Makholm says, giving a tour of Gilbert’s domed, stained-glass arcade. Construction workers in hard hats are busy creating the two-story sculpture court that will hold works by rotating artists. This space represents the art-display centerpiece of phase one, opening at the beginning of this month. Some 20,000 square feet of galleries will showcase a small part of the museum’s current 4,500-item collection. In phase two, scheduled for 2020, the M will expand into the restored Gilbert arcade, reaching a total of 36,000 square feet.
The museum, at its opening, will focus on the craft and teaching of art, just like it did in the 1890s. And so, in addition to exhibition space, the museum will also operate a brand-new Josephine Adele Ford Center for Creativity. This initiative will offer extensive teaching and studio spaces for those who want to improve their drawing, painting, embroidery, jewelry making, and other crafts.
For all the construction hubbub, Makholm moves confidently through the space, in alligator-patterned pumps and a black pencil skirt—looking every part the chic museum director, and no part the art-rags-to-art-riches scrapper, which she also is. She has a real office now, not a mere carrel. Outside this real office sits a real staff, with real computers. Any day now there will be real museum guards patrolling the real exhibition space, too.
As we tour this new place, Makholm pulls back a plywood sheet on hinges, which serves as a door until the real entrance is built. Behind the plywood: great white walls that will securely hold great public treasure. Standing here, most visitors will have no inkling that this canvas or that photographic print were almost lost. Makholm restores the plywood as construction guys narrow their eyes at her: a typical high-heeled executive who doesn’t know the meaning of important work.
