What's Next for Twin Cities Museums?

The Twin Cities museum experience is not what it used to be. We talked with local museum leaders Mary Ceruti, Katie Luber, and Kate Beane about how things have changed in the last few unprecedented years.

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What are museums? Whatever we thought the answer was on New Year’s Day 2020, by that March, we knew what they weren’t: pandemic-proof.

When the Twin Cities’ many great museums closed for the pandemic—just like everything else at the time—ticket sales, visitor numbers, and gift shop revenue all plummeted. Now, two-and-a-half years later, museums are back, but they are different than they were before. How? We checked in with Walker Art Center executive director Mary Ceruti; the president and director of Mia, Katie Luber; and Kate Beane, the new executive director of St. Paul’s Minnesota Museum of American Art, all three of whom are new to their roles since 2019, to see what museums mean for our Cities and our state today.

COMMUNITY

“I would say that the evolution of museums was well underway before the pandemic and uprising, but the evolution was certainly hastened along,” says Mary Ceruti, of the Walker. “The old perspectives haven’t gotten us where we need to be. In broad strokes, museums were places that had cared for history and objects, told stories and were authorities of all that, and shared expertise out. But today, the relationship between community, museum, and curator is much more porous. It’s not about pontificating out. Museums are now about conversation, back-and-forth, creating ways for dialogue.”

Mia’s Katie Luber agrees and has seen something of an equation play out: community + aspiration + time + stewardship = museum. “A hundred-plus years ago, Mia was basically 25 people, all wealthy industrialists, saying, Art for the community. But it actually took generations to achieve that. Today we are free, and we serve everyone. Our mantra is, Everyone welcome always. But we only achieved that because of our community and, within that, our communities. That is, gallery-goers, yes, but also the government of the state supporting public health and safety, which allows people to be safe and healthy enough to find time to experience art. It also means the community of donors, the community of curators and employees, and the international art community, too. Before the pandemic, the things we took for granted obscured how essential the health of these different, diverse, overlapping communities is to the vitality of any museum.”

But don’t forget the past, says Kate Beane, of the M. These multiple communities come from both a shared past and also individually experienced pasts, which have become more vivid and urgent post-pandemic than they were before. “I was trained as a public historian, and I think the M bringing me on is another sign of how history and the present must be in dialogue. I’m Dakota, Flandreau Santee Sioux, and the murder of George Floyd is opening up opportunities to say, ‘OK, this whole place is founded on Indigenous removal.’ Immigrants from everywhere—Vietnam, Sweden, everywhere—came. Each community has a different relationship with art, defines art differently. It might be a basket or a quilt, a tool for scraping hides, or an oil painting, and so what does Minnesota mean, what does Minnesota art mean? I think the upheavals of our recent past have given us space and urgency to question—and answer!—things we weren’t questioning before.”

VISIBILITY

With this newly significant porous back-and-forth and emphasis on community, a fresh question arose: Did the state and federal government actually see the various communities inside our museums? “Early on in the pandemic, we realized, ‘Restaurants are really good at making people aware of their plight. Are we?’” recalls Ceruti. “I’m collaborative by nature and started working first with Katie Luber at Mia, the Guthrie, the Orchestra, the Duluth Art Institute. We put together the Minnesota Arts and Culture Coalition, first to get health information so we could understand how and when it was safe to bring people back—we’d have public health speakers like Mike Osterholm. But now we’re permanent; we meet on Zoom; we bring in guest speakers, including the governor; and we’re able to share what we’re going through. And that visibility, that advocacy, how to do things better, worries on the horizon, all of it—the creation of this coalition has been a silver lining.”

WOW FACTOR

“One thing I think became very obvious in the last couple years? We’re competing with Netflix,” says Mia’s Luber. “Why go out when Isabelle Adjani will appear in your living room when you summon Call My Agent!?” To compete with the biggest artists streaming, Mia has been thinking about the biggest artists ever and has a show this October of the work of Botticelli, straight from Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. “Our chair of European art, Rachel McGarry, started working on this in 2021 because we all thought, Let’s do something to knock everyone’s socks off,” Luber adds. “Botticelli is right up there with Rembrandt and Picasso as a name that rings out so true, and the more we looked into it, the more we thought: Botticelli lived through some of the most severe plague years in Florence. He took inspiration from fluttering draperies in ancient Roman works, and maybe, maybe he asked, ‘How did they do this without the financial support of the Medicis?’ And we look at Botticelli and ask, ‘How did he do this without electricity and email?’ So any of us today might feel like, Pandemic, social division; it’s never been this bad. Then you come to a museum and you can say, ‘Actually, we’re having a very human experience. Let’s see what other humans have taken from their similar very human experiences.’ They took their raw experience, turned it into greater beauty. How can any of us turn our raw experience into greater beauty? That’s a personal question that requires quiet and that rare feeling of inspiration, and that’s what people tell us they come to us for.”

VISION

Beane took over the M when the galleries were closed for expansion; they are expected to open again in 2023. Using this space to think about a vision for the future, Beane has been mulling the crisscrossing currents of history and humanity that exist in 2022 and what that will mean to our future. “I’m Dakota, removed from these lands, but I’m directing a museum in the Pioneer Endicott building.” (St. Paul’s Pioneer building was built in 1889, not so long after the 1863 Dakota Removal Act, which banned Dakota people from Minnesota and began the process of forcibly removing them to places such as South Dakota.) “So I think, That’s ironic: Me, Dakota, running things inside the Pioneer building. That will mean one thing to people here today; it will mean something else to my seven-week-old daughter in 30 years. What happens when we center community, tell our stories, engage authentically? I think the M will be a center of talking about difficult topics in interesting ways, and that is probably the only way we create true empathy, learn from and with one another, and create understanding and healing. Art has meant different things in different communities in different times, and we are in a different time.”

Historically, says Beane, you see time in art marked when different cultures meet. The French impressionists’ art came about after exposure to Japanese art. The work of George Morrison, the renowned Minnesota Ojibwe abstract expressionist, only came to be because he lived when he did. “What happens in St. Paul now that Hmong and Ojibwe basket weavers live side by side? When people of color are in positions of leadership to highlight these cross-cultural moments? I think we’ll look back at ‘now’ as museums catching up with society and saying, Our stories are interwoven.”

“What happens when we center community, tell our stories, engage authentically?”

—Kate Beane

CONNECTION

It is now not only OK to gather, it is necessary. “Definitely tell people that because of our need to keep art safe, we have great climate control and ventilation,” muses Ceruti, of the Walker. “But more seriously, seeing art, thinking about something outside of your own head, and sharing that experience with another person, that is a big part of what it means to be human.” There’s a continuum from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the Walker galleries, notes Ceruti. Getting ideas, images, and priorities out of one mind and into public space so others can engage with it, that’s a part of us all that has been neglected during the pandemic. “I think it’s a human need,” says Ceruti. “The creative process of externalizing how we understand things. I think in this moment, after so much isolation, that human connection, externalizing, understanding—it’s critical for our individual health and the health of our society. We’ve all been so isolated, in our own heads, afraid to be with people—that creates its own problems.”

MISSION

Talking to Minnesota museum leaders right now, one thing is clear: Our museums are entering this new-now art-going season with a great sense of urgency and mission. The problem of isolation? The problem of lack of inspiration? The problem of burnout, self-empathy, other-empathy, and a lack of compassion for the human condition, and how beauty has often come from difficulty? These are some of the most vexing problems of late 2022 and 2023, and they might just be the ones our museums are now uniquely poised to solve.

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