MMAA: "Summer-themed show a pleasant diversion" by Mary Abbe

Mary Abbe, Star Tribune

July 29, 2005

To celebrate its new lease on life the Minnesota Museum of American Art has staged a lighthearted show of vacation-themed art drawn entirely from its collection. Called "Summer Escape," it is an amiable potpourri of etchings, drawings, photos and other intimate art spiced with a few paintings, including a modest canvas by one of the Midwest's most famous names, Grant Wood.

As a hot-weather diversion, "Escape" is a very pleasant way to while away a torpid hour or two. Utterly free of intellectual pretense, the show is charmingly arranged according to such lightweight themes as "Beach,"Road Oddities,"Northern Minnesota,"Storms," and geographic regions from "Eastern Landscapes," to "South,"Midwest" and "Southwest."

Rather than dust off the museum's better-known holdings by sculptor Paul Manship or painters Romare Bearden, Joan Mitchell or Donald Sultan, for example, curator Theresa Downing decided to plunge into the archives and give an airing to art rarely shown. She did so in record time, assembling the display in less than six weeks. The MMAA has had to be nimble because its future is so dicey.

Until mid-June, the museum didn't know whether it would even have a home for next year. In April 2004 it moved from the second floor of nearby Landmark Center into temporary quarters in a former office building on Kellogg Boulevard about a block north of the Science Museum. The new location brought street presence and greater visibility, but no long-term promises. The museum's lease was up in May and not renewed until mid-June, making advance exhibition planning all but impossible.

The museum has leased the Kellogg site through May 2006, said director Bruce Lilly, although its situation remains precarious. In the fiscal year ended June 20, the visitor count was down slightly, to 17,619 from 19,000 the previous year. The 2004-05 season "was difficult financially, and we will have a not-insignificant deficit," Lilly said. Figures will not be available until the museum's annual audit is completed and has ben reviewed by its board of directors, he said.

Lilly and the museum's board hope that the institution will be included in plans to redevelop the St. Paul riverfront, but they presently have no money to build or to renovate any property that might be available. Lilly said they hope to have firm plans by December.

"For the time being, the community seems to like what we're doing and there's real public support," Lilly said, citing museum-sponsored artists' showcases and performances by Twin Cities bands that have been attracting younger crowds on weekend nights.

Fresh eyes on the collection

Endowed with youthful energy and boundless optimism, curator Downing distilled the "Summer Escape" show from the museum's 3,500-piece collection in short order. She's now organizing a state-wide biennial exhibition that's expected to open in October.

"People stop in all the time and ask about the collection and want to see their old favorites, but we wanted to remind them that we have a very rich collection so this show includes many things that we've never shown before," Downing said. "After I'd looked at between 300 and 400 things, categories started to emerge."

Perhaps it was the blazing heat outside that made the "Storms" section so appealing during a preview tour. Nobody does tornados better than Minneapolis College of Art and Design professor Michael Kareken, who is represented by two intaglio prints of Midwestern roadscapes almost crushed by inky skies with fierce funnels swirling low over the horizon and roiling fields rising beside roads of cracked asphalt. Faye Passow, also of Minnesota, brings a humorous touch to her 2002 lithograph of "Mobile Homes," spinning through tornado-tossed air.

"Beach" scenes include George Luks' deft pencil sketch of two plump bathers reminiscent of a New Yorker cartoon and Paul Cadmus' etching of those really awful bodies that often parade on American beaches, in this case Coney Island in 1935 -- which must have been a big year for pot bellies, sagging breasts, whining children and lecherous old men.

There's a wonderful section of New York-inspired images, including an incisive 1948 oil sketch by Reginald Marsh of a girl on a subway, a dramatic 1932 drawing by Allan McNab of the Brooklyn Bridge dominating the New York skyline, and two tenderly observed images by Isabel Bishop of exhausted people waiting for buses or trains to depart.

In the "Midwest" section we find Wood's little painting of a farmer plowing a rolling Iowa field, Chris Faust's luminous photo of an abandoned schoolhouse and Mike Lynch's lithograph of a lonely little bar in Moose Junction, Wis. There are two glorious pastel drawings of Lake Superior at dawn and dusk by the late George Morrison, who could render the molten beauty of water and sky with more heart and soul than Monet.

Among the show's surprises are four rare, sepia-toned photos taken in Mexico by Manship in 1928 and a series of early color landscape photos of the American West by William Henry Jackson. And the "Road Oddities," section offers photos of a pink trailer park and a row of vintage Cadillacs upended in Texas, plus Steven Fitch's photo of a goofy dinosaur looming over the highway in Vernal, Utah.

Recalling the pleasure of family road trips when he was a kid, Fitch once described his photos as "a kind of child's view of the highway." There's something of that childlike pleasure in "Summer Escape."

Summer Escape: Traversing the Collection

What: Light-hearted summer-themed show of more than 70 mostly 20th-century prints, drawings, photos and paintings by more than 40 artists from the museum's collection, including Grant Wood, Red Grooms, George Morrison and Mike Lynch.
When: Opens Saturday. Ends Oct. 2.
Where: Minnesota Museum of American Art, 50 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul.
Tickets: Free. 651-266-1030 or www.mmaa.org
Mary Abbe is at mabbe@startribune.com.