The M’s New Wing and exhibition glow after $14-million renovation and expansion
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Kate Beane and Kylie Linh Hoang admire a shimmering ribbon skirt on display beneath a soaring stone arch at the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul.
The museum executive director and assistant curator say the garment was commissioned to mark the entrance of the museum’s recently opened New Wing, and its inaugural “Here, Now” exhibition. The skirt, as well as a top and embellished belt, were created by Rachel King, a Red Lake Ojibwe artist.
“She created this outfit, which we lovingly call the ‘Guardian of the Galaxy,’” says Beane, laughing. “She oversees and protects the space.”
The New Wing is part of a $14-million expansion that has tripled the museum’s gallery space in the Pioneer Endicott building, built in the 1880s. This includes the renovated 420-window stained-glass arcade ceiling designed by Cass Gilbert in 1889, which casts the entire wing in a honey glow.
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Beane, who is Flandreau Santee Sioux Dakota and Muscogee Creek, explains that she chose the garment because she has a “love-hate relationship” with land acknowledgments. Rather than say a plaque with a land acknowledgment that tells visitors the museum is committed to supporting Indigenous peoples, Beane wanted to show that through commissioning a work by a local Native artist.
“What I want to make sure that people understand is that indigenizing spaces isn’t just for Indigenous people, it’s for all of us,” says Beane, who joined the museum as executive director in 2021. “Understanding that the Indigenous way of looking across time and place, and that Indigenous idea of connectivity, is incredibly important because as an organization, we’ve been here for a very, very long time, and yet that older representation very much highlights a certain demographic that doesn't include a lot of the diversity of Minnesota today.”
The museum, known as The M, started as the St. Paul School of Fine Arts in 1894. The focus, Beane says, was always on state community craft and arts. Under her leadership, Beane says the museum, with the help of the New Wing, is shifting to a regional focus.
“The borders of the state of Minnesota are colonial borders,” she says. “So, when we think about our relationship to this place, it's a relationship to the land that all of us have, not just Dakota people.”
Kylie Linh Hoang co-curated the “Here, Now” exhibition with these ideas of connectivity and representation in mind. Hoang and independent curator Bob Cozzolino (formerly of the Minneapolis Institute of Art) collaborated to weave a story through more than 150 artworks that investigate how we connect through the land, the cosmos, imagination and each other. Iconic works by the likes of Joan Mitchell, George Morrison, Wanda Gág, Jim Denomie and Elizabeth Catlett share space with contemporary artists such as Julie Buffaloehead, Ta-coumba Aiken, Maggie Thompson, Jeffrey Gibson and Ani Kasten.
Hoang says people tend to associate The M with a more historic lens.
“They think about our craft collection, they think about our textile collection. There’s a couple of paintings that people are very fond of, and a lot of those are in the show,” she says. “But there are other things that we’re doing that contextualize those with contemporary conversations about race, identity, gender.”
In the land-themed gallery, an Iowa landscape painting from 1934 by Grant Wood (of “American Gothic” fame) hangs near a 1946 watercolor of a Native fisherman by famed Red Lake Ojibwe painter Patrick DesJarlait. Large-format photographs from photographers across time and communities — Gordon Parks, Tom Jones, Pao Houa Her, Xavier Tavera, Wing Young Huie, Mike Hazard — hang together in the generations-themed gallery.
Beane and Hoang say that the museum heard concerns that the historic collection was being forgotten or pushed aside.
“We wanted to make sure that people understood that inclusion doesn’t mean erasure,” Beane says. “We put [artists] in conversation with one another. That’s the real humanity of who we are. We have a lot of different connections. We don’t have to be separated out into different galleries in order to be able to relate to one another and find connections across stories.”
The New Wing culminates with a room dedicated to George Morrison, the famed Ojibwe modernist painter from Minnesota who died in 2000. The museum has the largest collection of Morrison works of any institution.
“It’s like a grand finale,” Beane says. “Showcasing the ways in which George Morrison was ahead of his time and is just such an important figure in our community.”
One of Morrison’s large found-wood collages (“Culminated Landscape,” 1976) looks over many lesser-seen works, including figural studies as well as a 1956 black painted-wood sculpture by Louise Nevelson, who was a student of his.
“George actually obtained this work in a trade with her, so he traded one of his works for this work, and that’s why it's on view here,” Hoang says.
The oily black jutting abstractions of Nevelson’s work are echoed in Morrison’s inky black abstract paintings hanging on a nearby wall.
“You can see the ways in which they inspired each other,” Beane says. “Whether it’s artists who are in relationship with one another or artists who are mentor and mentee, those connections are very strong and very powerful, and being able to highlight those as part of the story of the work is so important.”
“Here, Now” is on view through May 2027. Hoang says they will regularly update the exhibition with rotated works from the museum’s permanent collection.
