The Hillstrom Museum of Art will open three concurrent exhibitions on November 21, 2011: Familiar Names, Familiar Faces: Portraiture by Paul Granlund; Our Treasures: Highlights from the Minnesota Museum of American Art; and Selections from the Hillstrom Collection. An opening reception for these exhibits is scheduled on Monday, November 21 (7-9 p.m., with brief comments at 7:30 p.m.). The exhibitions will remain on view through January 27, 2012. Admission to the Hillstrom Museum of Art is free and open to the public.
Familiar Names, Familiar Faces: Portraiture by Paul Granlund features portrait busts and reliefs by the nationally and internationally known artist who served as Sculptor-in-Residence at the College from 1971 to 1996. Over the course of his long career, Granlund was increasingly asked to portray noted individuals. These included world-renowned scholars, among them a Nobel prize laureate; important public and political figures; and the founders, presidents and other officials of numerous colleges and universities such as St. Olaf College, the University of St. Thomas, Valparaiso University, Muhlenberg College, and, of course, Gustavus Adolphus College. His sensitive depictions of individuals, including members of his own family, are sometimes overshadowed by his characteristic, buoyant figural works, but reveal much about Granlund’s artistic aims and accomplishment. Familiar Names, Familiar Faces is part of the Hillstrom Museum of Art’s celebration of the Sesquicentennial of Gustavus Adolphus College (founded in 1862).
Our Treasures: Highlights from the Minnesota Museum of American Art, features thirty-two of the finest masterpieces from the collection of the Minnesota Museum of American Art, headquartered in the state’s capital. The MMAA is in the process of locating a new exhibition space to highlight its collection of some 3700 works, which cover the range of American art history. This exhibit, supported by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (through an appropriation from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008), is an opportunity to make the MMAA familiar to all in the state. Our Treasures comes to the Hillstrom Museum of Art as part of a statewide tour that opened at the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota, Duluth, and that, after its appearance in St. Peter, will be shown at the Carleton College Art Gallery in Northfield.
Our Treasures includes paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and photographs, ranging in date from 1860 to as recently as 2006. Among the works in the exhibition are a Regionalist landscape painting by Grant Wood (1891-1942); a large portrait by Ashcan School painter Robert Henri (1865-1929), a large-scale drawing/collage by environmental/conceptual artist Christo (born 1935) that reflects his famous twenty-four-mile-long Running Fence, installed in California’s Sonoma and Marin counties in the early 1970s; an abstract assemblage sculpture by Louise Nevelson (1899-1988); a fine representational bronze sculpture by Minnesota-born Paul Manship (1885-1966); and a huge wooden collage by Minnesota Ojibwa artist George Morrison (1919-2000). The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue that traces the development of the MMAA and that includes essays on each of the works in the exhibit, written by regional and national art historians.
There is a strong context for Our Treasures being presented in the Hillstrom Museum of Art, which has in common with the MMAA the patronage and support of Reverend Richard L. Hillstrom (Gustavus class of 1938), who for many years in the 1970s and 1980s was closely associated with the MMAA, serving as a trustee and as the chair of its collection committee; a number of the works in the exhibition were acquired by the MMAA under this guidance. In addition to this connection—and to some degree because of it—the two museums have a basic similarity in the nature and content of their permanent collections, and many of the artists represented in one can be found the other.
To underscore this kinship, the Hillstrom Museum of Art is concurrently presenting Selections from the Hillstrom Collection, consisting of works by artists represented in Our Treasures. These include a watercolor by American Scene artist Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), a recently acquired drawing by Grant Wood, a lithograph by Wood’s fellow Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), an etching by American Impressionist Frederick Childe Hassam (1859-1935), and an oil landscape painting by Robert Henri.
The program at the opening reception for these exhibitions will include remarks from Kristin Makholm, director of the MMAA, Gustavus President Jack Ohle, and Gustavus Sesquicentennial Sculptor Greg Mueller, a former assistant of Paul Granlund.
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