Minnesota Artists

Introduction

Each making art in a different way, the artists featured here all added something to the story of Minnesota.

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Creating pottery for people to use every day in their homes is what Minnesota's foremost potter, Warren MacKenzie, enjoys doing. As a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MacKenzie became interested in traditional folk pottery from around the world, especially Japanese mingei pottery. An apprenticeship with the potter Bernard Leach in England sharpened that interest and gave MacKenzie enough experience to set up his own studio. In the mid-1950s he and his wife, Alix, returned to the United States and settled in Minnesota. They started a pottery studio in the town of Stillwater, where MacKenzie worked until his death in December, 2018. He is internationally known, and his work is much admired in Japan.

MacKenzie wants his ceramic wares to be functional: platters and bowls to hold food; teapots, mugs, and cups to hold drinks; covered jars and boxes to store things; and vases to display flowers. But he also crafts them to be pleasing to look at and to touch. First he shapes the clay into basic forms on a potter's wheel. Then he may add decoration like the clasps that pinch the lips of this bowl together, or embellish the pot by carving and smoothing the clay, or attach a sturdy handle or a graceful spout. Often he applies glazes of various colors. Each step in creating the pottery affects how it appears to the eye, feels in the hand, and functions in the home.

MacKenzie has inspired generations of potters through teaching ceramics at the University of Minnesota. Many of his students carry on the tradition of making pottery that is both beautiful and functional. In this way, Warren MacKenzie continues to add beauty to the everyday life of people in Minnesota, the Midwest, and the world.

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Fact One

Warren MacKenzie: Beauty in Everyday Life

This storage jar has side handles that complement its simple form and provide a good grip.

MacKenzie uses various glazes for different effects, such as the bright splashes of color on this simple platter.

By cutting vertical strips of clay from this vase, MacKenzie created linear decoration.

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Fact Two:

Purcell and Elmslie: Prairie School Partners

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some American architects tried a new way of designing, inspired by the natural world. They thought a building should be in harmony with its surroundings and suit the needs of the people who would use it. And it should have a unified look, outside and in; sometimes they even designed the furniture. This kind of architecture, now called the Prairie School style, was especially popular in the Midwest.

The architects William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie were partners. Working together in Minneapolis, Minnesota, they designed some of the best Prairie School buildings in the country. An outstanding example is the Edna S. Purcell house (now the Purcell-Cutts house), located in a Minneapolis neighborhood near Lake of the Isles. It was built in 1913 as a home for Purcell and his family.

The Purcell house has typical features of Prairie School architecture: an overhanging, almost flat roof; a central chimney; bands of windows that let in lots of light; natural building materials; and earthen colors. Purcell planned interesting open spaces so that rooms could serve many functions and be suitable for modern living. Elmslie designed complex nature-based details and furnishings, creating unified decoration for the house. Sadly, the Purcells left Minneapolis after spending only a few years in their new home.

The horizontal lines of the flat roof and rows of windows recall the prairie landscape for which Prairie School architecture is named.

This decorative light fixture hung in the back porch of the Purcell-Cutts House. It tied in with other stained-glass features in the home.

A dining room chair made for another Minnesota Prairie School home designed by Purcell and Elmslie shows how the partners unified the design of buildings and furnishings.

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Fact Three

Tom Arndt: Visual Stories

Thomas F. Arndt
American, born 1944
Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul_, 1976
Gelatin silver print
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Gift of First Banks

Since the early 1970s, the photographer Tom Arndt has repeatedly focused his camera lens on Minnesota, his native state. Known as a documentary, or street, photographer, Arndt works in public places, taking candid pictures of ordinary people going about their daily lives. However, his black-and-white photographs are more than just records of who was where, and when. They are visual stories of real people, places, and times, capturing carefully selected moments of human experience.

Arndt's photographs are honest images of everyday life. For this Minnesota State Fair scene, he did not ask anyone to pose, or wait for people to notice him and his camera. The group in front, the children to the left, and the security guard at the right are all casually living this particular moment of their lives. Arndt captured their experience, what was happening in that place at that time, and as viewers we can imagine ourselves there. We can hear the hum of the carnival in the background, smell the aromas from the food stands, and see the bright blinking lights.

His work as a photographer has taken Arndt beyond Minnesota and around the country. In the 1980s he recorded the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale and later on directed his attention to Chicago's midwestern city life. Today, Arndt continues to document Minnesota, going every year to the Minnesota State Fair, one of his favorite places to take pictures.

Arndt's photographs of the presidential campaign of Minnesotan Walter Mondale are informal and relaxed.

Capturing a telling moment on film is the documentary photographer's goal. Arndt snapped this image when a wrestling fan's excitement peaked.

Arndt caught this woman's faraway expression and her sense of isolation in the fair stand where she works.

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Fact Four

Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) or Dakhóta: Trade and Tradition

In the mid-1800s, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe)and Dakhóta were still the main inhabitants of the land that would soon become the state of Minnesota. Skilled artisans, they adorned many belongings with designs and patterns drawn from the landscape around them. European-American settlers moving westward across the continent traded goods such as cloth and beads with the Native peoples and also brought examples of arts like quilting. Anishinaabe (Ojibwe)and Dakhóta quickly blended the new materials and techniques with their own artistic traditions.

This blanket is made of wool cloth, beads, and silk ribbon, all obtained through the fur trade. It was created by an artist (or possibly several artists) expert in needlework, who decorated the cloth with meticulous beadwork and ribbonwork. You can see the influence of European-American quilting in the ribbonwork designs appliquéd along the blanket's edge. Appliqué (ap-luh-KAY) refers to sewing separate pieces of fabric decoration onto a larger cloth.

The blanket was made by one or more people of the Anishinabe (Ojibwe) and Dakota communities. Its history can be traced to some of the region's early fur traders, the prominent LaFramboise (la'fram'bwaz) family. According to family lore, the blanket was owned by Jane Dickson LaFramboise, a woman of Anishinabe/Dakota descent whose father had a good relationship with the Dakota. Jane's husband, Joseph LaFramboise, had established one of the first trading posts in what would later be Minnesota. It is said the blanket was used at their marriage in 1845.

Like the blanket, this bandolier bag features floral designs inspired by nature.

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Fact Five

Alexis Jean Fournier: The Local Scene

Working as a sign and stage scenery painter gave Alexis Jean Fournier the practice he needed to build a career as an artist. Toting his paints, brushes, and canvas he searched the city and countryside for subjects, painting outdoors with the scene before his eyes. By 1886 Fournier had achieved his goal of becoming a self-employed landscape painter with a studio on Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis. There he attracted patrons such as James J. Hill, the wealthy St. Paul railroad and lumber entrepreneur, who supported Fournier’s work.

In the summer of 1888, the young Minnesota artist painted a series of six views of Minneapolis, including Farnham’s Mill at St. Anthony Falls, Minneapolis. This picture shows one of the earliest (and longest running) sawmills in Minneapolis, built on the west side of Hennepin Island next to St. Anthony Falls. Located on the Mississippi River between the towns of Minneapolis and St. Anthony, the falls made this area a thriving center of industrial activity in the 19th century. Mills for producing lumber and flour lined both riverbanks, with the powerful falls supplying inexpensive energy to run them. For fifty years, beginning in 1880, Minneapolis was known as the flour-milling capital of the world.

With great attention to detail, Fournier created an accurate view of the mill and the young city beyond. This thorough record of the local scene includes the tower of the Exposition Building (behind and to the left of the mill), which had opened two years earlier, in 1886 (it was later torn down. Fournier's paintings capture the growth of Minneapolis and preserve a historical view of other locations in Minnesota. Through them we can step back in time.

In this painting by Fournier, Farnham's Mill is to the left of the Stone Arch Bridge. At the far left is the Pillsbury A mill.

Another of Fournier's six views of Minneapolis from the summer of 1888 pictures Lowry Hill in Minneapolis.

In a later painting, Fournier depicted the natural beauty of Minnehaha Creek.

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Related Activities

Inspiration All Around Us

Think about how the place where you live influences you. What can you do, see, or experience because of where you live? How might this be different if you lived somewhere else in the world? List things that are unique about your neighborhood, town, state, or country. Create an artwork inspired by your list.

More from Minnesota

Use the search feature of Mia's website to discover works of art by more Minnesota artists. Or visit the museum to explore a whole gallery of art that helps tell the story of the state's early history.

Prairie School Tour

Take a virtual tour of the Purcell-Cutts House to see its rooms and view historical photographs. Then tour other Prairie School buildings around the state of Minnesota. by visiting the Unified Vision: The Architecture and Design of the Prairie School online resource.