Once at MIA: The Collectors

They stand close, but not too close, pillars of the museum with plenty of ideological daylight between them. This was January 12, 1955, amid a host of new acquisitions. Russell Plimpton (seated) had led the MIA as its director for 34 years. His soon-to-be successor, Richard Davis (on the right), was then the senior curator, already pulling the museum in a new direction. Between them, Bruce Dayton, the understated board president.

Dayton was 36 but already a veteran of museum politics, having been recruited to the board in 1942, when he was just 22. Fresh out of Yale, he was selling men’s shirts in his namesake downtown Minneapolis store when Alfred F. Pillsbury, a family friend and major MIA supporter, pulled him aside at a party and said, “Young man, I have something in mind for you.”

A year after this photo was taken, everything would change. Plimpton would be gone. Dayton and his family would open Southdale, the country’s first shopping mall. Davis would begin accumulating modern art for the museum, while selling off antiquities and other older works. Indeed, he would stumble into one mishap after another before resigning in 1959, when the board proposed hiring its first professional president to oversee the director (and did).

Dayton would outlast them all, donating everything from Dutch still lifes to Chinese art to entire historic structures. “I started out collecting for myself,” he told the New York Times in 2009, and then I found that it was fun to give things to the art institute. I look for things that fit into the museum. They have 90 percent of what I’ve ever owned.”

Watch for more Once at MIA flashbacks every Monday at MIA Stories.