“Built to Last” Pop-Up Gallery Talk
Join us for a series of in-gallery conversations with guest speakers who will share different perspectives on the exhibition “Built to Last: The Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art.”
Friday, February 13, 2026, 11:30 a.m. | Jennifer Marshall
Why enshrine a factory in a painting? What happens when a camera, a type of machine, takes a picture of another machine? Can we call a dam a landscape?
In this gallery talk, Jennifer Jane Marshall, an art history professor at the University of Minnesota, will guide visitors through the early 20th-century romance with the Machine Age, pausing to consider how it sometimes tilted into the dread of an awful sublime.
Thursday, April 2, 2026, 11:30 a.m. | Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer
Join Twin Cities collectors and longtime Mia supporters Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer for a conversation about the exhibition.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 11:30 a.m. | Brooks Turner
How do artists find their relationship to labor? Join artist, writer, and educator Brooks Turner for a conversation on historic solidarity and utopian visions captured in works featured in the exhibition.
Turner discusses how artists like Sarah Berman Beach, Joseph Paul Vorst, and Guy MacCoy addressed work and resistance, with their works shaping social consciousness while envisioning a utopian future.
Jennifer Marshall serves as a professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, where she holds a Samuel Russell Endowed Chair in the Humanities. Author of Machine Art, 1934, and a forthcoming book on the self-taught sculptor William Edmondson, she’s a specialist in interwar American modernism, especially as it was forged during an era of mass industrialization.
Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer have been collecting for nearly four decades, with a particular interest in American painting and photography from the 1930s. Works from their collection have been featured at a number of regional and national museums, including the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Grohmann Museum, the Hillstrom Museum of Art, and the Springfield Museum of Art.
Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, and educator. Using archival research, collage, drawing, and installation, he explores the histories of labor, fascism, and resistance in Minnesota, with a particular focus on the 1934 Truck Drivers Strike. Turner’s solo exhibitions include “Voters in Revolt,” “Pedagogy and Propaganda,” and “Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota.” His essays appear in Labor Art Review, Art Papers, Mn Artists, and TEMP.