Q&A with Spencer Wigmore, Mia’s New Curator of American Art

By Tim Gihring

June 17, 2025—When Spencer Wigmore joined Mia this spring, as the Patrick and Aimee Butler Associate Curator of American Paintings, it was a kind of intellectual homecoming. He grew up in Elk River, northwest of Minneapolis, and Mia was where he formed his first impressions of art. Paintings that had tugged at his imagination, that had transported him across time and place, are now his unexpected privilege to curate.

After studying art history at Carleton College and earning his PhD from the University of Delaware, he worked for five years at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, helping reinstall and reimagine its collection to be more inclusive, more inquisitive about the art of the American West. Then, in 2023, he returned home, serving as the fine arts curator for the Minnesota Historical Society before coming to Mia.

Here, he explores these experiences, his love of American art, and questions that have long animated both art and life in the United States: Who are we as Americans—and who do we want to be?

What do you remember of your early visits to Mia and how they affected you?

I think I’ve always had an interest in natural history, in historical encounters with the natural world, and that led me early on to American landscape painting. Pictures like Jasper Cropsey’s Catskill Mountain House, which I remember enjoying at Mia as a kid, were my first exposure to those places. Now I get to see those works every day.

It’s not every kid who is drawn to landscape painting.

Those are the pictures I identified with at a younger age, and then I found my way back to them as my interests crystallized in college. They became an avenue for me to get at a lot of broader topics that are exciting to me, both within and beyond art—histories of mining and resource extraction, the importance of conservation in American culture, the ways that artists have shaped what we do and don’t value in wild spaces.

You spent a lot of time working with the art of the American West before returning to Minnesota. Is there any overlap in western and midwestern histories or imagery?

As in the West, there are these fictions of Minnesota nature as being devoid of human history prior to Euro-American colonization—treating these landscapes as abundant resources, available for the taking.

I think of the British-born draftsman and printmaker Edwin Whitefield, who made beautiful watercolor portfolios for the purpose of promoting real estate speculation in central Minnesota. I think of the treasure troves of material by Seth Eastman, at Fort Snelling, who documented through a Euro-American lens the significance of Bdote—the meeting of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers—as a cultural confluence, this rich contact zone between Indigenous peoples, settlers, and soldiers.

Those histories here are equally resonant to a lot of the issues that were drawing me to the American West.

You have a publication coming out for the Amon Carter Museum about Charles Russell, the so-called cowboy artist, whose paintings and sculptures helped shape our notions of the West. How did you approach this work?

When the Carter opened in 1961, it almost exclusively featured works by Russell and his fellow turn-of-the-century painter Frederic Remington. The collection quickly grew beyond that, but for many people in that region, Remington and Russell are central figures. At the same time, some communities see themselves misrepresented by these pictures—often in ways that are quite dehumanizing.

This project was an effort to grapple with these legacies of western American art and try to find productive ways of engaging or interpreting that material. The project, which the Carter will publish later this year, consists of short essays by scholars who are grappling with how to best approach this material in the present day, particularly within the context of encyclopedic museums. At the end of the day, it’s about asking how these collections that are so central to a museum’s identity remain relevant.

What stands out to you about Mia’s collection of American art? 

We’re fortunate to have a number of pieces that have long served as destination pictures, like George O’Keeffe’s City Night or George Bellows’s Mrs. T. in Cream Silk.

But the collection is also fragmented. It has real gaps that we need to explore how to fill, and that fragmentation also shows up in how it’s displayed. So, we’re thinking both in terms of acquisitions and how we might identify a historical throughline, a shared point of emphasis, that can give the collection a rich identity.

How do we integrate these local stories into a national and even hemispheric lens—thinking about the Americas as a whole, not just the continental United States? How do we integrate keystone histories of Latin American art, Canadian art, or the extensive Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie School materials that have this wonderful local connection?

Certainly, it feels like a pivotal moment for American art, as these questions of what that even means are being explored.

Something I’ve admired about Mia throughout my career is its willingness to investigate its approach to narrating history. And that often comes with a willingness to experiment—like the “Reimagining Native/American Art” installation or these highly collaborative exhibitions like “Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” and “In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now,” which open up new storytelling possibilities.

What does it mean to tell a history of the Twin Cities or the United States or this continent that really reflects a rich and diverse world of creative production, not limited to the media typically associated with American art? How Mia has responded to this question is something I’ve admired from afar for a long time, and I’m excited to add to that legacy however I can.

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About Spencer Wigmore, Patrick and Aimee Butler Associate Curator of American Paintings

Spencer Wigmore joined Mia in 2025 as the Patrick and Aimee Butler Associate Curator of American Paintings. Previously, he was Curator of Fine Art at the Minnesota Historical Society, where he led a period of unprecedented growth for the institution’s collection of historic and contemporary Minnesota art. Between 2018 and 2023, he was a member of the curatorial team at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. At the Carter, he assisted with the reinstallation of the museum’s permanent collection and curated numerous exhibitions, including “Trespassers: James Prosek and the Texas Prairie” and “Arthur Dove: Miniature Laboratories.” He is the co-author of Carter Handbook and the editor of the forthcoming inaugural volume of Carter Bulletin.

Meet the other curators in the Department of the Arts of the Americas.