At 3 p.m. on the afternoon of January 7, 1915, the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis sent up a prayer: “Accept now, we beseech thee, our father in heaven, under thy gracious favor, the fair temple which we today dedicate to thy name for the ennobling purposes of art.” May God, he asked, bless those who work for the “true, the good, and the beautiful.”
The program for the opening ceremony of the MIA, January 7, 1915.
With that, the opening ceremony of the Minneapolis Institute of Art was underway. It wasn’t held at the MIA, actually, but the old Auditorium on Nicollet Avenue and 11th Street (replaced by the Minneapolis Convention Center)—the MIA didn’t have its own auditorium yet. The Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra played a Strauss prelude and 10 men got up to speak, one after the other: the pastor, James J. Hill (who mostly admonished the museum not to spring for unworthy art; not to “pitch the key too low”), the governor, the mayor, etc. It was all over in less than two hours.
After decades of small exhibitions at the Minneapolis Public Library, the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts finally had its own building. A beauty, if not nearly as extensive as originally hoped. But no one seemed to think it was merely a building, a façade. “Therein, the false shall have no place,” intoned Governor Winfield Hammond, “for art is truth and the development of the institute is the development of truth and culture.”
The old Minneapolis Public Library, where the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts held exhibitions prior to opening the MIA.
That evening, a second celebration was held at the MIA for museum members and their friends—about four or five thousand people, welcomed by the Lowrys, the Folwells, the Whitneys, and other founding families. It was an era of noblesse oblige. The MIA, its founders hoped, would elevate the Upper Midwest, and link their proud milling town to the great old centers of civilization back east and beyond.
Minneapolis Mayor Wallace Nye took them at their word that the museum would not be their exclusive clubhouse: “Now that they have seen the project through,” he said, “they do not propose to be selfish with it. It is for the people, all of them, from wherever they may come. It is for our neighbors as well as ourselves. It has been given for helpful influence and the enjoyment of all who contemplate a study of the beautiful.”
Top photo: A school tour shortly after the museum opened in 1915.
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