They were poets, artists, and teachers and would go on to become architects, arts administrators, and management consultants. But at this moment, in the early 1970s, they were educators, charged with illuminating the mysteries of fine art. It’s a tradition of talks, classes, and school visits that has been around as long as Mia itself.
The first bridge between the museum and the public was an uncommon woman named Emma Roberts. Her family moved to Minnesota from the East in 1867, when she was 7, just after the Civil War. She shared a love of nature with her brother, Thomas Sadler Roberts, painting watercolors of flowers while Thomas became a well-known ornithologist and helped found the predecessor to the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota.
Emma Roberts, sketching outdoors, in a photo from the collection of Nancy C. Roberts.
She never married, never had children. In her 20s and 30s, she traveled the world and studied with artists back East such as Childe Hassam, the influential American Impressionist painter. In 1904, she became the head of the drawing program for Minneapolis Public Schools and founded the Handicraft Guild of Minneapolis. Largely led by women, the Guild quickly became one of the country’s most prolific organizations promoting the Arts and Crafts movement, and many Twin Cities homes still feature tiles, fireplaces, and other designs by Guild artists.
When Mia opened in 1915, Roberts initiated the museum’s first school programs: Classes would come to the museum to hear her talk about art before exploring the galleries. It was a novel idea. “The nature of this work is necessarily experimental,” the Mia Bulletin reported in 1915, “but it is hoped that by next year a definite plan may be carried out. In taking this step, which is characteristic of the broad and intelligent administration of its public schools, Minneapolis joins with New York and other progressive cities in attempting to make the art museum of greatest value to the public schools.”
Three years later, the program was ingrained, explained in the Bulletin as cultivating “art ideals by means of bringing the pupils into contact with art objects, and through illustrative and explanatory lectures, in the expectation that interest will thus be developed which will open the minds of the pupils to aesthetic impressions.” By 1920, some 7,000 students a year were visiting Mia under Roberts’ guidance.
Today, as the buses line up around Mia, disgorging students by the thousands, only the numbers and the presentation have changed. Roberts’ legacy is simple and powerful, the planting of a seed.
Photo: Posed in front of 2014 Stevens Ave., temporary home to Mia’s Education and Curatorial offices during construction of the Tange addition in the early 1970s. Standing: Maxine Gaiber, Arts Resources for Teachers and Students Department Head (now director of the Gershman Y in Philadelphia); left to right: Deena Sackman, Coordinator for High School programs ARTS; Scott Helmes, Coordinator for High School Architecture Programs ARTS (now an artist, photographer, and architect in St. Paul); Barbara Camm Coordinator for Junior High School Programs ARTS (now retired from corporate consulting); Susan Jacobsen, Coordinator for Elementary School Programs ARTS (currently Mia’s manager of lectures and programs—and its longest-serving staff member).
Much of this history was learned from Sue Leaf’s 2013 article in Minnesota History Quarterly, “A Tale of Two Siblings.”