“In troubled times such as these,” the MIA lamented in 1931, “there is a tendency to discard, as unnecessary luxuries, many things which seem essential to life in prosperous days. Interest in books and music and art is packed away with the party dress.”
The Great Depression was on, though it wasn’t clear how long it would last. The following year, the museum’s admonishment grew more barbed: “Do you not realize that your 10-dollar membership”—about 160 bucks today—“is a vital part of the Institute’s income? If the Institute means anything to you, please renew or pay up your membership now. We need your 10 dollars desperately.”
The opening of the Charleston Room in 1931.
Eventually the museum adapted. In 1933, the Friends of the Institute curated a quirky, modest show called “Fitness for Fifty Cents”—“probably the most practical and most diverting [exhibition] ever shown at the museum,” the museum crowed. It was, as the name implies, a collection of worthy objects worth half a dollar.
Mind you, it was staged as a climax to the group’s annual Winter Cruise in the Caribbean. The debarking cruisers collected the objects—pottery bowls, playing cards, candlesticks, smoking accessories—from Twin Cities stores. “It is their belief,” the museum noted, “that many gay and attractively designed objects for daily use can now be purchased for such a sum.” They were right. It was the golden age of American design, when anything from coffee pots to vacuum cleaners were artfully accentuated and streamlined to compete in the growing mass market. It was the worst of times and the best of times.
By 1935, the MIA was feeling secure enough again to throw itself a 20th birthday party. It recreated the first exhibition it ever held, before the present museum was built, in 1883. “At that time, Minneapolis was a one-street town,” the MIA recalled, “and that street was deep in mud as carriages went down Washington Avenue to the exhibition.” The show, it noted, had “the well-bred decorum of a ladies’ luncheon.”
William Moloney at the MIA in 1932 or ’33.
That was then. In 1935, the museum announced that the revisited exhibition wouldn’t be an exact replica: “Taste, like other things, has undergone a great change in 50 years.” The artworks it once celebrated, including “two horrendous religious scenes” embroidered on wool “have long since been discarded as puerile.”
The museum celebrated how far it had come. It had weathered the worst of the storm. And when a patron named Marjorie Knowles presented the MIA with a French stole and chasuble, a religious vestment, it seemed relieved to be remembered: “It was left to Miss Knowles to realize that even an art museum might like to receive a birthday present.”
Watch for more Once at MIA flashbacks every Monday at MIA Stories.
Top photo: A school tour in 1935.