MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA: FREDERICK R. WEISMAN ART MUSEUM

The University of Minnesota was the lucky recipient of a very large legacy from Frederick R. Weisman, a native Minnesotan who moved to California and married the sister of billionaire Norton Simon, made billions of dollars himself in multiple businesses (the man had the Midas touch), amassed a huge modern art collection, and gave most of it away.

The part given to the University of Minnesota is housed in a museum designed by the renowned architect Frank Gehry, and with its stainless steel-coated twisting and turning exterior, it reminds me a lot of the Gehry-designed Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles:

 The side facing the campus is a brick wall, meant to blend in with other buildings on campus, but the opposing side is an abstraction of a fish and a waterfall. Can you see it?

Neither can I, but I love it anyway.

The museum has a lovely setting alongside the river with a great view of downtown Minneapolis:

MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART

It didn't take long to learn that Minnesota is full of surprises, and one of those surprises (at least for me) was how vibrant the art scene is. Much to my husband's dismay, we visited three art museums (if you count the sculpture garden as an art museum, which I do) in Minneapolis.

The surprise within the surprise was the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA).

I guess all art museums are full of surprises, which is what makes them so intriguing, but the MIA had more than its share of surprises.

Did you notice the art in the picture above? That was the first surprise--a bronze body-less head on the front lawn. Eros Bendato Screpolato (1999) by Polish artist Igor Mitoraj is 12 feet long, 7 feet tall, and 4,000 pounds. Translated, the title is something like "Eros in Cracked Bandages." The general feeling of decay and the empty eyes are haunting.

Just down the sidewalk is an angel standing on the back of what looks like a wolf. The work is entitled The Fighter of the Spirit (1928), and is an anti-war piece by German Expressionist artist Ernst Barlach.

 Isn't this a great face?

MINNEAPOLIS SCULPTURE GARDEN

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden sits on eleven acres of prime real estate in downtown Minneapolis. With forty permanent installations, it is one of the largest sculpture gardens in the country. Unfortunately, when we were there, most of the sculptures were in storage while the park was getting a make-over.

We began our visit at the Cowles Conservatory, the ultimate "house with glass walls." The walk is lined with seasonal plantings, succulents, and ferns. Loud talking seems out of place in this almost church-like place.

Individual rooms are created by walls covered in creeping fig

The pathway opens up into this room filled by an enormous glass and steel fish created by architect Frank Gehry in 1986.

Of this sculpture, Gehry wrote, "In Toronto, when I was very young, my grandmother and I used to go to Kensington, a Jewish market, on Thursday morning. She would buy a carp for gefilte fish. She'd put it in the bathtub and this big black carp--two or three feet long--would swim around and I would play with it. I would watch it turn and twist . . . and then she'd kill it and make gefilte fish and that was always sad and awful and ugly."  This fish is worth a visit all by itself. Gehry's childhood trauma has become pure joy for today's tourists.

MINNEAPOLIS AND ST. PAUL: A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE BASILICA OF ST. MARY

The "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul are more like fraternal than identical twins. Although they have many things in common, they have distinct borders, and each has its own personality. 

One example of the fraternal-twin split can be illustrated by the Catholic church. Together, Minneapolis and St. Paul make up a Roman Catholic Archdiocese with about 750,000 members who are led by a single archbishop. Each city has a large church that acts as the religious heart of the city, and together the two buildings serve as "co-cathedrals" for the Archdiocese.  Both churches were designed by Franco-American architect Emmanuel Louis Masqueray (chief architect of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis) and were built at the same time, and they both reflect Masqueray's French training. 

And yet, just as the two cities are distinct, so are the two churches.

This post will focus on the building in Minneapolis, a Basilica dedicated to St. Mary, and my next post will discuss the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, which was actually built almost simultaneously. (Imagine that drain on the church budget.) 

Construction of St. Mary's Basilica took place between 1907 and 1915, although the interior decoration wasn't completed until 1925. There are 83 Roman Catholic churches in the United States that have been designated minor basilicas (the only four major basilicas being in Rome), and this was the very first one, attaining that status in 1926 when it was so designated by Pope Pius XI.

The architectural design is Classical/Baroque or Beaux Arts, depending on who you ask. (I don't know enough about architecture to know whether or not that is essentially the same style.) The two spires are 116 feet tall and the central dome is 138 feet. On top of the dome is a secondary structure and a cross, bringing the total height to 200 feet.

Images of Mary are prominent both outside and in: