From the inception of St. Thomas, we have had pre-eminent designers complete buildings that are important to the history of American architecture, including Clarence Johnston’s Chapel of St. Mary (1905), Emmanuel Masqueray’s Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas (1918), and Edwin Lundie’s Gainey House (1954-1957). But, perhaps the most notable work completed for St. Thomas was done by turn-of-the-20th-century architect Cass Gilbert.

The year is 1890. The high school, college and seminary of St. Thomas Aquinas, founded by Archbishop John Ireland, have been holding classes for five years in a single, Second Empire style building located on the site of the present day north campus. The time had come to consider a more elaborate setting, given the expanding interest in religious training at the seminary.

Ireland had the land, 60 acres donated by Irish immigrant William Finn. He needed an architect and patron to create and finance his vision. The patron? None other than railroad baron James J. Hill, who would contribute $500,000 to the project in honor of his devout Roman Catholic wife, Mary.

As historian Mary L. Wingerd noted in Claiming the City: Politics, Faith and the Power of Place in St. Paul (2003), Hill had a vested interest in the seminary for business reasons as well. Archbishop Ireland was committed to the Americanization of Minnesota’s culturally diverse Catholics, and his goal was to establish a seminary that would train priests to impart American Catholic principles to their parishioners. Since most of Hill’s employees were Catholics, it served his purposes to support the education of priests who would Americanize his workforce. It also served Hill’s purposes to recommend a capable designer to the archbishop.

On Oct. 22, 1891, James J. Hill summoned Cass Gilbert to his imposing new residence on Summit Avenue. Gilbert, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts based architecture program, had worked in the office of the most important architecture firm in late 19th century America, McKim, Mead and White, before returning to St. Paul in 1882. A six-year partnership with James Knox Taylor dissolved about the time of this particular meeting.

Cass Gilbert. (Photo courtesy Minnesota Historical Society)

Gilbert’s career was taking off and Hill had been the benefactor of his success in Gilbert’s designs for several depots for his Great Northern Railway. When Gilbert arrived at Hill’s mansion, he found Archbishop John Ireland and Father Louis Caillet (Mary Hill’s confessor) there with his host. The purpose of their meeting was to discuss the design of new buildings for the expanding seminary. The next day, Gilbert and Archbishop Ireland drove out to see the land Ireland had selected: forty wooded acres sloping toward the east bank of the Mississippi River at the end of Summit Avenue.

Archbishop Ireland contributed to the seminary’s design as much as he could, but Hill left no doubt that he was the one who was fully in charge. Gilbert historian Geoffrey Blodgett described their encounter in Cass Gilbert: The Early Years (2001): Hill “fixed his intimidating one-eyed glare on the young architect and told him that he was answerable to Hill, not the archbishop, on all issues touching design, construction, and cost.”

Hill’s continuous intervention into the minutia of everything from heating systems to door locks must have challenged Gilbert. He regularly gave the architect a dressing-down if the slightest changes were made without his approval; and he even threatened to find someone else to work with or to stop work altogether.

Gilbert seriously considered withdrawing from the project more than once, but he saw it through to the end.

Despite the power struggle with Hill, Gilbert succeeded in producing an environment that supported Ireland’s goals: a place for the education of American priests with a  campus that engaged with its natural environment and developing residential area around it.

Gilbert designed six buildings for the seminary: an administration building, a classroom building, two dormitories, a refectory and a gymnasium. The original plans called for a chapel as well, but this was put on hold until later. Hill wanted the buildings to be plain but dignified. Gilbert responded with a pared-down aesthetic similar to the Great Northern depots he had already designed for Hill in Willmar, Grand Forks and Anoka, a safe choice since their design had already weathered Hill’s exacting scrutiny.

As Hill kept pushing Gilbert to reduce costs, the architect drew together Renaissance inspired elements to produce well-proportioned buildings with smooth brick walls, hipped roofs and arched windows. The north and south wings of the administration building housed, respectively, a private chapel and a library large enough for 20,000 volumes. The three stories of the central portion housed administrative offices, apartments for professors, a common room, parlors and reception rooms. At four stories plus the attic, the north and south dormitories each had a chapel, and together they provided enough space for each of 120 students to have two private rooms. There also were bathrooms with hot and cold water and an infirmary.

The St. Paul Seminary building, now demolished. (Photo courtesy Minnesota Historical Society)

In the two-story classroom building there were four classrooms, one of which was a “physical” and chemistry laboratory. On the second floor there was a “great hall” (also referred to as the aula maxima) with a platform at the front and seating for as many as 500 people, a space that served the community as well as seminary.

The two-story refectory housed a kitchen and dining hall described by a contemporary writer as having a “lofty ceiling of native woods, broad, old time fire place, plentiful supply of light.”

From the outside, the most notable feature of the gymnasium building that doubled as the school’s heating plant was its smokestack, complete with a Latin cross in brick relief at its uppermost reach. For recreation, the two story structure offered a large gymnasium with open trusswork and four smaller rooms, one of which was used for  reading. Although the 1893 financial panic slowed things down, the buildings were completed in 1894 at a cost of $184,268.13, well under the $200,000 budget, as Gilbert was proud to point out — and even then Gilbert had a hard time getting Hill to pay him in full.

In an article in the April 1895 issue of the Catholic University Bulletin, Father Patrick Danehy, one of the seminary’s professors, described the new buildings as being “in the North Italian style, simple, solid and impressive.” To him, “the solidity of their walls reminds one strongly of the monastic edifices of a bygone age.” For Archbishop Ireland,  on the other hand, the seminary was meant to be contemporary and forward looking, designed to meet the latest needs of the modern, American Catholic Church.

Even with its nod to tradition, the facilities the seminary provided were fully up-to-date,  from a heating plant that was reportedly so advanced that it was written up in the Engineer’s Journal, to a physics and chemistry laboratory designed to make sure the students would be well-informed when questions came up about the relationship between science and religion.

The campus also was decidedly unmonastic. Rather than clustering the buildings tightly around an inward-looking, cloister-like courtyard, Gilbert oriented all of them  northsouth and grouped them loosely, leaving a good bit of space between them. He also oriented them so that they would have a connection with the surrounding community.

Summit Avenue skirted the northern boundary of the site, and the east-west trajectory of Grand Avenue defined the campus’ main axis. This became all the more apparent when a drive – essentially an extension of Grand Avenue – was installed through the center of the court. The campus was thus connected with and open to the community, and it also provided a reason for people to come: the classroom building housed an auditorium that could seat as many as 500 people for public lectures.

Ireland’s decision to place different functions in separate buildings was an unusual choice at a time when most seminaries were housed in a single, large building. Ireland believed that seminary education ought to cultivate the body as well as the mind and spirit, and he contended that exercise should be part of the students’ education.

Ireland may have been responding to growing concerns about seminarians being too stationary and disconnected from the world, as they remained holed up in the large, all-purpose buildings where they lived and typically were educated. And he also may have imbibed the growing taste for “muscular Christianity,” a movement that advocated physical exercise as a means to the production of a form of Christianity that was robust and manly.

Physical education was becoming an increasingly important component of education, as Gilbert would find in designing buildings at the Shattuck School in Faribault, Minn., and Madison Central High School. With the campus-like arrangement Gilbert produced, the students would be compelled to get outdoors to go from building to building,  and they also would have the gymnasium available for more vigorous exercise. Beyond this, there were acres of what Danehy described as “native sward threaded with graveled walks and dotted with flower beds” where the seminarians could stroll.

The result was a campus designed to produce a new, American priesthood, through modern facilities serving a modern educational agenda, encouragement of physical as well as mental exercise, and integration with the community.

Perhaps Gilbert’s most iconic Minnesota design is the state capitol building.

By the time the seminary was ready to build its chapel, Gilbert had extricated himself from the project and moved to New York. He may have been relieved rather than offended when his architect friend Clarence Johnston was tapped to do the chapel’s design. Predictably, the seminary was known, for a time, as the Hill Seminary after its major benefactor, and its resemblance to Hill’s Great Northern railroad buildings was not lost on observers.

What remains of the St. Paul Seminary is now part of the University of St. Thomas’ south campus. Three of the buildings have been demolished and several still serve the  university community. The two dormitories – Cretin and Loras halls – have been remodeled, with the former an undergraduate student residence and the latter an office building. The gymnasiumheating plant survives as the university’s Service Center, although at one point it was considered as a potential dedicated art gallery for exhibitions, a notion that may come to be in a new fine arts building in the coming years.

In To Work for the Whole People: John Ireland’s Seminary in St. Paul (2002), author Sister Mary Christine Athans noted that designing and overseeing the construction of the Minnesota State Capitol (1895-1905) or even the United States Supreme Court Building (1928-1935) in Washington, D.C., probably was an easier task for Gilbert than building the seminary.

Even though Gilbert at times was constrained by Hill’s patronage, he stayed true to his classically inspired architectural vision and created at the end of Summit Avenue, the start of our own version of an American architecture, appropriate to the Catholic identity of those creating it.

About the authors: Victoria Young is an associate professor of modern architectural history at St. Thomas. Katherine Solomonson is an associate professor of architectural history in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, and is working on a book documenting Gilbert’s career.

Read more from St. Thomas Magazine.

With that fame came a move to commissions of a large scale, such as the 1997 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the 2003 Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and across the river in Minneapolis, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, finished in 1993. These projects supplanted Gehry’s need to design domestic space. But in the summer of 2012, a Gehry-designed duplex became owner-occupied in New Orleans, a part of the actor Brad Pitt’s Make it Right Foundation’s project in the Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward.

How do we connect Gehry’s Winton Guest House to the Make it Right House? What has Gehry changed, updated or invented in his domestic architecture in the last 25 years? This is the question I will be examining during my sabbatical next year.

After traveling to New Orleans several times during the last two years to lay the groundwork for this research, I realized that the city was a perfect fit for an architectural history graduate seminar at St. Thomas. And this spring, The Architecture of New Orleans course was born.

New Orleans has been called many things – the Crescent City, The Big Easy, The Birthplace of Jazz, NOLA, the City that Care Forgot. The city’s racial and ethnic makeups have created a variety of architecture found nowhere else in the United States. Settled by the French in the 18th century and controlled by Spain in 1763, New Orleans was also home to a large population of free people of color, as well as slaves.

With the arrival of the 19th century the American element of New Orleans grew with settlers from the Northeast sharing the city with immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Sicily and beyond. Each group has contributed to the architectural legacy of New Orleans in powerful ways, and students in my graduate art history seminar this spring are exploring this variety in their research with topics focusing on cemeteries, voodoo, New Urbanism in housing projects, food markets, public parks, hospitals, sacred spaces (including a contemporary Spanish Baptist church rebuilding after Katrina), colonial plantations, biophilic design, historic preservation, Pitt’s Make it Right Houses, and the connection between Walt Disney and the French Quarter.

The research provides a fabulous overview of the layers of New Orleanian architecture – strata that were made visible on a recent trip our class took to the Crescent City this past spring break.

Students found their own ways to New Orleans early in the week and researched their projects. We all gathered as a group on Thursday, March 28, at Jackson Square in the French Quarter for a walking tour of the Quarter, Central Business District and Warehouse District. I had scoped out the buildings on a previous visit and our tour required that each student present a five-minute on-the-street talk about their building as we progressed through the neighborhoods.

The students were expected to connect their presentations into our classroom discussions and also address the building as an art object. What did they see now that they were standing in front of it? There is no better way to understand the built environment than to be out in it: looking, touching and getting a feel for context and scale. I was thrilled to watch New Orleans come to life for the students.

Saturday morning found us in the Garden District at Lafayette Cemetery No. 1. The cemeteries of New Orleans, with their above ground tombs, are amazingly beautiful, and they clearly reflect the character of the city built largely just a few feet above sea level. After our cemetery visit, a little lagniappe (something extra) found us touring the adjacent neighborhood, stopping by Sandra Bullock and John Goodman’s grand Victorian-era homes.

On Friday, we were fortunate to visit the Lower Ninth Ward with John Williams, the executive architect of Brad Pitt’s Make it Right houses and a longtime New Orleans designer. Supported by funds from the Art History Department, we spent five hours on a bus tour with John. It was one of the greatest architectural experiences I have ever had, and I think my students felt the same.

The area is still, after almost eight years, coming back to life. The Make it Right Foundation hopes to build 150 homes in the neighborhood. But basic services such as grocery stores, schools and the like have not returned to the Lower Ninth. It’s still a very tough go for folks who have returned. Students were able to meet with residents, including John “Smitty” Smith and Ron Lewis at his “House of Dance and Feathers,” and learn their stories of evacuation and survival.

A duplex designed by Frank Gehry in New Orleans. (Photo by John Williams)

And it was here in the Lower Ninth where we encountered Gehry’s work. The pink and purple duplex, its hues selected by the homeowner, recalls the liveliness of New Orleans’ vernacular domestic shotgun houses and Creole cottages. It is built out of environmentally friendly materials and includes solar panels and other sustainable features. The variety of porches encourages engagement with neighbors and passersby.

Gehry believed in Pitt’s vision and wanted to make a house that responded to the “history, vernacular and climate of New Orleans,” as he stated on Make it Right’s blog.

The completion of the house is history in the making – a work by Gehry and a foundation that helped the hardest hit citizens of New Orleans when other entities were slow to do so. And now, the University of St. Thomas has a connection to both.

An exhibition seminar differs from a regular graduate seminar in that, in addition to working on individual research projects, students produce a coherent exhibition with that research. Unlike typical graduate courses, having an exhibition focus in a course provides opportunities for student research to find a real-world audience beyond the classroom – the exhibition visitors who see the artworks, read the wall labels, and peruse the catalogue.

In 2007 I led a similar seminar on national identity and the historical design of printing types. The students’ research for that course resulted in a 2008 exhibition held at Minnesota Center for Book Arts titled “Face the Nation: How National Identity Shaped Modern Typeface Design, 1900-1960.” Their research is still accessible at the exhibition’s website (www.stthomas.edu/facethenation). I knew from that experience that another exhibition seminar would be a rewarding experience for students and teacher alike.

The objective of a seminar built around the Fiterman collection was for students to undertake original research and share what they found, both in the scholarly format of a journal article and in the functional format of wall labels and exhibition catalogue entries. Putting this in practice would lead us to ask this fundamental question: How does one undertake and present research about modern art effectively, engaging with complex ideas yet producing a report that is of practical use and limited length, and is coherent for a given audience? This is a question of great importance for the two traditional subdomains of the art history discipline: the academy and the museum. Neither is served by the notion that intellectual and pragmatic approaches to talking about art are strangers to each other. We would need to develop strategies and skills for integrating these approaches.

From Handling Artwork to Writing Museum Labels

For students to experience the full spectrum of research challenges, I required that each investigate both well-known and lesser-known, or even unknown, artists. For well-established artists, a bulk of existing scholarship should be consulted and synthesized in order to advance knowledge on the topic. On the other hand, for little-known artists, the challenge is not too many sources to consult but too few.

Whether there was a wealth or dearth of available information about a particular artist, students had the extraordinary experience of having direct access to the artworks themselves. Once the artists were assigned, preliminary research conducted and best practices for the physical handling of artworks reviewed, the seminar moved from the classroom to the art storage space that had been set aside in the Murray-Herrick Campus Center. For three weeks in the middle of the semester, students took turns presenting their research-in-progress and showing their works to the class.

Art History graduate students Brady King and Lauren Greer take some measurements as they hang art in O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. (Photo by Mark Brown)

Working with artworks directly is a special opportunity. In typical art history classes, students experience works of art as digital images projected on a classroom screen. With the actual art in front of us, we could perceive subtleties of color, texture and, of course, scale that are lost in a photo on a screen. In addition, as unique artifacts of human creation, artworks have what German cultural critic Walter Benjamin famously called an “aura,” which is lost or compromised in photographic reproductions. This artistic presence also added to the excitement of our class meetings in the storage space.

After conducting preliminary research on three artists, each student chose two artists to pursue further. I encouraged students to build persuasive arguments for their projects using ideas first advanced by Wayne Booth, Gregory Colomb, and Joseph Williams in their book The Craft of Research. Analyzing the key parts of a research argument – the claim that the author wants to prove, the reasons for believing the claim, and the evidence that can demonstrate the persuasiveness of those reasons – we discussed how these parts manifested not only in scholarly articles but also in other formats: lectures, exhibition labels and exhibition catalogue entries.

Using feedback from me and from each other, students refined their arguments and entered the last stage of the seminar: expressing their research results in very different formats. For each project, students were required to write an essay suitable for an academic audience, and also a museum label and catalogue entry that would be suitable for an on-campus exhibition. Faced with this challenge, students acutely felt the differences between these two worlds. Readers of academic journals expect exhaustive research, clear citation of sources and a patient layout of a complex argument. Exhibition visitors, on the other hand, seek engaging and accessible written guidance for viewing the work of art in front of them. They are likely to skip labels that do not provide that guidance concisely. While the academic articles could each be 12 pages long, the museum labels could be no more than 150 words each.

Museum label writing is a specialized skill. The brevity and straightforwardness of the resulting text belies the effort required to make it work well. One of my favorite seminar meetings happened late in the semester, when Erika Holmquist-Wall, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (and a 2006 graduate of our master’s program) visited our class to consult students on professional practices of writing effective museum labels. In small-group discussions that resembled professional label-editing workshops, Holmquist-Wall guided students in revising their texts to speak more effectively to museum visitors.

Results

The research projects that the seminar students accomplished were remarkable, and hearing about their findings made me doubly excited about the gift of the Fiterman collection to St. Thomas. I was introduced to new artists and learned more about familiar ones from the diligent historical exploration my students undertook.

Fiterman played a major role in the Twin Cities art scene, and so it comes as no surprise that some of the creators represented in the collection were artists of local renown. I enjoyed learning more about the paintings of Aribert Munzner, the prints of Eugene Larkin, and the sculptures of Harriet Bart, for example. The hard-edged, high-saturation prints by Peter Busa looked familiar in style to me, and then student Marquette Bateman-Ek explained why: Busa also painted the bright, crisp murals on the Valspar building in Minneapolis.

Several projects expanded my understanding of the artworks by decoding their subject matter and symbolism. What was going on in Miriam Schapiro’s silhouetted version of a “Punch and Judy” puppet show? Student Kate Tucker deciphered the work, noting references to artist Frida Kahlo and unveiling the collage as a feminist effort both to address domestic violence and to point to an ancestry of female artists. What accounted for the spiraling shapes in the prints and drawings of Nigerian artist Uche Okeke? Student Lauren Greer discovered that those shapes were derived from uli, an art form used by women of the Igbo culture for body decoration and wall painting. Was there purpose to the seemingly random objects – nails, shoeprints, sunglasses – that appear in Pop artist James Rosenquist’s print in the collection? Bateman-Ek explained that they actually reflect an autobiographical story of a traumatic era in the artist’s personal life.

Greer and Ivanova check the fit of a piece from the Dolly Fiterman collection. (Photo by Mark Brown)

In addition to these decryption keys, student research uncovered the processes employed by artists whose works are in the Fiterman collection. French photographer Georges Rousse is represented in the collection by several photographs of messy, graffitied interiors. Student Carin Jorgensen explained Rousse’s method of entering a building slated for demolition, painting figures on its walls, and taking a photograph as the enduring memory of the doomed space. Student Barbara Quade-Harick traced the source of Nancy Graves’s brightly dotted abstract prints from the early 1970s to NASA maps of the moon. Artist John Raimondi is represented in the collection by two very different works: a realistic color drawing of wolves and a tabletop-size model of his monumental abstract sculpture “Cage.” In interviews with the artist, student Brady King discovered his manner of addressing human emotional concerns through a process of moving from realistic animal imagery toward ever more abstract visual language.

Some students particularly impressed me with the originality of their research. Alyssa Thiede learned that one of her artists, local painter Ta-Coumba Aiken, thought of his art-making as a healing process. Thiede considered this idea not only through typical art-historical methods, such as decoding the traditional symbolism of the paintings; she also looked into the very different field of health studies to gauge whether forms such as those in Aiken’s paintings fit with what current studies have concluded about the therapeutic effects of art in health care settings. Abby Hall looked into a late print by painter Milton Avery, and made a persuasive case that it reflected influence from his fellow New York artist and former student Mark Rothko, the noted abstract expressionist; heretofore, scholars had observed influence that Avery had on Rothko, but Hall proposed that late in his life it appears the influence went in the other direction as well, as indicated by both visual and biographical evidence. Would I believe that Avery the teacher could learn something from Rothko the student? After learning so much from the students in this seminar, I had no doubt that was possible.

The donation of artworks from Fiterman has added valuable, beautiful and interesting works of contemporary art to the collections of the University of St. Thomas. The “Insights into Modern Art” exhibition (on display in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center lobby gallery through May 26) offers a chance for the public to see choice works from this collection. At the same time, it serves as a showcase of the pedagogy that this gift has enabled. The students in my seminar learned valuable lessons about working directly with contemporary art, a kind of professional training that was made possible by the donation. I look forward to future opportunities both to display the university’s modern collections in dynamic ways and to teach future students via such hands-on learning.

Read more from CAS Spotlight.

Imagine a birthday party where you get to open 249 presents. That’s what it was like for art history students at the University of St. Thomas when they removed bubble wrap from each piece in a large collection of modern art donated to the university last year by noted Twin Cities art collector Dolly Fiterman.

The students, enrolled in the graduate seminar “The Craft of Researching Modern Art,” selected and curated 26 of the pieces for the “Insights Into Modern Art” exhibition now on display at the university.

Graduate students in Dr. Craig Eliason’s “The Craft of Researching Modern Art” seminar unwrap some of the 249 works of modern art donated to St. Thomas by Dolly Fiterman.

The exhibition features works in a range of media by 18 famous and not-as-famous artists; it can be seen through May 26 in the lobby gallery of the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the university’s St. Paul campus.

An exhibition reception and panel discussion, free and open to the public, will be held at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, April 27, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. For more information call (651) 962-5560 or visit this website.

Students in the seminar, led by Dr. Craig Eliason, associate professor of art history at St. Thomas, experienced the full spectrum of mounting an exhibition as part of the department’s program for engaging students through art. They learned to safely handle valuable art, research and write about the artists, prepare descriptive wall labels, develop an exhibition catalog, and finally to mount and display the works.

Art history graduate student Brady King prepares artwork from the Dolly Fiterman collection for display in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center lobby gallery.

Three of Eliason’s students will discuss what they learned about the artists and their art at the April 27 panel discussion:

• Abby Hall will discuss “Opposites Attract: The Reciprocity of Influence Between Mark Rothko and Milton Avery.”
• Kate Tucker will discuss “Feminist Artistic Lineage: Frida Kahlo Through Miriam Schapiro’s Eyes.”
• Marquette Bateman-Ek will discuss “James Rosenquist: Print Symbols of His Disastrous Decade.”

The modern-art collection Fiterman donated to St. Thomas contains works from the 1950s to the 1990s, with the greatest number from the 1970s and 1980s. Media include lithograph, woodblock print, bronze sculpture, silkscreen, collage, woodcut, engraving, oil stick on paper, and pen and ink on paper.

Best-known nationally or internationally among the artists in the exhibition are Milton Avery (woodblock print), Miriam Schapiro (mixed media), Ilya Bolotowsky (screen print on plexiglass), A. R. Penck (engraving), Nancy Graves (lithograph), Karel Appel (lithograph), James Rosenquist (etching) and Allan D’Archangelo (silkscreen and mixed media).

The best-known local artists represented are Ta-Coumba Aiken (acrylic on canvas), Aribert Munzner (acrylic on paperboard), Diane Katsiaficas (textile), Eugene Larkin (woodcut) and Harriet Bart (bronze sculpture).

Fiterman grew up in Bejou, a small town about 40 miles north of Detroit Lakes. In high school she was a cheerleader, wrote poetry, was Minnesota’s first Wild Rice Queen and won a statewide drama award.  She attended a business college in St. Cloud but transferred to the University of Minnesota to study speech and radio broadcasting.  In addition to working as a secretary and selling clothing at Dayton’s, she acted at local theaters and spent a year modeling in New York. After returning to Minnesota, she met and married her husband, Edward Fiterman.

Art History graduate students mount works of modern art in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. From the left are Lauren Greer, Olga Ivanova and Brady King.

In the 1950s she began to take sculpture and painting classes and to collect works by post-war artists. In 1977 she opened the Dolly Fiterman Fine Arts gallery in downtown Minneapolis; a decade later she moved the gallery to an elegant, former library building she restored on University Avenue in southeast Minneapolis.

Fiterman represented U.S. and European artists, organized exhibitions and contributed generously to arts, educational, religious and civic organizations.

In an introduction to the exhibition catalog, Father Dennis Dease, president of St. Thomas, wrote that he first became acquainted with Fiterman in the early 1990s “when her name was synonymous in the Twin Cities for ‘world-class art collector.’

“Indeed, the gallery that she founded, Dolly Fiterman Fine Arts, has shone an international spotlight on art in the Twin Cities, and her big-hearted philanthropy had bolstered Minnesota’s arts community as well as educational, religious and civic organizations.”

At St. Thomas, she supported Mark Balma’s frescoes in Terrence Murphy Hall in Minneapolis, the restoration of the grotto on the south campus in St. Paul, and the Jay Phillips Center for Jewish-Christian Learning (now Interfaith Learning).

Dolly Fiterman.

Among her first gifts of art to St. Thomas was a carved African Mende mask in 1994, which has been used since for a methods course required for all art history majors and graduate students. Three years later she donated a large oxidized-corten steel sculpture, John Raimondi’s “Cage,” which can be seen on Summit Avenue next to the O’Shaughnessy Science Hall. A model of that sculpture is part of the “Insights Into Modern Art” exhibition.

St. Thomas honored Fiterman with an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1997. Her degree citation quoted an art critic’s description of her: “what oil-field workers would call a gusher – a great, explosive, natural well of bubbling energy and impulsive enthusiasm.”

The university also showed its appreciation by offering her a place to live on campus in 2002 while her Minneapolis home was undergoing repairs.

Over the years Fiterman also lent St. Thomas several dozen large paintings that have been displayed in campus buildings. Those works, in addition to the collection of modern art donated a year ago, have been given to the university to create a core teaching collection.

“While she has been generous with a number of educational institutions, her interest in the teaching of visual arts through exposure to high-quality original artworks is strongly visible in her relationship with St. Thomas,” wrote Dr. Shelly Nordtorp-Madson, chief curator and clinical faculty member for the Art History Department.

“The works on display (in O’Shaughnessy Educational Center) are only a fraction of the total pieces of art within the collection,” Nordtorp-Madson wrote, “and plans are already in the works to develop other thematic exhibitions utilizing the art from Dolly Fiterman’s substantial gift. It also is hoped that these works of art can be more extensively exhibited as an educational collection, in a new fine arts center, which would provide even more opportunities for students to learn the skills of working with art.”

According to Dease, “Dolly helped us choose and purchase art for our own collection, and she gave the university nearly 400 works of her own; these include contemporary paintings, drawings and sculpture by some of the world’s best-recognized artists as well as a remarkable collection of African art.”

Dolly Fiterman received her honorary doctorate from St. Thomas in 1997. Her citation described her as a “natural well of bubbling energy and impulsive enthusiasm.”

Fiterman’s contributions to St. Thomas follow two other recent donations to the university’s collection. In 2007, 2,000 carvings and artifacts in the American Museum of Asmat Art were given to St. Thomas by the American Crosier Fathers and Brothers and the Diocese of Agats. In 2008, Frank Gehry’s Winton Guest House was donated by Kirt Woodhouse and moved from Lake Minnetonka to the university’s conference center on the outskirts of Owatonna.

“Together, these collections have created new opportunities for students in art history classes at St. Thomas,” said Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, the John Ireland Professor and chair of St. Thomas’ Art History Department.

“The donation of artworks from Dolly Fiterman has added valuable, beautiful and interesting works of contemporary art to the collections of the University of St. Thomas,” Eliason wrote in his catalog essay. “The ‘Insights Into Modern Art’ exhibition offers a chance for the public to see choice works from this collection. At the same time, it serves as a showcase of the pedagogy that this gift has enabled.”

American Museum of Asmat Art Director Julie Risser and Art History graduate assistant Abby Hall carefully pried open the large crate that contained all three and anxiously anticipated seeing the carvings for the first time.

Just before the pieces were revealed, Risser commented on the coincidental timing of their arrival. “It is really appropriate that the crate arrived during our exhibition about master carvers,” referring to the Wowipitsj: Man, Myth, Legend exhibition now on display in The Gallery. “I am really curious to see the details of the works.”

After the pair “gloved up,” they reached into the crate and carefully lifted out the first piece. Hall said, “this is gorgeous.”

These Asmat carvings started in Agats, Indonesia and passed through Singapore and New York before arriving at St. Thomas. (Photo by Mike Ekern ’02)

The carvings were commissioned in 2011 from Rufus Sati, a well-known Asmat master carver. Each piece represents one of the three pillars of the Asmat culture. Risser was present in Papua as Sati made his first notches in the largest piece, which represents the relationship of people with people. The second piece represents the relationship of people with the natural world, and the third represents the relationship of people with the spirit world.

The new pieces will fill a niche near the ceiling on the eastern wall of The Gallery on the second floor of the Anderson Student Center, which is home to the AMAA@UST. They are expected to be installed by the end of spring semester.

Risser is pleased with the carvings but acknowledges there is repair work to be done. “We work with a great conservator,” she said. “It looks like the repair work will be fairly minor.” The delicate carvings began their journey on Dec. 26 when they departed by boat from the city of Agats in Indonesia. They arrived at St. Thomas on March 21 by way of Singapore, then New York.

The American Museum of Asmat Art at the University of St. Thomas is a collection of more than 2,000 pieces – ranging from sculptures to fiber art to shields – created by the Asmat people of Indonesia.

The festival, which began at St. Thomas in 1980, traditionally presents a broad range of artistic forms. All of this year’s events are free and open to the public and will be held on the university’s St. Paul campus. They are:

Robin Hemley

Robin Hemley will give a lecture on his book Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, April 11, in the auditorium of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center.

Nola recounts the life of the author’s sister, who died at age 25 after several years of treatment for schizophrenia.

Winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hemley has published seven books; his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of Defunct magazine.

Quvenzhane Wallis

Beasts of the Southern Wild, nominated for four Academy Awards and winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, will be shown from 8 to 11 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, in Scooter’s, located on the first floor of Anderson Student Center.

The film, a drama with fantasy elements, is set in the Louisiana bayou and stars 6-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis. The film will be introduced by Dr. David Penchansky of the St. Thomas Theology Department. More information about the film can be found here.

St. Thomas Alumni Choir, a mixed vocal ensemble of young and old alumni, will present a concert from 3 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, April 21, in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The choir is directed by alumni Sean Barker, Josh Bauder and Casey Johnson.

The choir will perform sacred and secular music by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Elizabeth Alexander, Josh Bauder, Jonathan Tschiggfrie, Stephen Paulus, Felix Mendelssohn, Alice Parker, Z. Randall Stroope and Keith Hampton.

The Gabriel Kney organ.

An Organ and Choir Concert, part of a series marking the 25^th anniversary of the dedication of the university’s Gabriel Kney organ, will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 28, in the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas. Host will be Merritt Nequette, retired professor and former chair on the St. Thomas Music Department.

The program will feature the university’s Liturgical Choir and guest alumni singers directed by Aaron Brown and retired Liturgical Choir founder Robert Strusinski; Orchestra directed by Matthew George; and organists James Callahan, David Jenkins, Kevin Seal and Robert Vickery.

They will perform Noel Goemanne’s “Song of Praise” for choir and organ, which was commissioned for the Gabriel Kney organ dedication in 1987; the Franz Schubert Mass in G; the Concerto for Organ, Strings and Timpani by Francis Poulenc; and the new Concerto for Organ, Strings and Percussion, featuring its composer, organist and professor emeritus of music James Callahan.

Joyce Lyon

The art exhibit “Passaggio/Passage,” featuring works by Joyce Lyon, is on permanent display on the Campus Way, located on the second floor of the Anderson Student Center.

An associate professor of art at the University of Minnesota, Lyon’s works are in public and private collections nationally, including Georgetown University Law Library, the Florida Holocaust Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Walker Art Center and the Weisman Art Museum.

Her work focuses on the intersections of place and memory. “I work from observation with an acute sense of the layering of time,” she said. “In ‘Passagio/Passage,’ I consider pilgrimage as it relates to a physical and spiritual journey and as a meditation on here and there and the passages in between.”

“Passaggio/Passage” by Joyce Lyon

A schedule of this year’s Sacred Arts Festival events can be found here.

It took me several years, though, to bring my interests in Brazilian language and culture together with my passion for art history. After completing a B.A. in art history at the University of Iowa, I enrolled at Tulane University for my master’s degree, where I focused on 19th-century French painting; however, Brazil kept calling me back, and midway through my Ph.D. program at Indiana University, I determined to change my research path and focus on the material culture of Candomblé, an African-Brazilian religion.

Since that time, my primary body of research focuses on the material culture associated with Candomblé, both within the sacred spaces used for religious practice and in the secularized realm of public art. Emerging as a religion among enslaved people, Candomblé was oppressed and even criminalized by the dominant class through much of the 20th century. Although it is now legal to practice Candomblé, the religion remains marginalized in many sectors of society. At the same time, the symbols of Candomblé are frequently extracted from the sacred context and appropriated for use in public art projects under the sponsorship of private corporations and governmental organizations. A fundamental transformation in aesthetics, function and meaning occurs when representations and symbols of the Candomblé orixás (deities) are taken out of their sacred context, adopted for public art projects and interpreted for consumption by a wide audience in a secular space. This process requires a shift in aesthetic principles and allows for the incorporation of Candomblé imagery into newly constructed forms of regional and national identity.

The methods and theories of art history and anthropology guide me in my fieldwork, but I would make no progress without solid language skills. After I completed the introductory language courses at the University of Iowa, I took more advanced courses in Brazilian literature. I continued this line of study as a Ph.D. student, and I also did a few intensive summer language programs in Brazil. When I began my fieldwork, though, my command of the Portuguese language was very formal. I had learned the language by reading literary classics and writing academic papers, striving for impeccable grammar. Many of the people who make the greatest contributions to my research through their deep knowledge of Candomblé have not had the advantage of formal education, and their use of language is much more colloquial. One of my great challenges in the course of my fieldwork was learning to expand my use of language to adapt to the context of its everyday use.

I enjoy teaching Candomblé to students who have experience with Catholic traditions because there are many interesting parallels to explore. In some Candomblé communities, people juxtapose African traditions with Catholic imagery and practices, a remnant of the power structures of the part that placed Candomblé in a vulnerable position. Through an exploration of art works, my research and teaching examine the ways in which people of differing worldviews and backgrounds create meaning about the world around them.

Heather Shirey is professor of Art History at the College of Arts and Sciences.

From Exemplars, a publication of the Grants and Research Office.

This statue, “Gaul and Wife,” is in Rome’s National Museum of the Terme.

The lecture, free and open to the public, is the second of four “Generations and the Tradition of Art” series events sponsored by the St. Thomas Art History Department, part of the College of Arts and Sciences.

A reception will follow in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center.

Following is an abstract that offers context for the Feb. 21 lecture:

Style, Continuity, and the Hellenistic Period

The sculpture of the Hellenistic period,­ specifically “Hellenistic baroque” sculpture, often is characterized as a rather revolutionary break with previous sculptural traditions in the ancient Greek world.

In this lecture, Dr. Peter Schultz re-examines this position. Dr. Schultz’s argument is not that the conventional characterization of the Hellenistic baroque as “revolutionary” is incorrect. Rather, his argument is that the familiar characterizations of the Hellenistic baroque as “new” or “innovative” or “revolutionary” have obscured another important art historical reality. Namely, several underlying aspects of the Hellenistic baroque are firmly rooted in a stylistic tradition that extends directly back to the sculpture of the fifth century B.C.E., specifically to the sculpture of fifth and fourth century Athens.

This “Classical” pedigree of the quintessential “Hellenistic” style has some ramifications regarding how the “baroque mode” was used by Hellenistic sculptors. Perhaps more importantly, examination of this “baroque tradition” allows for some rather interesting speculation as to what the sculpture crafted in the Baroque style might have meant to the artists, patrons, and communities that made, purchased, and consumed it.

A website with information about the lecture can be seen here.

The Asmat are well-known for their sculpture. The challenges of reaching this remote part of southwestern Papua meant Asmat communities had little contact with the outside world until the 1950s. Outsiders have immigrated into the Asmat region for several decades, bringing their cultural beliefs and practices along with them.

Some aspects of Asmat culture have changed dramatically with the introduction of new cultural beliefs as well as imported technology and other mass-produced goods; however, two traditional Asmat art forms that are the focus of the St. Thomas exhibition – carving and storytelling – remain vibrant.

This Asmat carving by Antonius Kamem depicts a man being transported by bats to the ancestral world of Safan. Kamem is from is from the village of Atsj in the Becembub region of Asmat.

The exhibition features carvings by Asmat master carvers, known as the wowipitsj. The works on display were chosen from more than 2,000 carvings and artifacts in the American Museum of Asmat Art collection, one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States.

The St. Thomas exhibition was curated by art history graduate student Rachel Simmons.  A board member of the Scott County Historical Society, where she has served as a curatorial intern, Simmons worked as a graduate assistant for the American Museum of Asmat Art for two years and knows the collection well.

“Carving remains a fundamental part of Asmat culture,” Simmons said. “The exhibit explains how their art connects with critical concepts in their culture.”

Dr. Julie Risser, director of the American Museum of Asmat Art, said Asmat culture holds a deep respect for ancestors; Asmat people believe that ancestor spirits embody the world around them and that sacred objects can become a home to these powerful forces.

She explained that this core concept is reflected in both carving and oral traditions. According to one Asmat tradition, a man named Fumeripits found himself alone after experiencing a harrowing journey. To end his loneliness, he carved human figures from wood. The figures lay lifeless around him; however, when he carved a drum and beat out a rhythm on it, spirit entered the forms and the carvings began to move. At first the figures’ movements were jerky but later became graceful.

Beata Atakat, left, a recognized Asmat fiber artist, discusses a weaving project with Dr. Julie Risser, director of the American Museum of Asmat Art. Atakat is from the Asmat village of Atsj.

“An Asmat community could have many carvers,” Risser said, “but the wowipitsj are the masters and the most-respected. For example, if a village is carving a wuramon or “spirit canoe,” each family might have a carver who would create one of the many figures in the canoe; however, the wowipitsj would oversee and guide the project.

“The processes by which large-scale sacred carvings are created and the contexts in which they are used remain a central part of Asmat animistic faith; they strengthen relationships with ancestral spirits,” she said. “Today, many wowipitsj have expanded their carving repertoire and make narrative carvings for an external clientele. This exhibition features those narrative carvings that are inspired by oral traditions.”

The carvings clearly reflect life in the Asmat’s rainforest environment. An estimated 70,000 Asmat live in several hundred villages that are located in tidal and freshwater swamps and lowland rainforest.

The late Michael Rockefeller, who died in 1961 while on an art-collecting expedition, described the Asmat region as “essentially a gigantic mud plain. … Mud is everywhere; even the rivers are gray with it.” Because of frequent flooding, many dwellings are built on posts several feet off the ground or, in some case, in trees. There are few roads but raised boardwalks are common throughout the region.

This carving by Anton Dapo depicts people and animals seeking refuge from a flood by climbing a beringen tree. The artist is from the village of Simsagar in the Safan region of Asmat. St. Thomas photo by Mark Jensen.

Curator Simmons said one of her favorite pieces in the exhibit is a carving by Anton Dapo from the village of Simsagar; created from a single piece of wood, it depicts people and animals climbing a beringen tree to escape a flood.

Risser noted that climate change is of particular concern in the Asmat region because so much of the land is flood-prone swamp. She and other museum staff are looking forward to a planned visit to the “Wowipitsj: Man, Myth, Legend” exhibition on Feb. 20 by internationally known science and climate-change expert Bill McKibben.

He will be at St. Thomas and Macalester College Feb. 20 and 21 for an event titled “In Celebration and Preservation of Winter: Responding to Climate Change in Minnesota and Wisconsin.” Founder of an organization called 350.org, McKibben was called by the Boston Globe “probably the country’s most important environmentalist” and by Time magazine as “the planet’s best green journalist.”

The American Crosier Fathers and Brothers began collecting Asmat art when they first arrived there in the 1950s.

An article on the Crosier website notes that during the order’s early years in Asmat, the Second Vatican Council produced three critical documents: The Church, The Church in the World and the Missionary Church, “which provided inspiration and direction to the Crosier missionaries. These include holding the people’s language and way of life in great esteem, the building of communities of faith endowed with the cultural riches of the people and borrowing from the customs, traditions, wisdom, teaching, arts and sciences of the people.”

“These documents encouraged us to have a holistic approach to the mission,” Crosier Father Ed Greiwe said in the article. “This included a respect for their traditional beliefs, their culture and customs, concern about the education of the people, about their health, about their own local leadership and economic well-being and development.”

By 1973, the Crosiers had collected and preserved more than 1,400 examples of Asmat carvings and artifacts, a challenge in a jungle climate where heat and humidity can destroy wooden and fibrous objects.

Carving of a figure in in a sago tree by Maximus Otor. He lives in the village of Warse in the Simai region of Asmat.

The collection – including finely crocheted masks, stunningly carved shields, long and narrow “spirit canoes” and tall ancestor or bisj poles – was first displayed in the Asmat city of Agats from 1973 to 1975, when it was moved to the Crosier Asmat Museum in Nebraska. The collection moved again in 1995 to the newly established American Museum of Asmat Art in Shoreview where it remained until 2007 when it was donated to St. Thomas by the American Crosier Fathers and Brothers and the Diocese of Agats.

Since then, museum director Risser and the museum’s Acquisitions Committee expanded the collection by more than 500 pieces. Risser purchased some of the works directly from artists during three trips to Asmat.

Many more came from Bishop Alphonse Sowada, a Crossier from the United States who first arrived in Asmat in 1961 and became the first bishop of the Diocese of Agats in 1969. Like many members of the Crossier order who served in Asmat, Sowada held a degree in anthropology and encouraged the Asmat people to preserve their culture through art and the preservation of rituals and feasts.

Two others who added to the collection were Minnesotans Donna and the late Cargill MacMillan Jr.; they traveled to Asmat at least twice where they purchased items at the annual fall “Pesta Budaya Asmat” (Asmat Art Festival).

For the wowipitsj exhibit, curator Simmons selected works from the Crosiers’ original collection as well as newer pieces collected by Risser, Sowada and the MacMillans.

In addition to the museum at St. Thomas, large collections of Asmat art and artifacts can be found at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. In 2009, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts displayed 72 pieces from the St. Thomas collection during a four-month exhibition. Some art historians believe that Asmat art influenced modernist and surrealist Western artists such as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso.

“Wowipitsj: Man, Myth, Legend” marks the American Museum of Asmat Art’s third exhibition in the Anderson Student Center’s Gallery since the student center opened in January 2012.

The exhibition, free and open to the public, can be seen Feb. 4 to Aug. 4. The Gallery is located on the second floor of the student center at Summit and Cretin avenues.

Exhibition hours are from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Mondays through Wednesdays, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fridays, and from noon to 4 p.m. on weekends.  More information is available at (651) 962-5512 and the museum’s website.

The American Museum of Asmat Art will host an exhibition reception at 6 p.m. Thursday, March 14, in The Gallery.

The Asmat area is prone to flooding. The solution: Build your home on poles. This 2009 photo was taken in Sawa, Papua, Indonesia, by Dr. Julie Risser during one of her three trips there.

When you hear this word as a St. Thomas community member what do you immediately think of?

Saint John’s University?

We all know about the competitiveness we have with Saint John’s in sports. What you might not think about when you hear UST and SJU in the same sentence however, are the ties that bind us together.

Many who work or study here at St. Thomas are Johnnies (or Bennies for that matter) like Terry Langan, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences or Mike Sullivan, associate professor of finance in the Opus College of Business. Art History graduate student Brady King is an alum of Saint John’s undergraduate studio art program. But what are our similarities?

We are both anchored in the Catholic intellectual tradition, a tradition we have brought to bear so strongly on higher education in the state of Minnesota and beyond. King also appreciates the quality of the faculty at both schools and the fact that everyone says hello to each other on campus. Although the rivalry with Saint John’s in sports is emotional, the respect between our two schools is profound.

Another important shared belief between St. Thomas and Saint John’s is the importance the arts have in a humanities-based education.  I have witnessed this first hand in two significant ways. First, for the past decade or so, I’ve been researching and writing about architect Marcel Breuer’s 1953 design for the Abbey church in Collegeville.

Since my first visit to central Minnesota I have been treated with the greatest kindness and respect. The Benedictine monks have always supported my work and in fact the completion of my book manuscript in the coming months is in large part due to and because of them. They share information, constantly find things in the depths of their archives, and always encourage me to get the project done.

Of course, it is not that there haven’t been interesting moments given that I am a Tommie. In the fall of 2011 the president of Saint John’s and the abbot of Saint John’s Abbey invited me to a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the completion of the Abbey church. Dinner was lovely and then we headed into a lecture hall for a roundtable discussion about Breuer’s work on the church.

As I was waiting to be introduced to the crowd, I grew just a little nervous because the Tommies had beaten the Johnnies in football on Palmer Field in O’Shaughnessy Stadium just three days prior by a score of 63-7! Yet, there were no boos from the crowd and only laughter when I told them (jokingly) that I was a little nervous to be on the stage at that moment.

The second collaboration has been going on around us for the past three months and showcases our mutual respect for the arts. “Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay” is currently on display in the lobby gallery of the O’Shaughnessy Education Center on the St. Paul campus of St. Thomas.

Master potter Richard Bresnahan speaks with guests at the Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay Exhibition Opening, Oct. 4, 2012 (Photo by Olga Ivanova)

We have Art History Department manager Sue Focke to thank for making this exhibition and a wonderful series of supporting events happen. Keenly aware of the artistic nature of this region, Focke had a vision to bring Saint John’s long-time artist in residence and potter Richard Bresnahan, and the work of his apprentices, to our campus, with the support of the department and the College of Arts and Sciences leadership.

Focke recalls that Bresnahan was thrilled at the opportunity, as he had always wanting to show his work on our campus.

Installing “Stoked” in early September was an excellent learning experience for our art history student exhibitions assistants, as Bresnahan’s installation team, led by Steven Lemke and Ryan Cutter, allowed them to be a part of the entire set up.

Graduate students from art history also assisted in publicity for the event, organized the keynote lecture and opening reception, and acted as docents during the many gatherings we’ve had in the OEC lobby gallery and beyond, including a Saint John’s alumni event held in the Anderson Student Center this fall.

At all of these events Bresnahan shared of his time generously, talking with students and other guests at the many receptions hosted on campus. In addition, Bresnahan invited Focke and myself to his pottery at Saint John’s for a tour and afternoon tea. The collaboration has been a great success and in my mind there is no doubt there will be more between the urban and rural Catholic cousins.  Saint John’s is home to a thriving studio art program that complements nicely with the art historical focus we have here at St. Thomas.

In every class I teach at St. Thomas, I spend a great deal of time talking about the Abbey church in Collegeville. There is never a sigh of disdain from my students when it shows up on the screen – they are genuinely interested in the visual power of the concrete church and bell banner and what it means to its Collegeville users.

I’m thrilled that both St. Thomas and Saint John’s are powerful entities in my life. For me they are rivals in the best sense – forces that compete in order to bring out the greater good in each other. From football to fine art, we are fortunate to share the relationship we have with the Johnnies.

Gallus served on the committee to bring the American Museum of Asmat Art collection to St. Thomas and then became an advisory board member. His interest in human rights guided his work among the Asmat people.

Gallus assisted students in their research of specific pieces of art. He also provided valuable insight into how the collection could be displayed at St. Thomas.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

“For some reason or another, [Menssen] thought I would make a good editor,” Clemenson said with a chuckle. After some consideration, he said yes. The department applied for the opportunity, and by October 2008 the journal was under Clemenson’s guidance. While considering the editorship, Clemenson said he reflected on one of the key responsibilities of any professor: service. “Every faculty member is expected to not only do research and teaching, but also service. That can take a variety of forms. I thought this was one of the best fits for me. I’ve always been research oriented, and [editing] involves something very close to research.”

A commitment to service and scholarly endeavors is deeply rooted in the College of Arts and Sciences, which encourages faculty to enrich the community through “discovery, artistic activity, integration and pedagogy.” This mission gives Clemenson and other faculty members the encouragement to put in extra hours every week editing academic journals that become dear to them.

Clemenson is one of several College of Arts and Sciences professors who were nudged toward or sought positions as editors or publishers of scholarly journals. (See a list of journals on Page 17.) Philosophy professors W. Matthews Grant, Christopher Toner, Gloria Frost, Timothy Pawl, Mark Spencer and Joshua Stuchlik are part of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly’s faculty editing team, which is supported by department staff member Ann Hale, who is the quarterly’s managing editor. Sociology and Criminal Justice professor Lisa Waldner co-edits Sociological Quarterly, while Art History professor Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell publishes Pacific Arts Journal, and English professor Alexis Easley edits Victorian Periodicals Review.

Increasing Expertise and Personal Growth

For Easley, the most exciting part of her editing work is the development of a deeper understanding of her subject. Easley is a scholar of Victorian journalism. When she began editing Victorian Periodicals Review in spring 2012 she did not expect to develop a new and strong connection to her research.

“It’s giving me insight into [Victorian] editors,” Easley said. “It’s giving me solidarity with these individuals.”

Easley has been a member of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals since 1998. She credits the society for mentoring her throughout graduate school. The society was founded in 1968 by scholars who were interested in Victorian journalism and studied the magazines, newspapers and journals of “every stripe” from about the 1780s until World War I, she said.

“It’s an international group of scholars. It’s pretty amazing and wonderful that we (St. Thomas) have this journal,” Easley said. “It’s quite a plum.”

Most of Easley’s work is concerned with editing the submissions, much as the philosophy faculty editing team members have their hands full with the editing and extensive review process behind the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.

The quarterly was founded in 1920 under the title New Scholasticism as a response to a call from Pope Leo XIII for a renewal of Catholic philosophy and theology. While the journal’s name has changed since then, its spirit of bringing reason and faith together in the area of philosophy has remained.

This mission is constantly on the editors’ minds as they process submissions to the journal. As do all academic journal editors, the St. Thomas editors seek experts in the subfields of their disciplines to act as referees who determine if each submission is worthy of publication. But before that process can begin, Clemenson and Toner dig through the submissions and determine each one’s level of appropriateness for the journal.

“Part of the beauty of philosophy as a discipline, because you’re dealing with fundamental questions, is that you can’t afford to limit yourself to a narrow specialization,” Clemenson said. The greatest benefit of editing the journal, he said, is the countless chances he is given to enrich his intellectual life by reading submissions and interacting with authors and referees.

“It’s important not to put the blinders on, but to keep perspective,” Clemenson said. He sees this branching out to learn about subfields in philosophy as a wonderful scholarly opportunity.

When Waldner was seeking new scholarly opportunities, she never dreamed of applying to a journal as prominent as Sociological Quarterly. That is, until her doctoral adviser and mentor, professor Betty Dobratz of Iowa State University, asked her to apply jointly to the Midwest Sociological Society’s call for a new editor in 2011.

After a rigorous application process, the pair was chosen. They began editing the journal in March 2012.

“Sociology is so broad, and there are some things that I know more about or that she knows more about,” Waldner said. “We thought a team made sense.” The pair’s broad knowledge base is very important for a journal such as Sociological Quarterly, which focuses on “a whole gamut” of things that sociologists study, including family, crime, politics and gender topics, Waldner said.

Waldner and her co-editor face the challenge of working together across a physical distance. Video chatting plays a big role in the editorial process, with weekly Skype appointments to discuss papers submitted to the quarterly that deserve a second look. Editing is a challenging and time-consuming process after which only about 10 percent of submitted articles are published. But to Waldner, the outcome and personal growth attached to the process make it well worth the challenge.

Waldner said the most exciting part of the editing process is when a paper goes out for review. A referee is generally at the top of his or her field and an expert on the submitted paper’s topic. “I really enjoy that it has given me an excuse to contact fairly prominent sociologists and say I’m the editor of The Sociological Quarterly,” Waldner said. “It’s providing [me] an opportunity to learn.”

It gives her the opportunity to read about almost every subfield of sociology and to identify additional topics she and Dobratz believe will be of interest to readers. Waldner said they identified Occupy Wall Street and the 2012 elections as special section topics for upcoming issues, and they regard the special topics as the perfect way to increase readership while keeping the journal, and themselves, current in sociology.

Mentoring the Next Generation

Professors are not alone in receiving new opportunities with the presence of scholarly journals on campus. Students benefit, too. They gain from the increased knowledge shared by professors in their classes.

Clemenson said he brings new articles from American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly into the classroom and finds his expanded knowledge of the field a benefit when it comes time for his students to write papers, because he can direct them to the best scholarship in the field.

“Being an editor of this journal broadens my perspectives, and keeps me from being narrowly focused on my own set of interests,” Clemenson said.

Waldner noted that expanding her knowledge outside her specialty in sociology helps her in the classroom. She believes working with the journal increases her critical-thinking skills, which she can then pass on to her students. “Folks that are involved in creating knowledge are the best to impart knowledge,” Waldner said.

The more insight the professor has, the more easily students are able to access information. Easley sees editing as a natural extension of her research and teaching. “The big picture is to bring the richness of Victorian culture to the next generation,” she said.

Some of the journals, including Victorian Periodicals Review, also provide tangible opportunities for students. English graduate student Rachel MacDonald is the first of an expected long line of students to receive an editorial assistantship with Easley.

“The experience [has] confirmed my belief in the revision process as the place where good writing becomes great writing,” MacDonald said. She was surprised at how much work goes into each issue, she said. The editing is extensive, but much of the work has “nothing to do with editing, but marketing, branding and business.”

The position allows MacDonald to be integrated in every part of this editorial process.

Pacific Arts Journal also provides a graduate student position, which is currently filled by Rachel Simmons. The journal is published and produced by members of the Art History Department under the leadership of department chair Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell. Simmons hopes to make her career working with Pacific art in some way, and Stansbury-O’Donnell believes work on the journal is an excellent opportunity for her to network in the art community.

The journal publishes articles on the art of Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines and the Pacific islands. This focus may seem very far away from Summit Avenue, but with the recent establishment of the American Museum of Asmat Art on campus, the Art History Department is showing itself as an impressive resource for Pacific art.

“She’s been brilliant,” Stansbury-O’Donnell said of Simmons. “Not everybody wants to or can teach in a classroom or curate in a museum. A publication is another place. Copy editing is not specifically an art history skill, but you could get a job editing art history journals.”

As a strong advocate for mentorship of students and recent graduates, Waldner seeks to pull her former students into Sociological Quarterly.

“I reach out to my [former] students and provide them with opportunities,” Waldner said. The newest member of the journal’s editorial board is 2004 St. Thomas graduate Valerie Clark. Clark is a research scientist for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. “It gets her professionally engaged, and it’s something she can put on her résumé,” Waldner said. “I look forward to inviting more [students] in the future to give them experience.”

Providing Visibility

Each of the scholarly journals edited or published in the College of Arts and Sciences provides new information and exciting opportunities to the faculty who work on them. Editing a journal also brings recognition among other scholars. Clemenson describes the responsibility of housing a scholarly journal at St. Thomas as a true “vote of confidence” by a scholarly discipline.

“Our institution was entrusted with this responsibility,” Clemenson said. “That speaks well of our department.”

Read more from CAS Spotlight.

Vandegrift (Communication and Journalism) wrote and narrated the piece while Jacobsen (Web and Media Services) filmed, edited and produced more than five hours of footage down to an 11-minute video package that has been nominated for an Upper Midwest Regional Emmy.

Jacobsen and Vandegrift are nominated alongside Twin Cities Public Television and the online magazine The Flightline in the Historic/Cultural/Nostalgic category.

As a journalist turned professor, Vandegrift has received regional Emmy nominations on a consistent basis dating back to the 1990s. He has won in categories such as writing news, health-science programs, and both hard and soft feature programs. This nomination is particularly meaningful because of its scope. “I have been reporting and producing stories since 1984,” he said. “Never before have I worked on a project that spanned this amount of time. It required focus and persistence.”

Jacobsen is nominated for a second time, having won in 2009 along with St. Thomas staffers Dave Nimmer and Doug Hennes for a piece they produced for the Opus Prize. Even though this is not his first nomination, it means just as much to be recognized among some of the best broadcasters in the region. “They are very good,” he said of the other nominees in the category. “I have enjoyed watching TPT’s ‘Lost Twin Cities’ series, so to be thought of at that level of production is an honor.”

The Emmy awards gala takes place Saturday, Sept. 29. When asked what he might do if they are awarded the Emmy, Jacobsen joked, “I will walk to the stage as fast as I can before they figure out that they made a mistake.” As for his feelings on their chances: “It’s just nice to be nominated.”

For more information visit the Upper Midwest Emmy Awards.

Watch “Moving the Art,” featuring interviews with Art History’s Victoria Young, Father Dennis Dease, Penny Winton and Frank Gehry, himself:

The exhibit catalog was written by Dr. Matthew Welch, deputy director and chief curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and curator of  “Stoked.” It contains nearly 90 color photographs of the works in the exhibit and biographical reviews of the five artists.

Read more here about the “Stoked” exhibit, on display at St. Thomas in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center lobby gallery through Jan. 10.

Katie Czarniecki Hill, ’12 M.A. in Art History, program fellow at mnartists.org and program associate for the Walker Open Field summer program, dreamed up (and helped organize) the event on “a bit of a lark.”

Katie Czarniecki Hill, ’12 M.A., dreamed up and helped organize the Internet Cat Video Film Festival. Photo courtesy of Walker Art Center.

“I wanted to contribute to Open Field by sharing something that brings joy (yes, I’m talking about cat videos) but also do so in a way that would test the boundaries of social practice by attempting to bring an online community off line and into real life,” she said. “What started as a bit of a lark soon became an interesting experiment, and I don’t think I would have even suggested it without this public platform for experimental programming provided by Open Field.”

The festival immediately garnered national coverage, which included Time, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, the Huffington Post and the Seattle Times, among many other print and broadcast media. The New York Times flew a reporter to Minneapolis to cover the event, and the Village Voice lamented in a headline, “We All Wish We Attended the Internet Cat Video Festival in Minnesota.”

Will Braden, a Seattle filmmaker, bested more than 10,000 nominees to win the ”Golden Kitty” award in the People’s Choice “CATegory” for “Henri 2: Paw de Deux.” His film has been viewed nearly 4.5 million times on YouTube. Honorable mentions included “Cat Vs. Printer,” “Katzenfussball,” “Canned Food: A True Story” and many others.

Czarniecki Hill, who shares two cats, Max and Ron, with her husband, said her favorite part of the festival was ”actually watching the videos and seeing the huge crowd react in unison. I was sitting behind the screen, so the light from the projection lit up a lot of faces in the audience, and I could see people laughing together, which was the original intention of the program.”

View the Golden Kitty award-winning film, “Henri 2: Paw de Deux,” below.

The exhibit, free and open to the public, will be displayed in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center. The hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and noon to 9 p.m. on Sunday.

St. Thomas is the sixth stop on the exhibit’s national tour.

“Square Tebachi” by Richard Bresnahan.

A lecture and opening reception will be held at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, in the O’Shaughnessy Educational Center auditorium and lobby. The speaker will be Dr. Matthew Welch, deputy director and chief curator of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and curator of the “Stoked” ceramics exhibit.

After graduating from St. John’s University in Collegeville in 1976, Bresnahan served as an apprentice for three years under Nakazato Takashi in Karatsu, Japan. His training included everything from menial housekeeping tasks to throwing 500 pieces of pottery in a single day.

Critical to his training was learning about local clays and how to make and apply glazes made from ash and plant materials.  Today, he and his apprentices typically use materials found in the Collegeville area.

Bresnahan returned to St. John’s University in 1979 as its first non-monastic artist in residence and created on campus a pottery studio and wood-fired kiln. Over the years he has experimented with new forms, glazes and techniques, and since the late 1980s, he has taken on about 45 apprentices.

Dr. Mathew Welch, author of “Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay,” and the book’s editor, Sandra Lipschultz.

Welch, the exhibit’s curator, selected works from Bresnahan and representatives from four generations of his apprentices. They are: Kevin Flicker, ceramics instructor at the University of Minnesota-Morris; Stephen Earp, ceramicist and writer from Shelburne Falls, Mass.; Samuel Johnson, ceramics instructor at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University; and Anne Meyer, ceramicist and sculptor from St. Joseph.  While their works reflect different creative approaches, they share a common concern for indigenous materials in relationship to the environment.

“An abiding respect for ecology and natural systems has always characterized Richard Bresnahan’s philosophy and his ongoing dialogue with fire and clay,” wrote Welch. “Throughout his long career, he has consistently challenged himself to undertake new firing techniques, to test potential glaze materials, and to devise unique and elegant functional forms. As a result, the dynamic pottery Bresnahan creates reflects both the specifics of his physical environment – by utilizing local resources – and his own far-reaching artistic vision.”

Each of the four apprentices add their own interpretation to the techniques they learned under Bresnahan. Whether incorporating or building on his philosophy, the apprentices have clearly adopted Bresnahan’s approach.

“ … each maker is ‘stoked’ in the best sense of the word – excited about life and the simple act of using the earth and fire to produce objects of great mystery and strength,” Welch wrote.

“Stoked: Five Artists of Fire and Clay” is paired with a catalog written by Welch. It contains nearly 90 color photographs of the works in the exhibit and biographical reviews of the five artists. The book will be available for purchase and autographing at the opening reception.

The exhibit at St. Thomas is hosted by the university’s Art History Department, part of the College of Arts and Sciences.  The Oct. 4 lecture and reception is co-sponsored by the St. Thomas Alumni Association. Information about the exhibit can be found online or by calling (651) 962-5560.

Those attending the lecture and reception are asked to pre-register at this website.

This knowledge drives the way I teach the Introduction to Art History course. In the first unit on domestic space I expect students to read and understand how people from different cultures, races and economic backgrounds live. We analyze photographs, plans and drawings in order to understand the visual element of the home. Students also consider why certain things such as paint color, lighting, architectural details and landscaping are important choices for a homeowner. Students then combine all this research and discussion into a final project that asks them to describe their childhood home in both words and floor plans.

But why am I so interested in having my students understand domestic space before tackling the work of artists like Michelangelo, Georgia O’Keefe or Jackson Pollock? Because not only is this exercise effortless for my students to relate to, it also provides me with an indication of who they are as people and what they think is important about the way they live. The house becomes a tool for two-way learning.

But would most of us think about our house or home as an art object? Not likely. Some of us might live in homes designed by architects but others seek shelter in places designed by an unknown artisan, maybe one’s great grandfather or local builder. So, when does a house become art? When it moves beyond the purely functional. Enter the Winton guest house, designed by architect Frank Gehry and contructed from 1983 to 1987 for Mike and Penny Winton, and most recently owned by local real estate developer Kirt Woodhouse until he gave the property to the University of St. Thomas in December 2007.

An Unusual Gift

The gift required that the house be relocated from its original site near Lake Minnetonka in Orono, Minn., to the University’s Gainey Conference Center in Owatonna, Minn., as space was not available on the Minneapolis or St. Paul campuses for a piece of art 2,300 square feet in size. Woodhouse, who had purchased the property from the Wintons in 2002, offered the house to several groups in the Twin Cities, but none was able to accept the gift.

The entrepreneurial spirit of St. Thomas’ development office made the gift a reality. As the architectural historian in the Art History Department, I knew that this would be a huge opportunity to showcase an understanding of architecture as art, as Woodhouse wanted. He said, “Art of this caliber is meant to be shared and enjoyed by the public. My intent with this donation is to inspire those who visit the home to have a greater appreciation and understanding of modern art and how it comes in many forms, including a house.”

What I did not know was just how complicated the process of making the house available to our students and guests would be. Complicated, yes, but also very educational.

Another Way to Look at ArtThe Art History Department prides itself on a broad understanding of art with our eight full-time faculty members specializing in topics including narrative and Greek vase painting; medieval costume, shape-shifting and syncretism; ancientMexican sculpture and manuscript painting; 17th-century Chinese landscape painting; the history of type design; politics and identity construction in the African-Brazilian religion Candomblé; Asmat art; and mid-20th century Catholic church architecture. And our approaches to art are as varied as the media. Some base their scholarship on theory while others find archaeology, patronage and religious issues important.

If it seems difficult to think of a building as art, one needs only look at the forms of Gehry’s Winton guest house to sense a different understanding of domestic space at play. On the exterior, the 35-foot tall pyramidal-shaped living room is finished with black painted metal as is the shed-roofed bedroom. An additional curving bedroom is covered in local dolomite limestone from southern Minnesota (the same stone was used on many St. Thomas buildings). A cubical fireplace room is faced in the same brick as the original house on the site. A loft is covered in stainless steel sheet metal and a rectangular-shaped garage/kitchenette is covered in a graphically patterned mixture of Finnish plywood and aluminum strips. The forms could stand on their own as each piece barely touches another, and the forms are kept pure as no exterior joints, hardware or utility boxes are visible.

Although these different spaces function as livable elements of a house, they are inspired by art. At the time of the house construction, Gehry was well known in the Los Angeles area art scene and his friends included pop artist Ed Ruscha and sculptors Claes Oldenburg (who created the Spoonbridge and Cherry at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden) and Richard Serra, among others. The strongest influence on Gehry’s work for the Winton project came from the 20th-century Italian artist, Giorgio Morandi. Gehry has talked repeatedly about the importance of Morandi’s still-life studies of bottles, boxes, cups and vases on Gehry’s work of this period. As Gehry told Barbara Isenberg during an interview for her 2009 book, Conversations with Frank Gehry: “When I discovered the pictures of Giorgio Morandi, I just went nuts because Morandi was drawing bottles which were essentially one-room buildings and creating villages of bottles. I liked that.”

And once the comparison is made to the Winton guest house, the influence is stunning. From certain vantage points, the house appears as a sculpture with no windows or doors visible. The house rests right on the ground, further accentuating its role as sculpture.

The rise of architecture to art was noticed by many including Time magazine, awarding its house-of-the-year status to the guest house in 1987. In the same year, House and Garden featured the building in an article “The House as Art,” stating, “What makesthe Winton guest house wonderful cannot be easily recommended for application elsewhere, but that has never been the point, strictly speaking of avant-garde architecture.” Gehry was breaking new ground in domestic design. Architecture was art.

Moving the House in 10 Sections Over 10 MonthsNormally when a piece of art is donated to the university one or two people can carefully move it to a useful location. But what if the art is a house? And what if the useful location is 110 miles from your main campus as was the case for the Winton guest house? Enter Stubbs Building & House Movers, the company responsible for relocating the historic 2,900-ton Shubert Theatre in downtown Minneapolis. Because of the unique shape of this house and the height of the living room tower, Larry Stubbs and his team dismantled the structure into 10 pieces – the heaviest was the 80-ton stone bedroom – hoisted most of them onto steel carrying beams and transported the sections on flatbed trailers down side roads in the middle of the night to the Gainey campus.

It is rare to see an entire house dismantled in order to move it. But in many ways, this is one of the most exciting and the most instructive parts of this project. Construction successes and failures and material wear became readily apparent. The biggest surprise came when Stubbs’ crew removed what they thought were stone slabs creating the patios adjacent to each door. They found, instead, two-foot diameter boulders buried in the ground – the visible slabs were only the tip of the iceberg! The rebuild, led by contractors Casey & Groesbeck and architects Krech, O’Brien, Mueller & Associates, provided a chance to fix problems and utilize 25 years of advances in the building field in order to make this structure more solid than it has been in years.

Education via Architecture

Buildings teach us about the culture of a given time frame, as well asabout the people who designed, owned and used them. Just as I ask my undergraduates to write about their childhood home, I wanted the Winton guest house to share its journey, in this case, through a permanent exhibit in the house. The stone bedroom will showcase the relationship between the Wintons and Gehry, the garage will highlight the design and construction of the house, and the metal bedroom will feature the relocation of the building. Construction documents and letters between the Wintons and Gehry’s office, most of which have never been seen before, will be accessible to the public. Oral histories supplement these documents. The Wintons, Gehry, the local builder Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, and others have donatedpapers related to the project and interviews, and together with my students, we can study these documents and draw new conclusions about this building. This will aid students in their role as tour guides of the house.

At least 10 students have played a role in the creation of the exhibit, most notably graduate students Katie Czarniecki Hill and Marria Thompson, who gave up three days of their 2011 spring break to lay out the exhibit and write label text on what they called their “Gehry Gone Wild” break. Other students have conducted research and interviews, edited label text, taken photographs for the exhibit, secured materials, and critiqued plans and designs.

Many people have cited the importance of the guest house in Gehry’s career, tying it directly to his Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota (1991) and Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997); and now we can teach our students about Gehry’s inspirations and his evolution as an architect.

We will start this process in the spring of 2012 in my graduate class, Gehry and his Contemporaries, which will feature the archives of the Winton guest house (such as letters between the client and architect, blueprints and photos) as key instructional material, along with a weekend stay at the Gainey Conference Center to study the house and its context more carefully. Fortunately, Owatonna is a living architectural history book, with many different styles and buildings types present, including the Gainey house, a French Norman revival house completed in 1953 by noted Minnesota architect Edwin Lundie for then president of Jostens, Daniel C. Gainey, and Louis Sullivan’s early 20th-century bank building in downtown.

Sharing Gehry and the Winton Guest House With the World

By most accounts, Gehry is one of the most popular living architects in the world. He has parodied himself on an episode of “The Simpsons,” helped “Arthur” and his friends design a tree house on the PBS show, been the subject of several documentariesand films including Sydney Pollack’s 2006 “Sketches of Frank Gehry,” and designed a hat for Lady Gaga, and watches and jewelry for Tiffany and Fossil. But he is also one of the most innovative and respected designers in the profession. His computer-aided design processes enable the majority of his projects to come in on time and on budget. He has won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an American Institute of Architects Gold Medal and a National Medal for the Arts from President Bill Clinton. He has takenarchitecture to a new artistic level, prompting noted architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable to call him the “most staggeringly talented architect since Frank Lloyd Wright.” Gehry was not the acclaimed architect he is today when he started working on the Winton guest house. The Wintons gave a relatively unknown designer the freedom to create space and form in new and clever ways.

The Winton guest house is Gehry’s only domestic project open to the public. Please visit www.stthomas.edu/gehrywinton for more information. A public tour schedule will be set up for the non-winter months, and the house will be open by appointment throughout the year.

Read more from CAS Spotlight

Gehry’s career had a quiet start in California in the mid-1960s. But in 1982, his architectural visibility received an important boost with a commission for a 2,300-square-foot guest house on the shores of Lake Minnetonka. The Winton Guest House was donated to the university in 2007 and now resides on the Gainey campus in Owatonna. The guest house will be open to the public in fall 2011.

But why should you be interested in seeing the Winton Guest House? Who were the Wintons? And why is this house so important to Gehry’s career?

The Wintons and Gehry: Creating the Guest House

In 1981, when local civic and business leaders Mike and Penny Winton started thinking about adding a guest house to their Orono property, they contacted New York City architect Philip Johnson. In 1952, Johnson designed their current brick, rectilinear modern house for Richard Davis, then senior curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Near the end of a yearlong wait for Johnson’s reply, the Wintons read the May 16, 1982, edition of the New York Times Magazine, which featured an article on Gehry.

Although Gehry was an unknown to the Wintons, they were immediately taken with his work, and Penny Winton contacted her close friend Mickey Friedman, design curator at the Walker Art Center, about their discovery. In a moment of serendipity, Friedman informed Winton that she had just discussed with her husband, Martin, director of the Walker, the possibility of a solo show on Gehry’s work. It seemed that Frank O. Gehry would soon be getting to know Minnesota very well.

In late April 1984, the Wintons went to visit Gehry in southern California. It was here that Gehry had settled after attending the University of Southern California and Harvard to study architecture and urban planning, respectively. He began his career working for Victor Gruen on large scale projects, including the Southdale Center in Edina, before starting his own firm in 1962.

Gehry showed the Wintons several of his buildings – both completed and on the books – including the Spiller (1980), Norton (1983-84) and Wosk (1984) residences, Santa Monica Place shopping center (1980), Loyola Law School (1981-91), California Aerospace Museum (1982-84), Temporary Contemporary Museum of Art (1983) and Chiat Day Advertising agency (1985-1991). But the building that grabbed the Wintons’ attention was Gehry’s own home in Santa Monica (1978).

In an interview with Penny Winton last January, she recalled that the visit to his house solidified their desire to hire Gehry. They loved how the building showed its con- struction – the walls, joists and connections – while utilizing unconventional materials such as chain-link fence and wire mesh.

Back at Gehry’s office in Venice they discussed the guest house. Gehry told the Wintons that he intended “to design the guest house so that it is warm and casual, with the most interior spaces of modest, compact size.” The Wintons were clear in their direction that this was not to be a second house: “The point is that your project has that relationship to our main house and does not sneak up on us as equal to or a second main house.”

The Wintons would eventually let Johnson know that they  were no longer waiting for his reply: “Since we couldn’t get you interested, we have begun work with Frank Gehry for a guest house. We think we will have an interesting combination, or, I believe the expression is, ‘dialogue.’”

The design process spanned four years and three schemes before Gehry arrived at the final version, which he noted, “may be construed as a large, outdoor sculpture.”From the terrace of the Johnson house the guest house appears as an art object with no windows or doors visible. The structure rested directly on the ground, further accentuating its role as sculpture, as Penny noted in a letter to Gehry: “I do like thinking of it as a great giant sculpture pressed into the ground.”

The artistic element of architecture has always been at the heart of Gehry’s work. Prior to the Winton commission, Gehry had been a member of the Los Angeles art scene for years, and his friends included artists Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen and Richard Serra, among others.

Gehry also cites the influence of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi on his work, whose still life paintings of objects of differing shapes and sizes highlighted elemental form and light and shadow; however, ideas about art resonated beyond artists to architects, including Johnson. Gehry recalls from their visits: “Philip is the only other architect I know who’s into the art thing, and when we meet we don’t talk about architecture, we talk about art.”

In the Winton Guest House, six creative spaces are differentiated not only by their form but also by the materials that clad the form. The 35-foot tall pyramidal-shaped living room is finished with black painted metal, as is the shedroofed master bedroom; an additional curving bedroom is covered in local dolomite limestone from Kasota, Minn.; a cubical fireplace room is faced in the same brick as the Johnson house; and a long rectangular garage/kitchenette is covered in a graphically patterned mixture of Finn-ply and aluminum strips and surmounted by a loft covered in stainless steel. Boyer Building Corp. and the architectural firm Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, under the watchful eye of lead architect John Cook, made Gehry’s design vision a reality.

The Wintons moved into the house in the winter of 1987 and furnished the home simply and with a neutral palette, including Thonet wooden opera chairs, a side table fashioned from two sawhorses and wooden planks, pale linen carpeting and white chenille bedspreads. Some of the unusual decorative elements in the house came directly from the Wintons. For example, when Gehry wanted to use marble tile in the bathrooms, Penny Winton said “No, no, no … plywood.” The house had the whimsy and character the patrons wanted, from its playful shapes to the loft built specifically for the younger visitors. Winton told me that the grandchildren used to run immediately to the loft with their toy soldiers and toys and fight for the right to spend the night on the small futon in the space.

Not only did the family enjoy the house, the critics raved. In 1987, the structure won House & Garden magazine’s design award of the year and a place in Time magazine’s “Best of ’87” design honor roll. The American Institute of Architects included it on the 1988 honor award list, given as the profession’s highest recognition of design excellence.

Gehry’s design of the Winton Guest House marks a pivotal moment in his career, when he began to move away from  rectilinear form and embrace the curve as a major design element, as seen in the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis (1993) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain (1997).

In 1989, the Hyatt Foundation presented Frank Gehry with the Pritzker Architectural Prize, an honor bestowed annually to an architect whose lifetime contribution to the profession has been extraordinary. The jury wrote in its evaluation, “His buildings are juxtaposed collages of spaces and materials that make users appreciative of both the theatre and the back-stage, simultaneously revealed.” While the jury wrote this statement as a reflection of Gehry’s work in a general sense, it could also be applied to the Winton Guest House as its diverse materials, hidden connectors and playful shapes masterfully combined to create a cohesive, exciting and unusual space.

Donate, Relocate, Rebuild and Educate

After the usefulness of the Minnetonka property faded for the Wintons, they sold it to developer Kirt Woodhouse in 2002. Woodhouse divided the 12-acre property into three lots, and within a year the Johnson house sold leaving the guest house and a vacant lot available. In February 2008, St. Thomas announced Woodhouse’s donation of the house. Over the years, donors have given the university a Florida gas station, a herd of Arabian horses, a resort condo and a collection of Vatican postage stamps, among other items.But what would St. Thomas do with a guest house?

Woodhouse hopes that this gift will increase the public’s perception of art: “My intent with this donation is to inspire those who visit the home to have a greater appreciation and understanding of modern art and how it comes in many forms, including a house.”

The donation also prevented the potential loss of the property, as the Lake Minnetonka area is full of extraordinary homes that often do not match with a new owner’s tastes or needs. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Northome was razed in 1972 and in 1997 the Philip Pillsbury Sr. house, designed by notable Minnesota modern architect Ralph Rapson, met the wrecking ball.

When it came to finding a location for the house at St. Thomas, the lack of space on the Twin Cities’ campuses dictated a move to the Gainey Center in Owatonna. But how would the structure tackle the 75-mile journey? Enter mover Larry Stubbs of Stubbs Building and House Movers, who in the frigid winter months of 1999 had moved the 2,908-ton Shubert Theater one block to aid in the construction of a new downtown Minneapolis entertainment complex.

To move the guest house, Stubbs and his crew broke the house into eight pieces and obtained the necessary travel permits, state patrol escorts and power line locations, while at the same time praying for good weather and minimal equipment failure. Stubbs prepared for the move starting in July 2008 by separating each section of the house and jacking them up onto large steel beams, called a crib, for movement off the building’s foundation and loading onto the moving truck.

The journey to the Gainey Center began at 12:30 p.m. on May 20, 2009, when the 50-ton stone bedroom moved from its site a short distance down the hill to the driveway. The two-hour move was slow and careful, requiring many stops to level the flat bed as the truck turned the corner. The truck then made its way to Owatonna in the middle of the night, allowed to travel only between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m.

All the remaining pieces followed in this fashion. After working out the necessary building permits with Steele County officials, the house now is now reassembled, thanks to by a construction team led by Sam Woods of Casey & Groesbeck, working with architects Krech, O’Brien, Mueller & Associates. The team has worked diligently to restore the house to a condition perhaps better than the original. Even floods, tornadoes and extreme snowfall have not dampened their spirit.

No longer a residence, the house will become a museum and feature an exhibit and video on its history. The Winton Guest House joins the Daniel C. Gainey house, designed by accomplished Minnesota architect Edwin Lundie in 1953 (Lundie also completed the Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas on the St. Paul campus after architect Emmanuel Masqueray’s death in 1917), as standouts in a city that already is known as an architectural stopping point with buildings such as the Minnesota State Public School for Dependent and Neglected Children (1885) and Louis Sullivan’s National Farmer’s Bank (1908, now Wells Fargo), called by many scholars his masterpiece and the most beautiful bank in the world.

In August 2010, Gehry sat down for an interview at his Santa Monica office. Even though he has reached “star-chitect” status, and his current work is mainly large-scale projects such as the recently completed New World Symphony Hall in Miami and the 870-foot high residential tower at 8 Spruce Street in Manhattan, Gehry still fondly recalled the Winton project. He believes that the building probably “did make a difference” in his career, and he clearly recalled the design and challenges of building such a structure.

The Winton Guest House made manifest Gehry’s approach to artistic, architectural design and began a winning relationship with Minnesota. As Gehry told local architect James Dayton (Dayton worked for Gehry from 1991-96), “I’m 3 and 0 in Minnesota.” Gehry was referring to the Winton Guest House and the outstanding patronage of Mike and Penny Winton, the Weisman Art Museum, where his addition is almost complete, and the Walker Art Center where Gehry’s successful 1986 show left behind a glass fish sculpture by the artist that you can now find in the center’s Sculpture Garden.

St. Thomas students will have an opportunity to study firsthand Gehry’s process of design, and we will be able to share this house – the only Gehry domestic project open to the public – with architecture (and art) aficionados throughout our community.

How fortunate St. Thomas is to have a building by a designer labeled by Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable as “the most staggeringly talented architect since Frank Lloyd Wright.”

Read more from St. Thomas magazine

Last summer, three Crosiers, who happen to call as many continents home, visited St. Thomas to see how our community is incorporating the new collection of Asmat art into its educational efforts. Our visitors were Crosier Master General Father Glen Lewandowski, who serves in Rome; Father Virgil Petermeier, who works with the Asmat in Agats, Papua, Indonesia; and Father Ed Greiwe, who serves at the Crosier priory in Onamia, Minn. All three appreciate the value of fostering awareness of Asmat culture because they have spent many years living in the Asmat region and advocating on behalf of the 70,000 Asmat people.

The American Museum of Asmat Art at St. Thomas contains carved and painted shields, sculptures, spears and arrows, as well as large fiber masks adorned with feathers, seeds and shells. It also includes utilitarian objects, such as bowls, fishing nets, axes, adzes, harpoons and daggers made and used by the Asmat. Works by neighboring groups such as the Dani are included in the collection to demonstrate cultural diversity in Papua.

The Crosiers’ visit started at Brady Educational Center where graduate students in the Art History Department research, design and install exhibitions for the atrium displaycases. Last year graduate students Jenny Maki and Barbara Manthey, along with volunteer intern Maureen Ragalie, produced a series of displays about Crosier history and Asmat drumming, traditional patterning and weaponry. While each student was responsible for specific cases, Maki, Manthey and Ragalie consulted with each other to ensure the exhibition flowed logically.

This year, four graduate students, Josh Feist, Vada Komistra, Elizabeth Henderson and Manthey are working on new installations in Brady Educational Center that will exploreconnoisseurship (how to recognize an individual or regional style) and the relationship that collectors have with the art that they acquire and the people who make it.

Connoisseurship and collecting are particularly timely topics because the Asmat museum received a large number of high-quality works from two donors last summer. Donna and Cargill MacMillan donated many artworks from the Pacific, the majority from Asmat. Accompanying many of the carvings in the MacMillan donation was information about the artists. While it may seem logical for such information to be included, frequently when non-Western art is purchased, the artist’s name is not recorded; having this information allows us to recognize an individual artist’s style and quality.

In August, Bishop Alphonse Sowada donated several pieces from his collection to the Asmat museum. These include very old drums, two more recent open-work carvings, arrows and stone axe blades. The open-work carvings reflect Asmat interpretation of core concepts of the Catholic faith. Sowada had served in Agats during a time when the Indonesian government discouraged Asmat art production. He led the effort to encourage carvers to continue sculptural production and through his advocacy was able to convince authorities to allow the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress to be built in Agats. Sowada emphasized the need to document works thoroughly. Our work continues with Sowada to get as much information about the imagery, meaning and carving techniques as possible.

All of the newly donated pieces from the MacMillans and Sowada will help St. Thomas students learn about collections care as well as Asmat culture specifically, and Pacific cultures more broadly. Some will be displayed in the Brady Educational Center cases or the other Asmat museum exhibition venues in the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts, O’Shaughnessy Educational Center and O’Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center. There also will be gallery space for the Asmat art in the new Anderson Student Center, which will open in 2012.

Before any of the new donations or pieces from the permanent collection are displayed, they pass through the Asmat museum lab located in one of our storage facilities. Lewandowski, Petermeier and Greiwe included a stop to the lab on their visit. They were able to see objects that art history graduate student Vada Komistra was examining and cleaning. Care must be taken, because unlike most Western artists, Asmat artists do not use any binder to attach pigment; instead, they rub paints made from lime, soot and ocher onto the object. After several years the paint can become very fragile, and cleaning small bits of dust and cobwebs and other minute debris is challenging.

Komistra and the other graduate students are cleaning the MacMillan and Sowada donations, as well as 70 objects that will appear in an upcoming exhibition, “Time and Tide: The Changing Art of the Asmat of New Guinea” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

The UST Geography Department also is helping with the MIA exhibition. Stacie Rominski, a geography GIS lab student assistant, designed a map for an Asmat exhibition. As quality maps of the Asmat region are hard to come by, Rominski’s work caught the attention of Molly Huber, assistant curator of African, Oceanic and Native American Art at the MIA. Huber was able to work with Rominski to tailor the map to suit the MIA’s exhibition needs and for the “Time and Tide” exhibition catalog.

As Lewandowski, Petermeier and Greiwe toured campus,it became clear that the American Museum of Asmat Art is bringing departments together, creating an environment for art history graduate assistants to collaborate on collections preservation and presentation efforts, as well as enhancing the relationship that exists among the University of St. Thomas, the MIA and the Crosier Father and Brothers. But perhaps most importantly, it is exposing the St. Thomas community to a distant culture that has a lifestyle and environment vastly different than that of Minnesota. (View some Asmat art from the St. Thomas collection at www.stthomas.edu/asmat.)

Photographer Mark Edwards was lost in the Sahara Desert when he was approached by a heavily robed nomad. The man brought Edwards to his camp, left him for a moment and returned with an umbrella, two pieces of wood and a small cassette player. After building a fire, the two shared a cup of tea. Then the host pressed play, and suddenly Bob Dylan’s voice rang out, singing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

It was July 1969, and Dylan’s grim vision of our planet’s future had been written seven years prior during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Now, more than 250,000 miles away, Neil Armstrong was taking his first steps on the moon. “It was extraordinary to be caught between the ancient and modern world,” Edwards told the Irish Times last May. [1]

Edwards was inspired by his experience, and began piecing together strings of Dylan’s “Hard Rain” lyrics with his own photography. For many years, it was a private indulgence. But when a friend made contact with Dylan’s manager about the project, the singer quickly gave his approval.

Edwards went on to pair Dylan’s prophetic lyrics with a collection of photographs – most taken by him, others by friends and colleagues. The result is a haunting book, Hard Rain: Our Headlong Collision with Nature, that was four decades in the making. The book has since evolved into a powerful, outdoor exhibit of his work. The full installation will be at St. Thomas from Oct. 13 to Nov. 13 as part of the Sacred Arts Festival.

Edwards hopes his work will inspire others to address the potential devastation of climate change – including the direct and indirect human cost of poverty, habitat loss and human rights violations. “The key point about this is that we are all aware,” Edwards told the Irish Times. “There’s a widespread acknowledgement that we are changing the climate, but we are still in denial. We accept in one part of our thinking that climate change is happening, but the implications of climate change hover just outside the grasp of our imaginations.”

Related Links
Sacred Arts Festival
Hard Rain Project

Lyrics: Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

___________________________________________________

[1] Irish Times, “A Hard Rain Falls,” 17 May 2008.

This year under the Heritage Week theme, “If These Walls Could Talk: From Dreams to Reality,” students in my American Architecture course focused on campus planning. A look at the history of our campus designs reveals many dreams, some fulfilled and many never completed. The images that follow provide an understanding of how our physical identity has changed over the years.

Fifteen undergraduate students worked together to create illustrated presentations on the history of campus planning for two Heritage Week receptions. Art History graduate student Emily Koller ’07 M.A. assisted the class in many aspects, including working with St. Thomas archivist Ann Kenne to finalize the illustrations. This active-learning component of the course allowed my students to “create” history rather than just read about it.

The undergraduates were Mike Burrill ’07, Emily Dowd ’07, Sean Ewen ’07, Whitney Fistler ’07, Justin Hall ’06, Chaillee Hogan ’05, Wakako Hora ’05, Rachel Hoffman ’08, Heather Johnson ’06, Mesa Johnson ’05, Adam Murfield ’06, Emily Place ’05, Emily Schupp ’05 and Jason Schwietz ’05.

St. Paul Campus from 1870 to 1900

Opening as an Industrial School for delinquent boys in 1876, the Old Administration Building saw St. Thomas through its first 46 years of development. The four-story red brick building, built with cutting-edge technology for its day, used steam for heat and provided hot and cold water to its residents. The building consisted of a chapel, classrooms, study halls, a kitchen, a dining hall, and dormitories. Eventually the needs of the college were no longer met by the overcrowded building and it was razed in 1931. Lake Mennith, created in 1888 by dredging a swampy area near the present-day site of the library, was used for recreational purposes. The college even had a working farm in its early years, kept up by the Gleason family, whose house can be seen on the left.

- By Emily Dowd, Rachel Hoffman and Mesa Johnson

The College of St. Thomas opened as a seminary in 1885, with the Old Administration Building as the first structure on campus. The building was finished off with a 90-foot tower from which Father James Keane, rector, used a telescope to watch for misbehaving students below. The old Administration Building housed the original chapel, first in the basement of the north wing and then on the entire third floor of the south wing where it was capable of seating 300 people. In 1891, the college built a wooden clapboard chapel in a style reminiscent of Gothic. Its eight lancet windows were replaced with stained glass in 1903. After the college outgrew the wooden chapel, it constructed a new chapel in 1917. Architect Emmanuel Masqueray, designer of the Cathedral in St. Paul, designed the chapel in a Renaissance revival style.

- By Emily Dowd, Rachel Hoffman and Mesa Johnson

St. Paul campus in the 1930s

The Liberal Arts Building, now Aquinas Hall, is the most visible legacy of the administration of the Holy Cross Fathers at St. Thomas and a major event in the development of the college. Designed by MaGinnis and Walsh of Boston, it was the first building erected in the Collegiate Gothic style with Mankato stone facings. Construction began in May 1931. At the time of this photograph, the student paper reported the completion of 12 Gothic windows, the first floor corridor, and steel joists for the second floor. Archbishop John Gregory Murray dedicated the $300,000 building on St. Thomas Day, March 7, 1932, praising the college as a center for Catholic culture.

- By Emily Koller

The Holy Cross fathers, a group of Notre Dame priests sent to St. Thomas to improve the college’s academic reputation, proposed this plan for St. Thomas in 1931. Noted Catholic architects MaGinnis and Walsh replicated the Gothic style of the Notre Dame campus in their designs for St. Thomas. This style is evident in the administration building completed in 1932 (now known as Aquinas Hall) and the projected Gothic tower, which was never completed. Also of note is the athletic complex. College president Father Matthew Schumacher envisioned a stadium that would accommodate 50,000 spectators and attract national attention because of its large size and innovative retractable roof of steel and glass.

- By Chaillee Hogan, Heather Johnson and Adam Murfield

St. paul campus after World War II

This 1948 aerial view illustrates the effect the GI Bill had on the College of St. Thomas. To meet the rising demands for living accommodations from the swelling enrollment, the college purchased several temporary structures from the Federal Housing Authority, including three two-story barracks and 20 dwelling huts. These huts, with their wooden foundations and thin, drafty walls, soon became affectionately known as Tom Town. Tom Town is estimated to have housed 300 families between 1947 and 1961. Neighboring are the Collegiate Gothic structures with the newly constructed Albertus Magnus Science Hall (now the John R. Roach Center for the Liberal Arts), the only building completed from the 1945 expansion plan.

- By Sean Ewen and Emily Place

As one resident of Tom Town recalls, the military surplus duplexes were regular little houses, plain of course, but not eyesores. They became starter homes for grateful faculty veterans and their young families during the postwar housing shortage. In 1947, monthly rent was $47.50 and it included water, electricity and gas for each two-bedroom unit. Purchasing oil for the large space heater between the kitchen and living room was the responsibility of the resident. The young wives sometimes struggled with the “primitive” housekeeping conditions and the inability to entertain guests. On special occasions, several families would host a dinner party together at a nearby restaurant, usually the “Lex.”

- By Emily Koller

St. Paul campus from 1982 to 2005

A century after its founding in 1885, the University of St. Thomas was reunited with the St. Paul Seminary. The union of these two institutions marked the beginning of a plan to better unify the campus. Campus planning was focused around the goal of providing state-of-the-art facilities to better adapt to the changing needs of students and faculty, while at the same time maintaining a sense of place within the community. Here is a 1994 aerial view.

- By Justin Hall, Wakako Hora and Emily Schupp

After 20 years of planning, St. Thomas began work on the Summit Avenue project in September 2004. The end result of this effort will be realized in increased off-street parking, new apartments to facilitate an increasingly residential campus, two new academic buildings, and new Child Development Center. Here is a fall 2004 aerial view, taken as construction was beginning on a new 422-bed apartment residence and 355-space underground ramp east of the baseball field.

- By Justin Hall, Wakako Hora and Emily Schupp

Minneapolis campus from 1982 to 2005

The Robert Bruce Langdon residence was located 29 S. 10th St. from 1882 to 1911. The house and property covered the entire block and Langdon and his wife, Sarah, entertained prominent people there. The house was razed in 1920 and an automotive dealership stood on the site for many years, until Terrence Murphy Hall was built in 1992 beginning the development of the downtown Minneapolis campus.

St. Thomas opened its first Minneapolis campus building – Terrence Murphy Hall, on the upper right – in 1992, and today it is the home of the College of Business and the Graduate School of Professional Psychology. Opus Hall (across 10th Street, in the background) followed in 1999 for the School of Education, and the School of Law building (bottom left) opened in 2003. Schulze Hall (center) is under construction and will open in August for the newly formed School of Entrepreneurship. The Minneapolis campus has 4,000 students and nearly 500 faculty and staff.