Pick of the Week: "Our Treasures" at Carleton's Perlman Teaching Museum

This is Northfield’s last week to enjoy a spectacular visiting exhibit of American art at the Perlman Teaching Museum in Carleton College’s Weitz Center for Creativity. The exhibit is “Our Treasures: Highlights from the Minnesota Museum of American Art,” and it ends on Tuesday, May 8. The exhibit includes thirty works by well-known American artists like Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, Romare Bearden, Christo, and Paul Manship. Among the highlights are three spectacular bronze sculptures by Manship (1885-1966), the St. Paul sculptor best known for this sculpture Prometheus, which forms the centerpiece of Rockefeller Center in New York City.

The oldest work in the exhibit is Jasper Cropsey’s 1860 painting Stalking Deer, and among the most recent works is Wing Young Huie’s Death Valley, Nevada(2001-2002). These two works provide good examples of the range of work in the exhibit, as well as some of the unifying elements. Cropsey’s painting depicts Native Americans hunting in the wild New England landscape of a previous century; Huie’s photograph shows a young Asian-American girl sitting in front of a landscape of the American Southwest. Captured in these images is the extraordinary diversity of the American landscape and the American experience over the course of the past century and a half. The Midwestern farm landscapes of Wood and Benton, the Harlem Renaissance jazz collages of Romare Bearden, the sleek Art Deco of Paul Manship, and the colorful Abstract Expressionist landscapes of Joan Mitchell—they're all here in the Perlman Teaching Museum’s intimate new space. 

After Tuesday, May 8, the exhibit travels to the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, before returning to the Weisman at the U of M in the winter of 2013. This is the best chance for Northfielders to see this stunning collection of American art. The exhibit is free and open to the public.  Museum hours are M-W 11am-6pm, Th-F 11 am-9 pm, and sa and Su noon-4 pm.