Minnesota Capitol Restoration: The Awe and the Awful

Minnesota State Capitol reopens after renovation, but final touches are still being applied.

The Minnesota State Capitol reopened for business on Tuesday after being closed for a $300 million renovation. The restoration is ongoing, but the legislature convened and the show must go on.

The Minnesota Historical Society promotion says: “Come visit your shiny new Minnesota State Capitol—refurbished, renovated and restored from top to bottom. Ooh and aah over its gleaming marble, magnificent murals, vibrant paintings and more, all restored to their original 1905 perfection.” Minnesota Public Radio ran a story on the new look Capitol with the headline: The awe is back.

It’s not that simple. There is both new beauty as well as retained historical ugliness. The MPR story included this telling line: “… planners didn’t want to tinker too much with history.”

That’s a shame. There is some history that we should not continue to glorify, such as the denigration and the genocide of Native Americans. Just because the renovation is over, the criticism isn’t. We should not delight in being frozen in 1905. Significantly, some artwork fails to reflect our values, an unacceptable situation in our the state’s most important public building.

Let’s look at the awe and the awful.

Capitol Art Subcommittee Bows to Political Pressure, Ducks Tough Questions

Senate mural: “The Discoverers and Civilizers Led to the Source of the Mississippi,” one of the more disturbing paintings for its image of forced conversion.

The Capitol Art Subcommittee has shown incredible skill in ducking tough questions about the offensive and racist art in the Minnesota State Capitol and whether or not to move it.

In its most recent meeting, May 5, the Subcommittee shifted gears, moving off of the debate about historic art and starting to talk about criteria for adding new art.

We will save that “new art” discussion for the another blog, but here are a few takeaways from last week’s meeting:

• The Art Subcommittee has accelerated its time table to complete its final report. It will now finish by the end of June instead of the end of the summer, as it announced earlier. (The Subcommittee got pressure from the Minnesota State Capitol Preservation Committee finish its work early because the work on the Capitol is moving forward quickly.)
• Each Subcommittee member will get the opportunity to write a personal note in the report, 500-600 words each, expressing their opinions on the two most controversial paintings in the Governor’s Reception Room, the Father Hennepin painting and the painting of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. (The current recommendation is to move them out of the Governor’s Conference Room to somewhere else in the Capitol.)
• One of the main “status quo” arguments for leaving the offensive art in the Capitol is that it provides an important history lesson. By providing better historical interpretation, the argument goes, Capitol visitors could get a more complete story of the state’s history. Unfortunately, there still does not appear to be money in the budget to pay for the historical interpretation. So for now it will be the same old story.

Lastly, let’s take one more look at the Art Subcommittee’s ability to speak out of both sides of its mouth. (It’s a topic we have covered before, but it’s one that cannot be emphasized enough.)