The MCAD Library has graphic novels, films, photo journalism, and an artist’s book about 9/11 and they are now on display in the Library.
Click here for a full listing.
Take a moment to look at how the artist’s creative response continues to help us process this national tragedy. Peace.
A girl began her life in a small town in Minnesota at the end of the 19th century. We can tell her story because we discovered an old battered black photo album filled with antiquated photographs in the MCAD Archive. We uncovered it while we were retrieving materials for the book and film which fellow MCADians are making to commemorate our quasquicentennial (125 years). At first glance we thought the album was an odd object to have in the archive. Whose album was it? Why is it here? On its cover is the title in spidery handwritten black fountain pen ink, "Infancy to First Year at Mpls Art Institute and Following Summer".
So, here is the story of a student's life. She starts as a baby bundled on a large furry pelt. Her name was Lucile. The photographs continue with the same girl at various ages shown riding her bike, with friends, on horseback, putting on school musicals. We see what she fondly remembered: her family, Buzzie the half-dachshund dog, Patsy the cat, the kittens her father brought home. And then we see that she has become the photographer and has written in: " the cat they had after I left home for art school", "my first year roommate, Wanda Gag", "the first summer vacation home from the Art Student's League - the last time I saw my father". The album ends with two pages of art students happily posing in painter's smocks here on our campus with the massive new Minneapolis Institute of Arts building in the background.
ome handwritten captions and some research I was able to figure out that this was the album of Lucile Lundquist (1895-1981). After graduating from Warren High School in 1916 she came here to the Minneapolis School of Art (MSA) which was then part of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.
ms to have been able to produce artists who succeeded beyond expectations not only locally but also nationally. And from this perhaps special time of political change in the shadow of a coming war together with the interactions of these students and at least one of the faculty, Mr. Koehler, known as a labor supporter, came a group of left-leaning politically active citizens. Lucile Lundquist was one of this group.
any Scandinavians who participated in the cooperative movement ensuring workers the profits of their labor. Charles Lundquist was the manager of the People's Trading Company, a large department store in town. He had studied at the Eastman School of Business in New York after emigrating from Sweden. Lucile's mother May Barnhart from Mantorville, Minnesota had been a school principal and she liked to paint. Her paintings would be the only art that Lucile would know until coming to Minneapolis and seeing the Institute's collection.
is today). Her roommate was Wanda Gag who would become her very close friend and confidant. When not doing school work they liked to play duets on the piano at their club and take in entertainments, like the Russian Ballet, operas, movies, plays, walks and picnics. Of course they also liked to talk about boys, politics and the war in Europe. Their teachers also encouraged their attending local lectures outside of school, such as those given at the Unitarian Church where Wanda heard Allen Broms speak about "free love". Lucile said about her art school friends, "There was a special feeling among us. We had a separate make-up from people who expected us to work in a store... When we got to Minneapolis, the old life seemed empty, dry, barren, and dull."
7, Wanda had left for New York; however, she stayed in touch with Lucile who was now rooming with Stella Gag, Wanda's sister. In the Fall of 1918 Lucile headed east to New York to the Art Students' League which had just given her a scholarship in addition to the one that Wanda Gag and their friend Adolphe Dehn had received the year before. They became one of the group of students who had come from the Minneapolis School of Art to join the Art Students' League in this period. Many of them would stay in close contact with each other, even eating dinners together to save money. The First World War would cause disruption to this cohesion by scattering the men as a result of enlistment or conscription but they came back together again in New York after the war ended. Through this group Lucile became involved with Arnold Blanch whom she would soon marry.
rmany. When they returned they moved to Woodstock, New York to join the art colony run by Hervey White. This would become their core home for the rest of their lives even though they both left frequently to teach at various schools across the country and would divorce in 1939.
Vanderbilt Whitney's assistant and she was represented in the Whitney Studio Club's 10th Annual Exhibition in 1925 and continued to be included through 1930. In 1933 both Lucile and her husband Arnold received Guggenheim Fellowships - the first time that a husband and wife had both won. They spent the following year in Europe and returned in November 1933 after which they both taught at the Art Students' League. Lucile continued to do well with art sales and shows at the newly-founded Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
lieb. Lucile and Harry in addition to Arnold Blanch, Adolf Dehn, and Elizabeth Olds, all former MSA students of about the same age were also members of An American Group, Inc. which was a cooperative non-profit of 52 artist who put on exhibitions. In 1938 they sponsored "Roof for 40 Million - An Exhibition on Housing" in which they said "Our wish is to awaken interest in the problem of Housing among those who have grown callous to the appeal of the printed or spoken word. The works presented will be distinct cultural value and will demonstrate the fact that artists are responsive to the pressing problems of our time."
