Past Exhibits

The cliche "a picture tells a thousand words" is often true. A Maritime Album takes a look at 50 intriguing and artistic maritime photographs and the stories surrounding the images. This exhibition was organized by the Mariners' Museum, Newport News, Virginia.

 The interaction between water and birds is the focus of A Reflective Nature, which comprises 50 paintings and works on paper selected from the permanent collection of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin, which organized the exhibition for national tour. 

 Though all the works in A Reflective Nature are alike in that each features birds and water, they differ in as many ways as there are artists to interpret these two subjects.   

America's Great Rivers is an exhibition from the Burrichter/Kierlin Marine Art Collection, the Museum's permanent collection, and loans from other collections, all depicting America's great river systems. Many of the works in this landmark exhibition have never been shown before at the MMAM, including recently acquired photographs by Ansel Adams.

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Betsy Bowen is a renowned woodcut artist based in Grand Marais, Minnesota. Her subjects are Lake Superior, traditional folklore, animals and people of the north woods. On display are a variety of her work from several woodcut series and illustrations from several children's books.

Sponsored by Winona National Bank.

Offering a variety of art and navigational instruments from many countries, this exhibit chronicles the history of ocean travel.  Imagine sailing in an age prior to instant global communication, weather updates and radio communication. Featuring navigational instruments, artifacts, books, historical documents and paintings from the Burrichter/Kierlin Marine Art and museum's collections. Explore the tools, techniques and challenges faced by the sailors over the last centuries.
 

Jim Brandenburg, Ely, MN, traveled the globe as a photographer with National Geographic Magazine for over 30 years and has won a multitude of national and international awards.  The "Chased by the Light" photographs were all taken in the deep woods surrounding Brandenburg's home, Ravenwood, near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northern Minnesota. They represent his feelings about the essence of wild places - a raven feather in the rain; a tree marked by a bear; a frosty meadow; lichens; an abandoned beaver dam; a wolf chasing ravens; or the aurora borealis in the nighttime sky.

Sponsored by Merchants Bank.

Dashing through the snow, on a one-horse open sleigh....

Join us for a celebration of the holiday season with colorful painted and carved wood sculptures by local folk artists Leo and Marilyn Smith. The Smiths are well known for their unique and creative approach to traditional holiday subjects, bright and cheerful colors and art inspired by the Upper Mississippi River. See angels, santa figures, folklore and fairy tale creatures and more.

Happy holidays to you and your family!

Members' opening reception Tuesday November 16th, 5 pm to 7 pm.

On display are handcrafted books and wood block prints by award winning artist Gaylord Schanilec.  From his Stockholm, WI studio Schanilec creates beautiful, exquisite and highly detailed wood block prints.  His prints appear in dozens of books, are sought after by collectors, libraries and museums and illustrate the natural world of the Upper Mississippi River.

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 An exhibition of paintings by Europeans, European immigrants and their American students and contemporaries.  Marine art has it roots in Europe and as America formed and grew, so did its marine art tradition. See works by Herzog, de Haas, Van Beest, Bradford, Buttersworth, Salmon and many more. 

Sponsored by Custom Alarm, Rochester, MN.

 From October 4^th through March 26^th, 2010, twenty-seven oil and canvas, gouache and watercolor paintings from the Burrichter/Kierlin Marine Art Museum by four of the world’s best contemporary marine artists are on display. 

John Stobart, Roy Cross, Dusan Kadlec and Maatren Platje are best known for their photorealistic style, painstaking attention to detail and accuracy in rendering a variety of historical and contemporary ships and locations.  Most of the scenes depict the busy sea and river ports in the growing America from 1795 to 1906. Historic seaports, such as New York, Boston, Savannah, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and  Nantucket, welcome new immigrants and merchandise. Museum visitors will view ‘famous name’ ships such as Constitution, Charles W. Morgan, Mariette, Robert E. Lee, and Minnesota.

Sponsored by Schwab LLC.

This exhibition explores the many meanings associated with water through a selection of thirty-two works drawn from the collection of the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Along with a range of interpretations, the works reflect varying approaches to imaging water, from traditional landscape to abstraction. Spanning a period from the 1920s to the 1990s, these works represent a variety of media, including oils, watercolors, photographs and prints. Among the artists represented in the exhibition are William Theo Brown, Harry Callahan, Paul Caponigro, David Taverner Hanson, Joel Meyerowitz, Robert Morris, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Dennis Oppenheim, Gabor Peterdi, Paul Resika, Wayne Thiebaud, Nahum Tschacbasov, and Neil Welliver.

A program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Sponsored by the Board of Directors of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum.

An exhibit of marine watercolors by Duluth, MN artist Cheng-Khee Chee will feature 40 watercolor paintings from around the globe. Chee's works have been represented in numerous national juried exhibitions and captured over 200 honors including the American Watercolor Society Silver Medal, Transparent Watercolor Society of America Skyledge Award (First Place), Allied Artists of America Gold Medal, and Knickerbocker Artists USA Grand Award Gold Medal and Purchase Prize for Excellence. He is well known for illustrating the popular children's book "Old Turtle".

Both East and West experiences and influences have shaped Chee’s artistic career. Over the years he has explored and experimented with ways to synthesize the concepts and processes of both traditions. His work comprises many styles from traditional to nonobjective. Chee’s ultimate goal in painting is to achieve the essence of Tao, the state of effortless creation. He hopes to produce paintings that are the synthesis of East and West, realism and abstraction, and the visual realization of his inner being.

 
Fully Sponsored by:

Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council

*This activity is funded by the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council through the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

 In 1935, George Macy, the publisher of the Heritage Press and Limited Editions Club books, invited Norman Rockwell to illustrate Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Rockwell visited Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s boyhood town, to find authentic details to include in his work. Twain’s vivid descriptions of character, setting and mood were an inspiration to the illustrator, who considered each of the writer’s scenes to be “complete and perfect to the last detail.”

The sixteen signed limited edition prints from Rockwell’s own collection comprise this exhibition featuring the artist’s timeless images for these American classics.

On loan from the Norman Rockwell Museum

Treasured whimsical wood carvings from the Leo and Marilyn Smith Collection combine with cyanotype photograph reproductions by Henry Peter Bosse.  The artists' subject is our area of the Mississippi River and its people, flora and fauna. Several new Smith pieces are on display for the first time.

Drake Hokanson and James A. Bowey are two of this region’s most talented photographers. Hokanson’s sensibility leads him to create provocative, primarily black-and-white landscape investigations. Through years as a photo-journalist and artist, the experiences of Bowey have given him the capacity to create equally captivating and sincere portraits.

*This activity is funded by the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council through the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

From Ely to Winona, and from transportation to recreation, canoes hold a special place in the past and present of Minnesota. Now, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum offers a look at the canoe as art. From hand-crafted birch bark to modern designs that are lighter, tougher and sleeker than ever before, this exhibit will explore the fascinating story of Minnesota built canoes. 

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum’s first 2-gallery group exhibition examines the work of numerous regional artists that has been inspired by rivers - most notably the Red River of the North and the Mississippi River.

Award winning Minneapolis, MN photographer and author Stuart Klipper will display a selection of his large scale photographs of the Arctic, Antarctic and points in between. His travels bring him to some of the most remote parts of the world which he captures with large format photographic panoramas of land and sea.

This activity is funded by the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council through the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund as appropriated by the Minnesota legislature with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

A holiday tradition of the Minnesota Marine Art Museum is to recognize the lifetime artistic achievements of local folk artists Leo and Marilyn Smith. The Smith's work ranges from the surreal to the light-hearted; encompassing the complexity of the natural world and the need for simple, traditional experiences.

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