College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Collecting art by artists in this region is a focus for the museum. Tweed Museum, through its collection, is intimately a part of the growth of Northern Minnesota and its rich, diverse artistic cultures. Both Indigenous and immigrant peoples have drawn from the land, the resources, and aesthetic to survive and thrive. The influence of the land and lakes is interpreted through patterns in scratchwork on birch bark containers, designs of beaded garments and moccasins, pottery forms, landscapes, and abstracts.
A highlight of the Native and Indigenous art collection is the Richard E. and Dorothy Rawlings Nelson Collection of American Indian Art. This rich collection of baskets, birch bark, beadwork, quillwork, tourist art, and treaty portraits, primarily by the Great Lakes Ojibwe and Eastern Woodlands people, 1850-1950, reflects the visual culture of this region's Anishinaabe, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomie and First Nations people in Canada, among others. The Nelsons also collected contemporary Native art in the 1980s.
In 2007, the Tweed Museum acquired the Richard E. and Dorothy Rawlings Nelson Collection of American Indian Art, including contemporary Native art from artists such as David Bradley, Patrick DesJarlait, George Morrison, and Angelique Merasty, a Cree birchbark biting artist. The Nelson Collection provides the historical context for the museum’s expanding collection of works by contemporary Native and Indigenous artists of North America. After a decade of actively collecting, the Tweed Museum currently has a sizable Native and Indigenous art collection.
In a city with major universities and a vibrant art scene, Tweed maintains its currency by collecting works from the continually evolving stream of contemporary art.Â
The Tweed Museum of Art's Contemporary Art Collection features works by artists such as:
- Julie Mehretu
- Irit Batsry
- Nicholas Africano
- Preston Singletary
- Frank Big Bear
- Max-Carlos Martinez
- Kara Walker
- Luis Gonzales Palma
- Ana Maria Hernando
- Akio Takamori
- Philip Pearlstein
- Alec Soth
The American Collection traces its beginnings to the art acquired by George Peter Tweed and donated to the Tweed Museum by Alice Tweed Tuohy. Works by 19th-century artists dominated until a visiting artist’s program, initiated in 1949 with artist Charles Burchfield, provided the opportunity to add art by 20th-century artists. Paintings by Will Barnet, Millard Sheets, Max Weber, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Fletcher Martin, Philip Evergood, Dong Kingman, Ralston Crawford, and Morris Kantor, to name a few, were acquired through this program. Generous endowments for the purchase of art have allowed the
