Art, old friendships, and a touch of nostalgia made for a full day.
My college friend Gary, his wife Marcia, and, for many years work, have brought me to Minneapolis again and again. One of the clients I worked with was the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA).
That’s where we started the day. I was hoping that some of my old contacts would still be working there, but time and Covid eliminated that possibility. The museum itself looks different. The lovely restaurant I was hoping to revisit has been eliminated. But a couple of the museum’s collections have been revitalized.
I started in the Asian section which a helpful docent told me had been expanded. The exhibit is comprehensive and thoughtfully reimagined. It would have been easy to spend hours in that area alone. But I wanted to get a feel for what else had changed. Next stop Africa, again a reworking that highlights some beautiful additions to the collection. One fun moment was watching a young girl (5 years old, her mother told me) be entranced by one of the masks. She stood there, studying it intently, before declaring, “this is my favorite.” I was sitting on a nearby bench resting when the daughter holding her mother’s hand and steering her towards the mask returned. “She insisted we come back,” the mother whispered to me. “She’s been smitten by the mask’s magic.”
Judy went to other areas, including a Native American exhibit which she said was exquisite. I didn’t have the energy to cross the entire museum, it’s vast, to see it.
It was a short drive to the Walker Art Center’s Sculpture Garden. The museum was closed, but that was okay because they currently have only a single exhibition and it didn’t excite either of us.
Back at the hotel we took a short nap and then drove to visit Gary and Marcia. They took us on a driving tour through some of Minneapolis’s neighborhoods. The city is filled with lakes and on the first warm, dry day people were out enjoying it. There were lots of runners, strollers, people walking dogs, as well as sailboats and canoes. Outside downtown, Minneapolis is a very green city.
As we drove, the conversation shifted from neighborhoods to something more immediate, the current ICE situation in Minneapolis and how citizens have banded together to protect immigrants. It’s an activist city and many people have become involved: bringing food so people don’t have to go shopping, walking children to school, and so on.
Marcia made a short detour so we could see the sculpture surrounding General Mills’ headquarters.
Dinner at Gary and Marcia’s favorite Vietnamese restaurant was the perfect close. The Twin Cities’ Vietnamese and Hmong communities bring an authenticity and depth to the food that’s hard to beat.
As the day wound down, I realized how much of it had been about revisiting places, people, even earlier versions of myself. Some things were gone, others transformed, but the connections, to art, to friends, to the city, still held.