Worth a Look, Road Trip Edition: Minnesota Marine Art Museum

"Worth A Look" is a series of semi-regular essays about excellent art, interesting ideas, and whatever other cool stuff we find around town. Go see art; it's good for you.

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If you’ve ever spent any time on the ocean, you know the strange feeling that follows you back to land: the swaying. You’ll be sitting in a chair or walking up some stairs, and you’ll feel your body reeling internally, still trying to regulate your balance against ocean swells you left behind an hour earlier. The clinical term is mal de debarquement, literally the “sickness of disembarking.”

I knew, heading down to Winona to visit the Minnesota Marine Art Museum for the first time, that seascapes awaited me, but I can’t say I expected to feel the sway. Honestly, I was going in cold, which I would highly recommend for most art experiences if I weren’t also an arts writer and wanted everyone to read my brilliant reviews. Maybe save them for after, I don’t know. If you are able to avoid the reviews and the spoilers and go in cold — especially to a museum, especially on a road trip — you may just foster a little surprise in your life. If, on the other hand, you’re wondering whether it’s worth your time to drive two plus hours downriver to see some paintings, then by all means, read on.

The first surprise was the landscaping: my goodness, those gardens are gorgeous. The second was inside: from the parking lot, the museum looks like a little wooden house on the Mississippi River, but it’s actually friggin’ huge. On display are five different exhibitions of paintings, sculptures, storybooks, and artifacts, all related in some way to the water. When I say I went in cold, I mean my only expectation was to get a good look at the classic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware, which, come to find out, was removed from their care two years ago and sold at auction for $45 million. I think I knew that; must have slipped my mind.

What I didn’t know was what I would see inside. First up: Judy Onofrio’s Deep Dive, a wild collection of ornate assemblages that bring together bones and claws and shells and glass into strange maritime sculptures. The show spans twenty years of work, and Onofrio’s older fiberglass faces make for a striking contrast with her more recent, more somber bleached bone towers — a cornucopia of colors interspersed with imposing, impossible fossils. In one moment, you get colorful, cartoonish cabaret characters lounging and mugging with marine life; in the next, swirling abstractions of off-white animal horns. It’s the life cycle of land and sea, perhaps: life and death, trash and treasure.

 

Top: Judy Onofrio, Big Secret, 2006. Foam, fiberglass, casting resin, acrylic paint, glass beads, and glass eyes. Bottom: Deep Dive installation view. Foreground, at right: Judy Onofrio, Chalice, 2019. Bone, casting resin, steel, and acrylic paint. All photos by Russ White.

 

In the next gallery over, a brand new exhibit of some absolutely knockout paintings: Ultra Mare by Kajahl. Every piece is a portrait either fictional or surreal: handsome Black captains peer out over their steering wheels toward the horizon while strange, mythical characters stare back in the form of floating icebergs and sunken treasures. Kajahl treats the paint with flourishing precision, rendering his explorers in crisp, sunbathed perfection while fuzzing out the edges around his uncanny water deities. You’re left wondering if these fearsome gods and noble explorers stand at odds to one another. With crowns on their heads and warships at their backs, do these men reframe or simply reinforce our assumptions about the old romance of conquest by sea?

 

Top: Kajahl Benes, Commanding Seas, 2024. Oil on canvas. Bottom: Kajahl Benes, Frozen Entity, 2023. Oil on canvas.

 

That sense of history pervades the other three shows, as well. In one gallery, two illustrated picture books wrestle with the power of the ocean — in the distance it sets between the lives of Hmong-Americans and their grandparents’ lives in Laos, in Kao Kalia Yang’s and Khoa Le’s The Most Beautiful Thing, and in the erasure of enslaved African identities as they crossed to the Americas, in Born on the Water, a complement to the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson, and Nikkolas Smith. 

The other two galleries do an interesting job of juxtaposing the history of 19th and early 20th century landscape painting with more contemporary artists — even some familiar names from the Twin Cities art scene, like Sonja Peterson’s monster cut-paper Empire Builder, Anne Labovitz’s eerily luminescent Water Works VI, and Mary Solberg’s Stolen Moment, featuring one of her signature swimcap-wearing women. The works are interspersed among more traditional scenes of turbulent seas, Rococo skies, and frigates moored in hazy bays, all part of the exhibition Fluid, asking the question “What is Marine Art, and what can it be?”

 

Fluid, installation view.

Andy DuCett, On Loan, 2018. Rotating oil on canvas on mobile platform.

 

And there, to my surprise, was the sway: an actual seascape painting, gilded frame and all, rocking back and forth along the wall to the sound of creaking wood. Twin Cities artist (and friend of the author) Andy DuCett built the entire apparatus like a section of someone’s living room, and back and forth his little painting goes. It’s a funny, engaging way to reimagine a traditional painting genre, for sure, but if you stick with the piece long enough you start to remember something about life on the water: the sea is powerful and magnificent and, when you’re stuck on a boat for long enough, eventually kind of boring. The waves never stop, the creaking never subsides. You’d better get your sealegs under you before you lose your lunch, and even making landfall won’t make the rolling stop.

It’s a fun moment that brings real life to the show, especially when viewed across from models of the Titanic and the USS Constitution (which enthralled the kids at the museum as much as anything in the room). The side-by-side curation of the show is its biggest strength: next to DuCett's undulating installation is an 1858 Edward Cooke painting of another ship nearly capsizing in a storm. Across the room, one of the hundred-year-old canvases depicts a crew manning the sails during Vast Heaving Aboard the St. George; next to it, a 2007 photo of crab fishermen from the "Deadliest Catch" TV show proves that while the outfits have changed, the crashing waters have not.

 

Top: Artist once known, Portrait of Unknown Girl with Rose, c. 1850s. Oil on canvas. New Bedford Whaling Museum Collection. Bottom: Holmes stereoscope in use by the author.

 

The final gallery I will leave you to discover on your own, save to say look out for the delightfully strange Unknown Girl with Rose, the 19th century 3D viewfinder goggles (designed by a Supreme Court Justice, of all people), and some interesting insights into the overlap between gender roles, environmental concerns, and landscape painting. It’s a genre of art that, I have to say, has never been my bag. If you give them a minute and get up close, however, they are remarkable examples of paintings as portals — not just to the Adirondacks or the Mississippi River, but to the time and culture in which these were painted.

Back in the car, heading eastward into the rolling hills and valleys of the Driftless, I suddenly understood landscape painting's charm a little better than I ever had before. Our summer road trip continued on to other art adventures in Viroqua and Milwaukee and back again, too soon, to solid land and normal life. It’s what awaits the end of every good trip: the glum, rolling sickness of disembarking. Oh well. We’ll always have Winona. ◼︎ 

 

Edward Cooke, A Dutch Poon, Running for the Port of Harlingen, Is Driven in a Heavy Squall Outside the South Pier Head, 1858. Oil on canvas. Minnesota Marine Art Museum Collection.

The Minnesota Marine Art Museum is located at 800 Riverview Drive, Winona, MN. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Sunday, 10am – 5pm, and open til 8pm on Thursdays.

Kajahl: Ultra Mare, Judy Onofrio: Deep Dive, and Across a Wide Ocean: Remarkable Stories about the Origins of Identity are on view through January 5, 2025. Re/Framing The View: Nineteenth-century American Landscapes is on view through August 4.

Editor's note: The sentence regarding Washington Crossing the Delaware has been updated to reflect that the painting was never in the museum's collection but was on loan from private collectors, who decided to sell the piece.

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This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.