Amid the social upheaval of the 1970s, a band of experimental Minnesota artists grew tired of the established art scene and imagined something different.
They wondered: What if the artists themselves had a say in what belongs in a museum and who gets an exhibition? What if artists could carve out space for themselves within museums’ hallowed galleries?
Out of their questions, the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program was born at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Today, 50 years on, it remains a vital partnership between the museum and Minnesota-based artists, offering an artist-curated gallery within Mia to exhibit their work.
As MAEP arrived on the scene in 1975, it joined a sort of grassroots arts zeitgeist. Tom DeBiaso, whose work was a part of MAEP’s inaugural exhibition, had formed Film in the Cities, offering young people the tools to experiment with filmmaking. Another group formed the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM), a feminist collective that operated a gallery in downtown Minneapolis between 1976 and 1991. A burgeoning gallery scene took hold in the Twin Cities – and across the country – as artists experimented with ways to yield more agency.
“There was this impulse that we could be stronger as a community if we began to build some social fabric where we would know each other, where maybe the act of an exhibition place could be more than just showing work,” said DeBiaso, who went on to become a professor at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
The artists with a radical bent made their pitch to funders and Mia’s leadership, who decided to give it a shot.
“There was sort of an air around the country for artist-initiated exhibitions,” said Stuart Nielsen, an artist and early collaborator. It fed what he remembers as a lively energy among the mostly young artists there at MAEP’s formation.
Stuart Klipper, another collaborator, likened the idea of MAEP to the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural publication that provided access to tools and knowledge for self-sufficiency and communal living. Like it, MAEP was born from a desire to find alternate models.
Klipper said the group initially discussed a computer-based algorithmic model for selecting artists, based on the Los Angeles Market Street Program, but the idea was soon scrapped for a more traditional submission process.
In addition to DeBiaso, Nielsen and Klipper, MAEP’s inaugural show included influential artists like abstract painter Phyllis Wiener, Rochester-based artist Judy Onofrio and the late George Morrison.
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Onofrio later had a solo MAEP exhibition called “Judyland,” where she assembled a mix of fruit, animals, faces and objects in a maximalist explosion of whimsy. MAEP “gave me the confidence to go for something that huge, and then it just took off,” she said.
As MAEP grew, staffing the program with working artists proved critical to its success, said early staffer Cynde Randall. “It just was a magical thing to hold the space for all kinds of artists,” she said. “That was also really written into the philosophy at the time – it was a space not inhibited by curatorial fashion or political or social concerns.”
Many of the shows, Randall said, wouldn’t have happened at a traditional museum. She recalled the 10th anniversary show in 1986 with a kinetic sculpture by Norman Anderson, “Noise Descending the Staircase,” featuring drums and trumpets set to a timer. “There was a consciousness raising about the importance of the arts,” she said.
As Minnesota’s arts community has grown and strengthened, so has the program, said MAEP director Nicole Soukup. “That aligns with more artists choosing to live in Minnesota and make their practice here,” she said.
Artists are selected three times per year through an open call application process. An advisory committee composed of artists chooses among the applicants and submits them for a final Mia review. Selected artists receive $13,500 in addition to space and support for their exhibition.
MAEP today operates in a different cultural landscape than the 1970s. While its founders may have envisioned an autonomous group operating independently under Mia’s roof, the program is now incorporated into the museum’s hierarchy. Still, its continued presence keeps alive the artists’ demand to have their say.
“Amy Usdin: After All” is on display at Mia’s MAEP gallery through February 22, 2026. The fiber art exhibition transforms fishing nets and other textile materials into draping landscapes full of texture and longing. Usdin will give anartist talk at the museum on January 25, and will also be a part of the “2024/25 MCAD–Jerome Fellowship Exhibition” at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), opening Friday, January 16.
