Minnesota Marine Art Museum
Painting, photography, prints, and sculpture explore oceans, rivers, labor, migration, leisure, and ecology from a low riverside museum in Winona.
Artwork inspired by Nicholas Brewer
“Marine art” here is broader than ships. The collection uses water to connect Impressionism, American landscape, contemporary Indigenous art, environmental change, and the movement of people and goods. Follow how one artist paints reflection and another paints risk.
The museum’s Mississippi setting is part of the interpretation. Windows, native gardens, barges, current, and bluff light make it possible to compare represented water with working water. Temporary exhibitions change the balance substantially, so verify what is on view before planning around a specific artist.
- Setting
- Upper Mississippi
- Mediums
- Painting to photography
- Campus
- Native gardens
Quick guide
- Collection lens
- Ask what water is doing in each work
- Outside lens
- Compare painted water with the working Mississippi
Use water as subject, material, route, and power
- Start with
- Begin at the Mississippi riverfront and carry observations about current, commerce, and light into the galleries.
- Look closely at
- Compare American and European paintings by how each artist constructs water, weather, labor, and horizon.
- Connect the story
- Use the rotating contemporary exhibitions to challenge the older collection’s definitions of marine art.
- Plan around
- Check the current exhibition roster and allow outdoor time when river weather makes the setting especially revealing.
Good to know
Well-known works rotate and loans change; an online collection page does not guarantee that a particular painting is currently displayed.
Notice these
- Mississippi riverfront
- American and European painting
- Rotating contemporary exhibitions