The curator shares her journey, inspirations, and what’s next for European art at Mia—including an exciting exhibition opening later this year.
Galina Olmsted, • Credit: MInneapolis Institute of Art
Many guides have met Associate Curator of European Art Galina Olmsted through trainings for At the Moulin Rouge, but her impact at Mia extends far beyond that exhibition. Now just over a year into her role, she is helping shape the museum’s European art programming with shows now on view and in the works. Balancing her curatorial work with family life (she’s married to a University of Minnesota neuroscience professor and mother to two young boys), Olmsted recently sat down with Insight to discuss her career, inspirations, and vision for Mia’s future.
Galina Olmsted enjoys her first Minnesota summer with sons Jack, 4, and Nico, 2.
Give us a sense of your background and what sparked your interest in art.
I’m from Oberlin, Ohio, which is home to one of the best—if not the best—small art college museums in the country. And that was formative for me to have that resource in my backyard—I was always a museum person. I was also fortunate enough that the museum up the road from us was the Cleveland Museum of Art. So I grew up around incredible collections, and particularly incredible collections of 19th century French painting. And then, when I went to graduate school first at Case Western Reserve University and had the opportunity to work at the Cleveland Museum of Art for two years in drawings and one year in modern art, to really engage with those collections was formative for me. I did my PhD on the East Coast at the University of Delaware, and just worked at museums the whole way through.
So, did you always know you wanted to work in a museum?
Working as a curator was always the path that I wanted in art history. I never really considered an academic track. I just wanted to be around objects and around the public and to think about creating those meaningful experiences that people have in museums with original works of art. So while I was at Delaware, I worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and just got to know those collections really well. And then just before I came to Mia, I was at Indiana University, a university art museum that has an especially strong collection of 19th and 20th century European art, where I had a great couple of years. When the job opened up at Mia, it just felt like an absolute perfect fit for me.
A perfect fit, for sure! Guides have enjoyed At the Moulin Rouge, but I’m sure they’d love to know about some of the favorite exhibitions you worked on before coming to Mia, too. Give us some highlights.
The first major French painting show I worked on was Van Gogh Repetitions, which was at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2014, and then traveled to the Phillips Collection. That was a show that really was about close looking at Van Gogh's art and thinking about the repetitions that he made in his career, revisiting the same subject again and again. That, I think, really explored an aspect of Van Gogh's art that the public wasn't as familiar with. Another show I had the opportunity to work on at the National Gallery in 2014, Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye, traveled to the Kimbell Art Museum and was really life-changing for me in so many ways. I just had the opportunity to write for the catalog for the current Caillebotte exhibition that is opening at the Getty Center in February before traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago in the summer. Those are three landmark exhibitions in my mind that really shaped the way that I think about French painting.
It’s thrilling to see you bring that foundation to Mia. Now, tell us about a few highlights from your first year or so here.
I've been really lucky to have already great mentorship at the museum and colleagues who really want me to succeed and who set me up with large projects right away so that I could just hit the ground running. That's been a really positive part of this first year. And so in my mind, the sort of first big thing that I did was the reinstallation of Gallery 377, the modern art gallery that includes Max Beckmann’s triptych. That was such a terrific way to get to learn those collections and also to learn how those sorts of installations work at the museum, the various teams are who work on those projects, including the crew who installs it, Editorial and Design who works with you on the labels, and all sorts of steps that take place. So that was a terrific first project for me.
I also hit the ground running with acquisitions. We have a number of new 19th and 20th century paintings that have entered the collection since I started here, and I'm proud of those acquisitions.
And then, yes, of course, At the Moulin Rouge. People seem to really be enjoying it, and I've been so pleased also at the engagement with both by the Friends and by the guides. I know those are often overlapping groups, and the way that they've helped activate that space and that material for our visitors has been really special.
Speaking of our guides, what has it been like to work with them?
I mean, I think the depth of commitment is unparalleled compared to other institutions. I've walked through the galleries, gone to check things upstairs, and I’ve enjoyed running into guides leading tours. This includes tours of At the Moulin Rouge, plus stopping by the Ask Me guides stationed in the gallery. While I put together the training for the guides, they've gone above and beyond in their preparation. I've run into guides who've said, “Oh, I read this biography of Toulouse-Latrec,” or who say, “Oh, I pulled this exhibition catalog,” and they’re sort of giving themselves homework and building out a curriculum, and you can tell that it's rooted in their own interest in the material and their own dedication to creating those experiences for visitors. It's admirable, and I think a really treasured part of the culture here at Mia.
Thank you—I think our guide corps would agree that our interest and enthusiasm runs deep. Building on that, guides will love hearing about what you’re excited about next.
Chrysanthemums and Horsefly, c. 1833–34 • Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese,1760–1849) Ink and color on paper. Bequest of Richard P. Gale, 74.1.210
First, a show that just opened in the Cargill Gallery, Hokusai | Monet. We have a Monet chrysanthemums painting from 1897 that's on loan to Mia for three years from a private collection, and it's been such a wonderful addition to our permanent collection galleries. But this exhibition puts it in the context of Monet's interest in Japanese prints. He was a collector of Japanese prints. He had an extensive collection in his home at Giverny, and he owned several examples from what's called the Large Flower Series by Hokusai, and it includes a print of chrysanthemums, and there's a really strong visual relationship between the Monet painting and that print. In its collection, Mia has the full large flower series, and so all of those prints will go up in Cargill alongside the painting. It’s an opportunity to talk about that reciprocal relationship because obviously French painters have this deep interest in Japanese art, but there's also a very early Japanese interest in French painting. So there's a sort of reciprocity story that we’re telling, and that's a project that I'm co-curating with Mai Yamaguchi, the Andrew W. Mellon assistant curator of Japanese art.
Looking ahead to the fall, I’m working with Lori Williamson, who I'm sure many guides know, as she runs the print study room. She’s been a wonderful colleague, and she and I are co-organizing an exhibition that is really born of an opportunity: the centennial of the publication of The Great Gatsby in 2025 by St. Paul native F. Scott Fitzgerald. There will be a number of celebrations throughout the Twin Cities organized in large part by another friends group, the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library. We're partnering with them, and we're going to be doing an exhibition Gatsby at 100 about the Jazz Age and art. So, we’re thinking about art from the 1920s and our collection across all media, and in particular art from that period, that has a relationship to the themes of The Great Gatsby, and thinking about that novel as a jumping off point for an opportunity to put many of our best, most interesting works on view in a new and compelling way. I know there will be a lot of programming both at the museum and throughout the Twin Cities, and 2025 is going to be a fun year for those of us who like a Gatsby-themed party.
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