Meet Spencer Wigmore, Mia's New Associate Curator of Paintings

A Minnesota native returns home to share his passion for American art—and to work closely with guides.

Spencer Wigmore Credit: Minneapolis Institute of Art

Spencer Wigmore’s connection to Mia goes back to childhood. Growing up in Elk River just north of the Twin Cities, he often visited the museum. After more than a decade away studying and working in other institutions, he’s back in Minnesota, as Mia’s Associate Curator of Paintings in the Art of the Americas department. Insight recently connected with him to hear about his path, his projects, and his thoughts on the role of guides.

So, this is a bit of a homecoming from you, yes? Give us a sense of your educational and career journey—and how you’ve kind of come full circle.

This is my home museum. I grew up in Elk River, and I did my undergrad at Carleton College, where I majored in art history. After graduating, I entered a PhD program at the University of Delaware, where I focused on 19th-century American landscape painting. I was away from Minnesota for about 13 years. Near the end of my graduate studies I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and partway through that I got my first full-time curatorial job at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. That institution had a lot of material really close to my core interests and was an exceptional place to start—working on exhibitions, acquisitions, and a major collection reinstallation. My wife and I knew we wanted to get back to Minnesota at some point. The first opportunity came about two years ago when I became fine art curator at the Minnesota Historical Society. Then I had the opportunity to come here to Mia.

What drew you to Mia in particular? Growing up, the fact that it was free was a huge thing. That kind of accessibility and community engagement is really valuable and central to building a lasting relationship with the collection. As my career advanced, there were always interesting things happening here. I think of the Hearts of Our People exhibition, for example. I just liked coming back, spending time with pictures I hadn’t seen for a long time and noticing little changes in the galleries. Every holiday I would make a stop here and do my tour through the spaces I wanted to see.

How did your interest in art history begin? Really by chance. I had a high school teacher who connected with me. I wasn’t interested in the topic at all or had any background in it—I’m not from the art world. I took a class to try and get college credit and thought, I’ll do this and then move on to what I really want to do. Two or three weeks into that class, a switch flipped, and I knew this was what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what it involved at the time, but that feeling has never gone away.

And what about your focus on American art? I’ve always had an interest in histories of conservation and environmental issues as they express themselves visually. At various points in undergrad and in museum work I’ve had the chance to work closely with landscape painting and photography, and I really enjoyed it.

You’ve now been at Mia for about four months. What has the experience been like so far? I’m part of the Art of the Americas department. Eventually there will also be a curator of Native American art, but for now I’m broadly responsible for U.S. art up to 1970, with a particular focus on painting. A lot of my time so far has been getting to know the collection and reflecting on how it’s displayed. It’s challenging because it’s dispersed—you have Latin American art here, some American art there—so it’s hard to find a cohesive through line.

The exciting part is thinking about what the future of American art at Mia will look like, especially in dialogue with other collections. That could mean transnational connections of American artists working in France, American designers drawing inspiration from Japanese aesthetics, or approaching American art through a hemispheric lens that encompasses all of the Americas, not just the United States.

What projects are you working on now? I’m still getting settled, but we do have some acquisitions in mind that I’m excited about. I’m also working on an exhibition in the Cargill Gallery called Built to Last: The Sjogren Meyer Collection of American Art. It draws on a private collection of paintings and photographs from about 1920 to 1950, with a focus on industry and social realist imagery. The goal is to show a spectrum of responses to industry and the Great Depression, from celebratory portrayals of industrial progress to biting critiques of labor injustice. The show will include about 40 works, and we’ll rotate some halfway through to show more depth. Visitors will see familiar names like Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Reginald Marsh, as well as artists who were significant for a time but have since been overlooked. It opens in January 2026.

How do you see guides as part of your work? At the Amon Carter, I worked with docents and the education team, and I see the same here. When we curate, we have stories we want to tell that reflect the importance of the collection. But audiences are very diverse, and there isn’t one single way to connect with everyone. Guides do important work in meeting people where they are, finding rich ways to connect, and developing a unique expertise that augments what curators do.

Recently you asked guides about their favorite works at Mia. What made you ask that? It was curiosity. It’s a helpful piece of information to know what works resonate with people as we think about the future of the collection. Sometimes that aligns with what we want to do, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s useful to know how the collection is being used interpretively beyond my own work.

How do you think about issues of diversity in the collection? We’ve all inherited collections shaped by institutional histories and by the opportunities available to artists at different points in time, which ended up being imbalanced. Part of why I connected with Mia as a kid is that I could see experiences I recognized and people who looked like me on the walls. That’s not something everyone is able to access. It’s really important—and a shared goal among curators here—to build a collection that is more representative of who we are as Minnesotans or Americans, and to tell stories that are complex and diverse and resonate with people from different backgrounds. That takes time—figuring out the gaps, how to fill them, and at what pace.

Speaking of connecting with Mia’s collection, are there particular works that have been meaningful to you? I try to avoid picking favorites, but as a kid I really enjoyed Jasper Cropsey’s Autumn Landscape. I still enjoy spending time with it. More recently, reinstalling George Morrison’s large work upstairs was really exciting, especially after it had been in storage. Beyond individual works, I’ve enjoyed thinking about the collection as a whole—its strengths, its gaps, and what feels unique or exceptional to us as an institution.

And finally, what does it mean for you to be back in Minnesota? It’s home. Both my wife and I are from here, our families are here, and we have a strong sense of community here. Minnesota offers so much, and it’s meaningful to be back and part of Mia, a museum that shaped me when I was young.