How you can help the arts recover

Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.

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The new Minnesota Arts and Culture website makes an intriguing promise: Tell us your ZIP code, and we'll instantly generate a list of arts or cultural offerings near you. The site allows users to enter some preferred cultural categories — Dance, perhaps? Theater? Visual art? — but it doesn't require anything more than a general location.

With interest duly piqued, an editorial writer entered a south Minneapolis ZIP code. The website came back with a list of 98 arts or cultural organizations. Some were too far to travel unless we felt like making a weekend of it. The first item on the list was a performing arts venue that had nothing programmed at the moment. But No. 2 on the list was the Museum of Russian Art, about 3.4 miles from the home office where this editorial was written.

A handy link took us to the museum's home page, where we learned that the museum "stands with the people of Ukraine" and featured some works specifically addressing the Russian invasion. It sounded worth a visit, so off we went.

The searchable directory that started us on our museum outing is a creation of the Minnesota Arts and Culture Coalition, a consortium of nonprofit arts groups and museums seeking to help bring patrons back after a dramatic falloff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Members of the group are as big as the Guthrie Theater and as small as the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids.

And then there's the Museum of Russian Art. When we arrived, only a few people were strolling through its galleries. The current exhibit, "Premonition of a Russian Dystopia," focuses on the works of Geli Korzhev, a Soviet-era painter who predicted the rise of "something not wholly human, totally scary, and belligerent" if the Soviet Union were to break up. In hindsight, it is tempting to assume that he foresaw the advent of Vladimir Putin.

Cold reality returned on the upper level, where the Ukrainian-born artist Elena Kalman vents her rage at the Russian invasion of its onetime republic. Huge acrylic-on-paper paintings depict her vision of "Ukraine Defiant," although her images seem to speak more of devastation than defiance.

The museum's executive director, Mark Meister, told an editorial writer that the repeated shutdowns of the pandemic period were "absolutely" a blow. "We reopened immediately upon being allowed, both times after the governor had made the closures, and we reopened with our full, seven-day-a-week schedule," he said. "And even so, attendance initially was at about a 35% level."

Now, attendance has recovered to about 90% of its pre-pandemic levels, "so that's a positive," he said. "But we're still not back to normal." Memberships remain about 15% lower than pre-pandemic levels.

The arts coalition hopes the Legislature will come through with a cash infusion for its members. Of the $190 million request, the Museum of Russian Art stands to receive $110,000. "Which would be a tremendous help to us, needless to say," Meister said.