Seventy-seven years ago, on April 5, 1934, the experiment in fine arts, the "Little Gallery" opened at the University of Minnesota in a few rooms on the top floor of Northrop Auditorium. The front page of the MN Daily for April 5th announces the opening convocation that was held to commemorate the opening, and advertises that Mr. Russell A. Plimpton, of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, would be giving a speech titled, "Who Started Museums Anyhow?," to include a slide presentation of, in Plimpton's regard, "some of the most interesting museums in the world."

As I reached to pull the folder titled, "Victorian Questionnaire" out of the box and opened the front flap to transfer the contents, to my surprise, there were no loosely assembled papers or correspondence, research, or exhib

An Italian artist named Luciano Lattanzi had an exhibition titled "Semantic Paintings and Drawings" at the University Gallery in 1960. While logging his file, I found a mysterious stack of pen drawings, rendered in a spiderweb-like scrawl. These turned out to be made by the artist himself — you can see his signature at the bottom of the images. I realized these were templates for a promotional poster for the show. The file contained a reproduction of the following drawing, so I assume they chose this for the poster:

Through supplementary research on the history of the University Gallery, my tired eyes have scanned download after download from the PDF Archive collection of the MN Daily, the University's student newspaper. The Daily's PDF Archives provide access to PDFs of the paper dating back to 1900.

In the fall of 1960, the University Gallery showed 40 master prints by the famed Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. These contact sheets feature images from the opening. Everyone seems to be drinking coffee or tea from tea cups, a tradition I'd rather like to see revived at art openings.