A Little Museum Goes a Long Way: The Jaques Art Center

By Joelle Seligson

This article was published in Museum, March/April issue of 2008.

Two hundred people sit silently in the dark machinery shed. Their talk of church, children and book club meetings has long been abandoned, along with the few remaining crumbs of homemade apple pie. They’ve also discarded the evening’s dress code—1920s farm clothes—covering their coveralls with cozy fleeces, replacing cowboy hats with woolen caps, even on what was an unusually warm September day. Sipping mugs of strong coffee, they huddle close together and watch a film that rings close to home: Sweet Land, about Minnesotans coming together, pooling their resources to save their farms and support their way of life.

It’s the culminating event of a sumptuous evening. Live music, a home-cooked buffet of meats and veggies—fresh from nearby farms—and chances to win an antique gramophone and a pie-of-the-month membership preceded the film screening. In a bigger city, an affair like this one would have cost a pretty penny. Here, guests pay by donation only. Most of the furnishings have been donated, in fact—from the portable toilets to the cuts of roast beef.

At the heart of the hoopla is the Jaques Art Center (pronounced jay-kweez) of Aitkin, Minn., a museum and a town that don’t often arise in discussion of American art. Eleven years ago, the center comprised one ramshackle room that showcased a few paintings by wildlife artist Francis Lee Jaques. It’s still a small museum today by most standards: two galleries, a collection of 60 works, just over 5,000 square feet of space and an annual budget of $100,000.

Yet in a town where the only cultural venues were once an hour’s drive away, people now cross county and state lines to come to the Jaques Art Center. An estimated 5,000 to 6,000 visit each year to view the center’s rotating exhibitions or attend its often sold-out courses in calligraphy or digital photography or 14th-century Sienese art. Its volunteers dedicate far more than 40 hours a week to keeping the tiny institution afloat. They don’t have museum studies degrees—or even museum experience. Nevertheless, their determination has created a blossoming small museum whose success is based not on the prestige of its collection or its signature architecture but on the people behind it.

Cherie and Jerry Holm are the leaders of this team. They have served in turn as the center’s founders, treasurer, president and main financers. It is their 72-acre farm—which has been in Cherie’s family for generations and on which she once raised 100 turkeys to finance her first car, an $89 1939 Plymouth—that hosts the sold-out screening. It is her cooking that will supply the pie-of-the-month winner’s prize. Standing before the crowd in her costume, a flowered apron, Cherie likens herself to a character in Sweet Land named Brownie—”the lady with lots of kids, a dirty apron and a loving husband who invites people to dinner.”

Despite the self-deprecation, Cherie is a businesswoman, who along with Jerry runs the Mayer Electric Corporation in Minneapolis. She soon turns to her pitch. “Tonight we are gathered to save the farm in another definition of the phrase. Our passion, the Jaques Art Center, survives entirely from the kindness of others who embrace its purpose through membership dollars and contributions of labor and money.

“This organization pays its own bills and seeks funding from every source possible to provide you with great exhibits and events that educate and enrich the lives of those around us. We appeal to you to embrace the cause.”

Art is a cause that Aitkin has not traditionally taken on. Today, the town is proof of the statistic that museums outnumber Starbucks in the United States: The Jaques Art Center is easy to spot in the town center—next to its only stoplight and beneath its only water tower—while the nearest Frappuccino is some 25 miles away.

But a few years ago, Aitkin’s arts community was more lacking than its lattes. “Things were pretty bleak for artists for a long time,” Cherie recalls. The local population, about 2,000 people, is rich with adventurers who revel in the area’s bountiful hunting and fishing as well as seniors seeking quiet retirement on one of 365 nearby lakes. Some residents say Aitkin is in the “midst of a renaissance”; others claim it’s depressed. But everyone agrees that outdoor recreation has long taken priority over creative expression.

Cherie and Jerry did not exactly set out to change this trend. The couple had barely heard of Francis Lee Jaques when they attended an exhibition of his work with family at Minneapolis’s Bell Museum of Natural History in 1972.

“All of us liked what we saw,” Cherie says.It turned out she had grown up across the river from Jaques and his family. Born in 1887, Jaques, named one of the 16 finest wildlife painters in history by Wildlife Art Magazine, spent his formative years in Aitkin, where he ran a taxidermy shop before leaving for service in World War I. After developing his craft with work in commercial art, he joined the staff of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, painting the backgrounds of wildlife dioramas and traveling the country on museum expeditions.

Jaques’s realistic renderings of American landscapes and animals—particularly ducks—reveal a deep-seated affection for the environment that is widely shared by the Aitkin population, including the Holms. “We have similar interests to Jaques. There’s nothing better than walking in the woods. I think it’s that sort of experience that you just can’t pull out of your human spirit,” Cherie says. Jaques and his wife, author Florence Page Jaques, so loved Minnesota’s scenic North Country that they honeymooned there in 1927—the same area where Cherie and Jerry will celebrate their 50th anniversary in November, with five children and 15 grandchildren in tow.

But a mutual affinity for nature is just part of the reason a group formed as the Friends of Jaques in the late 1980s, determined to showcase the artist’s work in Aitkin. More important to a town with a lack of artistic outlets and a growing retirement community able to fund such interests: No one else had claimed Jaques, who was born in Illinois, lived in New York for more than two decades and spent considerable time in other Midwestern towns. Aitkin seized the opportunity. As written in its statement of purpose, the art center now honors Jaques as “the first world-recognized artist from Aitkin.”

The homage started small: one print, to be exact, donated by a local newspaper. And at first, there was nowhere to put it.The group initially exhibited the print and a few other loaned works in a nearby bank. After signing on as docents for one of these shows in 1994, Cherie and Jerry were invited onto the board of directors and started collecting original Jaques lithographs and oil paintings. Seeking permanent residence for this growing collection, the board members learned that the city was planning to tear down a recently vacated Carnegie library. They scooped up the structure for the asking price of $1.

They got what they paid for. The one-room building that would be the Jaques Art Center was around 90 years old, and so was its infrastructure. It was “dilapidated,” recalls Barden Heft, director of the center’s board. The mechanical systems were shot; hot wires jutted out from rotting ceramic grommets. “We had to tear all that out and completely rewire everything. . . . At the same time we had to preserve everything to keep it as a national historic site. It was quite an undertaking.”

From someone once responsible for centers of international import, this is saying something. Born in Aitkin, Heft spent decades globetrotting on behalf of the United States Air Force, serving as a community planner for its European headquarters and designing airbases from Belgium to Italy to Japan. He returned with plans to retire at age 50 and spend time restoring his family home, seated on a high bluff overlooking a lake.

The ever-opportunistic Jaques Art Center board wouldn’t stand for this undisturbed existence. Not only is Heft renowned in Aitkin for his architectural expertise, he’s also known for his artistic connections. His father was a classically trained landscape and portrait painter; several of his works hang in the center’s galleries. In addition, Barden—who acquired a fine arts degree before his architectural one—acquired artwork throughout his time abroad. His considerable personal collection boasts dozens of Lladró sculptures, Venetian masks and woodblocks by Japanese artist Takashi Nakayama, whom Heft befriended during his years in Tokyo.

It was the latter that intrigued the board. “They got wind of me being back and heard about my collections. One day they showed up on my doorstep,” Heft recollects. “I had several woodblocks on display up in the big house, in my dad’s studio. They were quite enamored and asked if I would show them in the center.”

From there, the board convinced Heft to join its forces. Then the conversation turned to building. It was 2004, and the center’s collection had grown—thanks to donations from local families and Cherie’s hours spent scouring eBay—to one of the largest private accumulations of Jaques’s art. The lone Carnegie Gallery was no longer adequate. The center needed space for exhibition and storage, as well as classrooms and administrative offices. Perhaps most importantly, considering Aitkin’s aging populace, it needed handicapped accessibility.

The project was thus named Access Jaques, and Heft was named its leader. Two years, three iterations and painstaking attention to detail later—ensuring that even the new molding exactly matched the original—the center had a new Jaques Gallery, leaving the original Carnegie Gallery open for special exhibitions, as well as two classrooms, a vault and an elevator, made possible by a $40,000 anonymous donation.

It also had a new debt of $675,000. Since then, this number has dropped to less than $20,000, thanks solely to fundraising and contributions; the museum does not charge admission and does not plan to. The Holms alone have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars, none of which they hope to recoup. (“A gift is a gift,” Cherie clarifies.) They also created an endowment by donating 40 acres of Jerry’s grandfather’s farm. The fund now contains more than $120,000 gathering interest, as it will continue to do for 10 years, when the monies will open up for the center’s use.

The couple keeps the center’s lights on in a literal sense as well, supplying free electricity courtesy of Mayer Electric—a longtime business venture that may reflect Jerry’s upbringing in a one-room log cabin without power or plumbing. Cherie has been largely absent from the company lately, instead shouldering the responsibilities of the center’s former director Janae Johnson, who moved to San Francisco after less than two years on the job. She was making $17,000—less than half of what she should have been earning in a small town, Jerry says—and working up to 60 hours a week. By the end of her run, Johnson was “an exhausted young lady,” Cherie says, adding, “We have to be really careful not to burn people out.” Indeed, the center has gone through five directors in its 12 years of existence.

This track record hasn’t deterred Karen Raisanen, who in January accepted the board’s offer to be director number six. The wife of a Lutheran pastor in nearby Malmo, Karen was looking for involvement outside of her church when she joined the center’s board almost three years ago. She soon took on added responsibilities, namely editing the newsletter and planning events. She spent five days transforming the machinery shed into an elegant dinner hall for the film screening, three months finding auction items and a caterer for the $100-per-ticket holiday dinner, all on a volunteer basis.

Why?
“We have the great gift of Jaques’s art and name. I grew up in a small town also. It’s important to promote the community and the art world,” Raisanen explains. People throughout the country have an interest in Jaques and his wife, she adds; because of this, “the center really is a drawing card to the community.”

After completing a weeklong workshop on grants, Karen, whose professional background is largely entwined with her husband’s—leading Bible studies, teaching Sunday school—will officially take on her new role. As of now, it will involve driving to Aitkin at least four days a week and accepting a salary for a 30-hour workweek (though she’s already working 34). Her goals include gaining more exposure for the center; she plans to speak on public radio, attend community events and get involved with local schools, such as the Aitkin High School—home of the Fighting Gobblers—located across the street.
Financial independence is another objective, one that will require increasing membership numbers—now at about 500—and continuing to focus on fundraising, though it’s difficult to imagine adding to the center’s jam-packed bill. With the plates barely cleared from the yearly Christmas Market, holiday dinner and St. Nicholas Tea, 2008 promises the eighth annual golf tournament ($125, including a golf cart) and another evening event in the Holms’ machinery shed, this time featuring a supper of wild game. “We’re just making it up as we go along,” Cherie says of the varied lineup. “We’re just looking to our most creative selves and saying, ‘You know, I think this would work.’ If a person comes in with something that looks good, the board will approve it and then they’ll just run with it.”

There are no holds barred when it comes to special exhibitions, either. In September the Carnegie Gallery was filled with vibrant sculptures made of paper, cloth and fiberglass—contemporary art, which Jerry detests. But personal preference has no bearing on what the center will display, and neither do the philosophies of its namesake. “We’ll take any art as long as it’s not obscene,” Jerry says. “We’re not just following Jaques’s art. That’s how we bring the community in.” After the close of the annual juried wildlife exhibition, this year themed “Beaks and Squeaks,” the center will invite local art collectors to display “Art Treasures from Home” in its galleries, followed by the third plein air competition, which has become the largest show of its kind in the region.

As its pursuits expand, the board hopes the museum will, too. The city has announced plans to demolish the adjoining water tower within the next five years or so. “We’re going to be lobbying hard to acquire that land . . . so we can expand the Jaques Gallery and try to double the museum’s size,” Heft says. “It will still be a small museum, but maybe it’ll hold more art.”
“We will need more space,” Cherie states. She envisages that the additional room would accommodate an updated workshop and possibly even a small auditorium for lectures, which are currently held in the Jaques Gallery. The current setup is “okay for a small town; people don’t expect much. But it truly would be nice to have a bit more.”

A displaced water tower aside, the people behind the Jaques Art Center plan to alter Aitkin’s landscape even more broadly. In Cherie’s opinion, the shift is already occurring. “I think Aitkin’s going to come out of depression. I think it will be a changed community, and I know our art center is making a difference in that change.” She notes that several new establishments have opened nearby: an artist’s shop, catering businesses directed toward the center and organizations like it. “That never would’ve flown a few years ago,” she asserts.

A November editorial by Ann Schwartz, editor of the Aitkin Age, echoes Cherie’s conviction. “Whoever thought our little backwater would have a MacDonald’s [sic], a sophisticated food store, name brand appliances at two locations and much more? It’s a strange combination of folksy and sophisticated that makes our county tick. Yeah, you can hunt deer and shoot your rifle, you can wet a line or log off an acre. But you can also, on occasion, see a symphony orchestra concert, buy great art or attend a ‘high school musical’ that is on the level of semi-professional entertainment.”

Cherie maintains Aitkin’s artistic appeal is spreading beyond its borders. “We have a growing audience. Ten years ago, couples from the Twin Cities wouldn’t say, ‘Oh, let’s drive to Aitkin today and go do something fun in the town.’ We have people today that will just drive up now to the art center to shop, to come to a lecture, you name it.”

It’s still a quiet drive along a two-lane highway, coming to a stop in a town with one stoplight, at the old brick building beneath the water tower. It’s still just a few works of art in two galleries. Aitkin doesn’t aspire to the status of metropolis; the Jaques Art Center has no illusions about challenging the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this small museum has already made a big difference for the people of Aitkin and beyond. And who knows? Francis Lee Jaques may be just the first in a long line of artists rooted to this patch of Minnesota land.

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