The Tweed Museum of Art on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus features an ever-rotating, always-interesting series of exhibits. The museum collection grew out of the private art collection of George and Alice Tweed, who were also responsible for funding the building of the museum itself back in the 1950s. Today, the Tweed is home to more than 6,000 art pieces covering a wide range of art history and cultures.

Form and Surface, at the Tweed.

There are several excellent reasons to step inside the Tweed when you visit our Duluth bed and breakfast this fall. Read on for a list of current shows:

• You and Yours: Images of Family (through October 17, 2010)
• Form and Surface: Selections from the Glenn C. Nelson Collection (through November 7, 2010)
• Design in Print Imagery, 1940s–1960s
• The Royal Canadian Mountain Police
• Fall Student Shows – rotating

Shouldn't you be here this week?

There are many benefits to traveling mid week. Everything is less crowded: museums, parks, roads, and our Duluth bed and breakfast. Be spontaneous, drop everything, and hit the road. You deserve a break.

The Tweed Museum of Art, at the University of Minnesota, has a new exhibit: You and Yours: Images of Family. The exhibit was created by historian and curator Laura Briggs, who delved into the museum archives to find pieces that deal with family. In addition, she brought in new pieces by artists whose work has not yet been displayed in Duluth.

The inspiration for the exhibit stems from the changing definition of family. Briggs has written that “as cultural definitions of marriage, childhood, motherhood, and paternity shift over time, so too do our ways of forming family and of picturing it. You and Yours: Images of Family presents classic images of family alongside contemporary artists’ explorations of this universal, yet often idealized, theme.” It’s a fascinating idea. (more…)

The Tweed Museum of Art, at the University of Minnesota Duluth, houses an outstanding collection of over 6,000 pieces of art from around the world. Prominent Duluth citizen George P. Tweed and his wife Alice collected art for over twenty years. It was thanks to the efforts of Mrs. Tweed, after the death of her husband, that the collection ultimately became the Tweed Museum of Art.

The Tweeds had a fondness for the work of French painter Jean-Francois Millet, and there are several Millets at the Tweed. His work is now considered to be some of the finest examples of the French Barbizon School, named for the small village outside Paris that inspired Millet and his peers.

Mark Twain also had a fondness for Jean-Francois Millet, and wrote a farce about him. Is He Dead? lay in obscurity until Berkeley professors rescued it and helped it find its way to Broadway in 2007.

This spring, enjoy the art of Millet and the entertaining Twain play about him at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. The art is already on display at the Tweed, and Is He Dead? will be at the Mainstage Theatre of the Marshall Performing Arts Center April 22 through May 1, 2010. It’s a good reason to head to our Duluth MN inn.

The Tweed Museum of Art is just a few miles from our Duluth bed and breakfast. If you are coming to town to see your student, check out the Tweed. Should be here at the end of April, you won’t want to miss Is He Dead?.