The Great Gatsby and its dour depiction of the American Dream has become a high school classroom staple since its release 100 years ago. To celebrate the centennial of St. Paulite F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library is holding a series of events. The crowning piece is an exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) that opened in September and will run until March 22, 2026.
One of the exhibition’s centerpieces is a dust jacket and letter that Fitzgerald sent to his publisher, on loan from Princeton University. In the letter, he demands that the cover stay with the book, because he wrote it into the text. Lori Williamson, supervisor of the Herschel V. Jones Print Study Room, took inspiration from Fitzgerald’s literary and visual art connection to devise Gatsby at 100.
“One of my main talking points here in print study is the idea that art doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” Williamson said. “It is part of history. It’s part of literature and all that. So, this is a cool opportunity to put the book in conversation with art of the period.”
To start that conversation, Williamson needed Galina Olmsted, associate curator of European art, who specializes in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Olmsted and Williamson gathered all of Mia’s works from the 1920s, when Fitzgerald’s novel is set.
“We had artists that we knew Fitzgerald had met on his travels in Europe, and so we were sure to pick [their] works,” Olmsted said. “Otherwise, we were just combing through those lists, looking for works that we felt were evocative of the novel and of the time period. It was really an art-first exhibition process, which I think all exhibitions should be.”
Williamson and Olmsted decided that rather than include the typical didactic labels, which explain how an artist created the work or its relevance to the exhibition, they would pair their works with Gatsby quotes.
“I’m sure there have been museums that have done exhibitions solely using text from a novel, but it is unusual,” Olmsted said. “It creates a variety of experience for our visitors. First-time visitors are going to walk through a lot of galleries with regular didactic labels to get to the exhibition…And then, our hope is also that it offers something new and enticing to return visitors.”
The labels also helped the exhibition remain evocative rather than interpretive. The curators felt if they overlaid the artwork with their own thoughts, visitors wouldn’t get to form their own analysis. Instead, they hope to form a relationship between viewer, art, and text.
“I really love the experience when you step back from it a little,” Williamson said. “It’s like you’re overhearing the conversation between the art and the book, and then the viewer becomes part of the conversation, and then can take that with them…I think it gives people an opportunity to be not just viewers, but almost actors.”
Williamson and Olmsted also had an ulterior motive: to show works that aren’t often on display. While the exhibition includes some three-dimensional art, like Paul T. Frankl’s Skyscraper bookcase, and some are paintings, like Pablo Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair, most are works on paper from Williamson’s Print Study Room that can only be displayed for six months at a time.
These prints include the lead image for the exhibition, Ernesto García Cabral’s Hastio. The curators, with help from Mia’s marketing team, chose Hastio over other options, like the dust jacket, because they wanted to emphasize the exhibition’s evocative nature. The 1925 print—originally a magazine cover—shows a woman lounging on yellow cushions, used here to represent Jordan Baker from the novel.
“The point of the exhibition is not just to talk about the cover of the book,” Olmsted said. “It’s to talk about the resonances with our collection. It was important to us that the lead image for the exhibition—the kind of hero image—be a work from our collection. All the better that it’s a work from our collection that hardly ever goes on view. So, it’s really having its moment in the sun. It’ll go back in a box, and then we’ll pull it out for something else in a couple of years.”
The exhibition ends where the book ends, with a return to Minnesota. A drawing of Wall Street in New York and a lithograph of Minneapolis from the same time connect the two places, and works from Minnesotan artists Mike Lynch and Teo Nguyen—the lone anachronistic pieces of the exhibition—finish the show.
Williamson and Olmsted had far more art than they could fit into one exhibition, so Williamson is showing the “B-side” in the print study room, where visitors can book an appointment.