New director angled for Hennepin History Museum opening

To get to her new office at Hennepin History Museum, Cedar Imboden Phillips walks a crowded hallway of history.

The museum's new director passes the shell of a Soapbox Derby racer, a huge bellows, a display board of ornamental doorknobs, a stuffed lion from a long-ago Minneapolis zoo, then takes a right at the 1954 Coke bottle dispenser.

The squeeze illustrates both some of the museum's issues and its possibilities as Phillips, 36, takes over.

It's a job the Minneapolis native waited for patiently as she honed her museum-building skills at other museums around the nation. She started at the Hennepin museum as a volunteer in her teens, and even got married there, paying guests' admission.

"I believe this place has incredible potential," Phillips said last week. "I think all of the building blocks are here."

But the museum has a long way to go to reach that potential. It expects to record only 2,500 visitors this year, a figure that Phillips hopes to double in 2015. The museum's budget of $288,000 next year pales beside those of at least half-dozen county historical societies outside the Twin Cities based in cities much smaller than Minneapolis. Closer to home, the Ramsey County Historical Society, which operates the Gibbs Museum farmhouse, reported income of more than $800,000 in 2013.

"Cedar's charge is to build this thing from a hidden gem to a not-so-hidden gem," said board President Cara Letofsky, who joined the board in early 2013 with extensive political and nonprofit development experience. She and Phillips aim to transform an organization that has struggled to gain traction in a crowded Twin Cities museum market.

One issue is space, illustrated by the clutter outside her office. The museum sits a half-block north of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in the Christian family mansion, home of its collection since 1958. The big brick house wasn't built for a museum collection of more than 10,000 objects and more than 100,000 documents. Back rooms that housed servants are stuffed with files of photos and documents; hatboxes and racks of vintage clothing fill other spaces.

One task for Phillips is finding temporary storage for some of the bulkier items, such as farm implements and furniture, to allow the remainder to be stored more properly. Another is setting up a collections committee so it has policies to guide the museum as it acquires new items and potentially jettisons others.

That the museum is awash in historical artifacts is no surprise. It has roots in the Territorial Pioneers Association formed in 1858, out of which the museum organization emerged in 1938.

There are items associated with early residents, such as the oak desk used by William Watts Folwell as University of Minnesota president or the everyday and dress-up clothing worn by farmers. There are items as historical as the survey equipment used to lay out Minneapolis streets and as recent as an extensive collection of posters from the First Avenue nightclub or flip-flops worn by one survivor of the 35W bridge collapse in 2007.

Even with limited resources, "they've done a whole host of innovative exhibits that explore what it means to live in Minneapolis as well as Hennepin County," said David Grabitske, outreach manager at the state Historical Society. He cites as examples a 2001 exhibit on Minneapolis rock in the 1980s, which won a national citation, and a 2006 exhibit on burlesque, calling the latter something of a riskier topic.

There's evidence that Phillips and the museum staff of one other full-time and four part-time workers are having an impact. The museum's Facebook friends doubled to 1,600 in the past year after the daily postings on historical topics.

The once-sporadic fireside chats in the museum's sumptuous library-music room are now happening twice monthly on Sunday afternoons, with topics this winter ranging from the history of East Lake Street to decorative fans to the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota.

There's a full slate of upcoming exhibits, such as a small pop-up one now on winter gear, and upcoming pop-ups on Pride celebrations next June and Aquatennial history next July.

A current exhibit features memorabilia such as menus and dishes from noted but now-gone restaurants in Minneapolis. The museum will seek funding to mount mini-exhibits of these and similar artifacts in senior centers or nursing homes. There are plans for an exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the Plymouth Avenue riots.

Long-term, Phillips has set the goal of more than tripling the museum's funding to $1 million. That will require expanding its funding base far beyond the $170,000 per year it gets from Hennepin County. She has two models in mind. One is the Pasadena Museum of History in California, where Phillips worked shortly after a similar budgetary expansion, doing fundraising, writing local history and curating the collection. The other is the American Swedish Institute, and its addition onto a historic mansion completed in 2012.

She was so intent on landing the job that she applied as soon as her predecessor left, even before the board had defined a plan for its future or what it sought in a director. She was hired in November. Others have noticed her ambitions for the museum.

"She seems very capable, enthusiastic about the mission of the museum, seems to have lot of ideas and the energy to carry them out," said Hennepin County Commissioner Jan Callison, a former museum trustee. "She left me feeling very optimistic."

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438

Twitter: @brandtstrib