Change surged through the Twin Cities visual art scene this year as dramatically as the tsunami that transformed the nation's political landscape.

New directors swept into the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center, bringing new staff and fresh ideas. Two longtime organizations folded even as a third began renovations of new quarters. The gallery scene held steady through mid-year but began to quake in November when the market essentially dried up, as several art dealers have admitted privately.

And through it all, careers sizzled and fizzled, exhibitions came and went, and artists went on making art whether anyone wanted it or not. Hope springs eternal.

Nothing in recent decades has shaken up the Minneapolis Institute of Arts as much as January's arrival of new director Kaywin Feldman.

Fresh from the comparatively tiny Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee, Feldman was underestimated by some staff members and local museum watchers who presumed her quiet demeanor masked someone who could be easily manipulated or bamboozled. Wrong. Within six weeks Feldman reorganized the museum's administrative structure, which had devolved into a Byzantine labyrinth of competing fiefdoms and opaque decision-making. While the plan was drafted by her predecessor, William Griswold, who left to be director of the J.P. Morgan Museum and Library in New York City, executing it required a decisive temperament and willingness to ruffle feathers by promoting and reassigning long-serving curators and staffers.

Next she began filling vacant posts in the curatorial staff, which had been decimated by retirement, death and departures for other jobs. By year's end she had snared impressive scholars from Brussels, Los Angeles, Boston and New York to head the departments of African and contemporary art, prints and photography.

In midsummer she calmed Minnesota artists angered by the abrupt resignation of Stewart Turnquist, coordinator of the popular Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program. In September she announced that the museum would host "The Louvre and the Masterpiece" next October, a show from the Paris museum including a Vermeer painting never previously shown in North America. And in October she concluded a decade-long legal wrangle by returning a $2.8 million painting to the heirs of a French collector from whom it had been stolen by the Nazis during World War II.

Many a museum director would be exhausted by half those tasks, but Feldman handled the whirlwind pace with aplomb.

At Walker Art Center, director Olga Viso took charge simultaneously but faced fewer pressing problems. When chief curator Philippe Vergne left to head the Dia Foundation in New York, Viso hired Darsie Alexander from the Baltimore Museum of Art to replace him. During the summer she presided over the 20th anniversary of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and nurtured the good relationship with the MIA forged by her predecessor, Kathy Halbreich. This past fall, the two museums shared a stellar reassessment of the architecture of Finnish-born Eero Saarinen, which continues through next Sunday.

The Museum of Russian Art also soared this year as director Judi Dutcher, who signed on in May 2007, pushed its shows well beyond the Soviet-era Socialist Realist paintings for which the museum was founded. Her invigorating additions ranged from politically charged prints from Soviet Estonia to rare color photos from the Czarist era and stunning icons from Yaroslavl, Russia (through Jan. 24).

Also in transition

• Highpoint Center for Printmaking in November began renovation of new quarters on Lake Street in south Minneapolis, scheduled to open in May.

• The Minnesota Center for Photography closed July 31 after 18 years, a victim of tough financial times and bumbling management.

• The future of St. Paul's Minnesota Museum of American Art is also in jeopardy following the resignation in July of its director, Bruce Lilly. For 13 years it has downsized, moved, run deficits and failed to find a permanent home. It plans to close its galleries in January and to store its art, hoping for better days and a highly unlikely financial miracle.

• Modernist architect Ralph Rapson died March 29 at age 93. Designer of the original Guthrie Theater and chairman of the University of Minnesota's Architecture Department for 30 years, Rapson achieved international renown by designing everything from embassies to churches, homes and furniture in a 70-year career.

Notable shows elsewhere

• Bold figure drawings by Judith Roode at Catherine G. Murphy Gallery.

• Paul Shambroom's photos "Picturing Power" at the Weisman Art Museum.

• Kelly Connole's spooky ceramic rabbit sculptures at Circa Gallery.

• Molly Roth's calligraphic drawings made from newspaper and ribbon at Thomas Barry Fine Art.

• A raft of shows at Weinstein Gallery featuring photos by August Sander, Mikhail Baryshnikov and the fascinating current exhibit of interior "landscapes."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431