Women with Taste: Culinary Visionaries of the Twin Cities
September 27, 2025 - May 31, 2026
Women have traditionally been seen as the primary cooks in the home kitchen, while men have dominated professional cooking.
This exhibit celebrates eight women who challenged expectations and advocated for a more inclusive food scene. Working as chefs, food writers, restaurateurs, and home economists, they transformed dining in Minneapolis and St. Paul. And they opened doors for new generations of women to be recognized as culinary visionaries.
The profiles include Marjorie Child Husted, the brains behind Betty Crocker; pioneering restaurateurs Elvira Coronado, Reiko Weston, Leann Chin, Brenda Langton, and Lachelle Cunningham; food journalist Sue Zelickson; and frozen foods entrepreneur Rose Totino.
This exhibit is presented in conjunction with Julia Child: A Recipe for Life, on view at the Minnesota History Center September 27, 2025 - May 31, 2026.
soulforce: the movements of memory
June 18, 2026 - October 4, 2026
The exhibition soulforce: the movements of memory explores the collaboration and connection between Black, Indigenous, and Chicano communities and their movements for autonomy, self-determination and liberation in the post-civil rights era in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities and the Nation. These three movements sought to address the societal and structural inequalities facing these diverse communities and neighborhoods with more immediacy. The North side of Minneapolis is primarily where all three groups' struggles intersected against the structural forces that sought to disenfranchise them.
View soulforce during Weaving History: A Celebration of Minnesota Unraveled Storytellers, a free, family-friendly evening of food, live music, and community curated activities in celebration of the powerful voices behind the Minnesota Unraveled podcast at Mill City Museum on June 25.
Exhibit Curator Bio:
James Curry is a multi-disciplinary artist who grew up in Brooklyn Park, MN and studied at The American Film Institute and earned his MFA in Film from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2021, as an editor at KSTP, he and his team were awarded the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for coverage of George Floyd’s murder, uprising and aftermath. Also in 2021 he was awarded the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Film for his fiction and non-fiction work and in 2022 the Arthur C McWatt Fellowship, he curated a social justice themed exhibit on Dakota County Black Pioneers. He has written a graphic novella comic based on his ancestor’s narratives with DC/Marvel illustrator Tom Nguyen called Hate Stings published in June 2023. He is chair of Building Remembrance for Reconciliation and has partnered with Dakota County Historical Society on the development of a Black Heritage Trail in Hastings. In 2024 he was awarded a Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery Fellowship and curated his second exhibit there last summer called soulforce: the movements of memory based on Dr. Jimmy Patiño's work on Red, Brown and Black Power in the Twin Cities. Curry is currently in pre-production for his next non-fiction work that has received a grant from the Minnesota Center for Humanities for a documentary based on soulforce.
This exhibit is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
