In the Performing Arts Archive on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, there are 19 boxes of material relating to Gertrude Lippincott (left): correspondence, newsletters, clippings, photographs, and three audio cassette tapes. More of her papers are kept at the Minnesota Historical Society and the New York Public Library, and every year the Society of Dance History Scholars awards $500 in her name to the best published article on dance studies. When she died in 1996, there was a memorial at the Weisman Art Museum—a video of the event is tucked in one of the university boxes.
She is virtually unknown today. But in the 1930s and ’40s, Lippincott was a pioneer of modern dance. When she formed the Modern Dance Center, in Minneapolis, in 1937, it was one of the first racially integrated dance studios in the country. Most of her audiences had never seen modern dance, and that seems to be how she liked it. She organized the first dance event ever held at the Walker Art Center, in 1940. And she barnstormed the country from 1946 to 1966 as a kind of prophet, dancing at the YWCA in New York City, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and, in 1959, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
As part of Mia’s efforts to regularly host performing arts, she danced in the Pillsbury Auditorium, joined by Eunice Cain (right). In a 1957 article in Ebony, Cain was described as a “liturgical dancer,” incorporating religion in her art, and she was involved in the Mayor’s Commission on Human Relations in Minnesota. This is the earliest photo in the Mia archives showing an African-American at the museum—not that none had previously visited, but no photo had been taken or kept. The museum, like Minneapolis and the country at large, were turning a corner—into the modern era.