Radios have their own museums these days. But in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when this photo was taken of Mia director Richard Davis chatting with Florence Murphy and Pat Maloney on KUOM, radio was still the best way to communicate just about anything to a wide audience—including art history.
Not long after the first radio station went on the air in Minnesota, Mia had a time slot on it: 15-minute talks every Friday morning on WCCO. Among the first programs, in 1930, were a discussion of “Beautiful Furniture” (“what constitutes good taste in furniture and…practical suggestions that should be of value to every woman who takes pride in her home”) as well as Mia director Russell Plimpton’s take on modern French painters, with the rather clickbait title of “Domesticated Wild Men.” The brief shows were popular enough to warrant a 3 p.m. tour of the galleries every Wednesday especially for radio listeners.
A 1957 broadcast: from left, Tom Quigley, KUOM announcer; Helen Harkonen, head of the Education Department at Mia; and Oscar Lang, a Minneapolis clock expert.
“Fundamentally these radio talks are designed for a less artistically sophisticated audience than our members,” the Mia Bulletin declared in 1930, although it suggested that members who hadn’t made it to the galleries recently should listen, too. Fifteen minutes of remedial radio might get a prodigal patron back up to speed.
By the 1950s, the listeners truly were unsophisticated: they were exclusively schoolchildren. Mia had begun broadcasting “Journeys in Art” over KUOM, the University of Minnesota’s radio station, as part of the U’s Minnesota School of the Air that transmitted to classrooms throughout the state. The photo at right is from a January 1957 broadcast with Oscar Lang (right), a Minneapolis clock expert who had some 250 clocks in his home and discussed a circa-1700s clock from Mia’s collection that—not unlike radio stations—played a different tune every quarter hour.