University of Minnesota
The Arts at the University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota offers a vibrant, multifaceted arts environment deeply rooted in its College of Liberal Arts and supported by world‑class facilities across campus. At its cultural core is the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, designed by Frank Gehry and featuring more than 20,000 works.
Adjacent to that, student-curated galleries like the Coffman Art Gallery and the Larson Gallery (at St. Paul) provide rotating exhibition opportunities, while the Katherine E. Nash Gallery and the galleries within the Regis Center for Art support faculty, graduate, and undergraduate shows, spanning painting, sculpture, digital media, and interdisciplinary projects. The Regis Center boasts robust facilities for ceramics, printmaking, sculpture, metals, woodshop, black-and-white and digital photography, and moving-image production. Complementing these are the Rarig Center and Barbara Barker Center for Dance on the West Bank. The historic Northrop Auditorium, fully renovated by 2014, hosts major concerts, dance, film, and guest lectures, while the Ted Mann Concert Hall stages university ensembles, guest performers, and academic events. A lesser-known gem is the Whole Music Club in Coffman Memorial Union — a longstanding student-run venue notable for hosting acts like Green Day and The Replacements. The campus landscape also includes the Goldstein Museum of Design on the St. Paul campus, with over 34,000 design objects that support teaching and research in fashion, material culture, and design history.
Combined with the wealth of student-led and public programming, including gallery shows, live concerts, dance productions aligned with social themes, and exhibition partnerships, these resources make the University of Minnesota a fully integrated arts ecosystem.
a2ru Campus Contacts
Patrick Warfield is a musicologist and specialist in American musical culture. In addition to his faculty position as a Professor of Musicology, Dr. Warfield is also Director of the School of Music.
Dr. Warfield comes to the University of Minnesota from the University of Maryland, where he has served as Associate Director of the School of Music and currently as Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Humanities. Since 2021 he has also directed the Presidential-level arts initiative, Arts for All. In this role, Prof. Warfield has worked to make the arts more inclusive and accessible, tie them to other disciplines, and place them in the service of social justice by launching new interdisciplinary academic programs and creating funding opportunities for faculty and students interested in using the community-building and community-sustaining power of the arts to improve the world around them.
As a musicologist, Dr. Warfield focuses on the complexities of the high/low-brow cultural divide that emerged in late nineteenth-century America. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, American Music, Eighteenth-Century Music, 19th-Century Music Review, and MLA Notes. He has also published a collection of marches by John Philip Sousa in the seminal series Music of the United States of America, a biography of Sousa with the University of Illinois Press, and he is currently working on a history of one of the oldest, continuously operating instrumental ensembles in North America, “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band.
A well-known pedagogue, Dr. Warfield was a founding member of the editorial board of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy and has taken part in roundtables at the Teaching Music History Conference and the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society. He has provided musical commentary for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Washington National Opera, the Smithsonian Institution, and the French Embassy, and has curated and narrated concerts with the United States Marine Band, the Washington National Opera Young Artists Program, and the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra.
Patrick serves as the Emerging Creatives Lead at the University of Minnesota. The Emerging Creatives Lead submits nominations for students from this institution to attend the a2ru Emerging Creatives Student Summit. Please contact this Lead with an email, subject line: Emerging Creatives interest.