Library of Babel, 138 inches x 263 inches, Oil/Canvas, 1997 Commission for the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. (Provided)
Doug Argue is a nationally recognized painter who got his start in Minnesota in the 1980s and ’90s. He’s known for his larger-than-life paintings exploring themes such as time, perception, history, science and the infinite. But massive themes aside, the sheer scale of his paintings tells another, less conceptual story: to make big work, you need a big space.
Argue can retrace his career by recalling the places where he made some of his largest paintings. But throughout, his hunt for big physical spaces ran parallel to a quest for the mental and creative space he needed to make his best work.
This quest for space began when Argue was a student at Bemidji State University from 1980-1982. His teacher Marley Kaul noticed Argue’s artistic drive and gave him a key to the classroom so Argue could paint all night. But when Argue transferred to the University of Minnesota, he learned the hard way that such freedom was the exception. Where Kaul had encouraged Argue’s exploration, some of his new teachers wrote off his work entirely. After taking over an empty classroom to work through a summer, Argue found a note from the faculty, pinned straight through the center of one of his canvases, telling him to leave. Argue responded by painting the faculty in unsavory positions on the critique wall of the classroom. “That was the end of my academic career, probably rightfully so,” said Argue.
But Argue would soon learn that even when he wasn’t a squatter with a temper, he was vulnerable to being kicked out. When the landlord of his next studio space, the Wall Street Art Collective in St. Paul, wanted to develop the building, he turned the heat up to try to sweat the tenants out of the building. Instead, it broke the boiler in the middle of winter, forcing Argue and the other artists to leave. “We got a lawyer through the city because we were all fairly poor.” The owner of the building had to buy them out of their leases, but they still lost their spaces.
A few years later, Argue found himself in the beginnings of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District. John Kremer and Jennifer Young had bought the California Building in 1991 with a vision of preserving abandoned industrial space for artists. And what a space this was, a veritable artist penthouse, spanning half of the 6th floor of the building. “The first thing I always look for is if I can do, like, a 12-ft. x 40-ft. painting. The most important thing is to have a wall that you can do it on and look at it. I couldn’t afford the stretchers. I would just staple it to the wall.” Rolled up, Argue could fit 12 feet of canvas in the freight elevator, which opened directly into the space. It was here he created “Library of Babel,” a 12-ft. x 22-ft. painting, now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Argue has since worked in Rome, San Francisco, Vienna and New York City. But sitting in that sixth floor California Building space once more, he said this kind of studio space has become vanishingly rare. “You can’t do it in New York much anymore. Unless you have $12-20k a month to spend on a studio.” He recalled a beautiful studio space he had in San Francisco, “which is now all luxury rental houses for people who work in the tech industry. There’s no studio space there anymore.”
For people like Kremer and Young, as well as others on the board of the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District, protecting these kinds of spaces for artists is their driving mission. The old industrial buildings throughout Northeast Minneapolis, so essential to artists like Argue, are ripe for development and gentrification, leaving artists vulnerable to displacement.
This untitled work depicts thousands of chickens. (Provided)
“What am I gonna do with this 12-ft. x 30-ft. painting of chickens?”
Even if one has the space to paint a huge piece, there is no guarantee it will sell. “People often think of large oil painting as a cliche or like a market thing,” but to the emerging artist, it’s a huge risk. Early on, very few private collectors bought his work. But Argue won a Jerome Foundation Fellowship in 1984. His work for the fellowship caught the attention of curator Elizabeth Armstrong, who gave him his first show at the Walker Art Center in 1985.
“I was dirt poor,” recalled Argue. At times, he slept in the back of his Chevy LUV pickup or on the floor of his studio, but the grant money and institutional support allowed him to keep working. “I’ve always been lucky enough where I’m just sort of leaping from one rock to another across the stream and I manage to land on one.”
As Argue recalled, the combination of grants and the involvement of the institutions was a key to just about everything that was happening in the Twin Cities at that time — a dynamic he said has since shifted. “Because it happened so naturally at the time, I just thought it was just the way it worked. I didn’t realize that it was actually kind of crazy.”
From 1991-1994, Argue spent three years working on what would become one of his best-known works: an untitled 12-ft. x 18-ft. painting of thousands of chickens. “If you work on a painting for almost three years, galleries don’t want to be around you because they need production. Dealers go, ‘What am I gonna do with this 12-ft. X 30-ft. painting of chickens?’ But that’s the painting I wanted to be doing.”
Argue’s risk paid off. In 1997, he won the Rome Prize, and his career took off. He went on to exhibit through galleries in New York City, San Francisco and Sydney, Australia; the Venice Biennale; in the lobby of the World Trade Center, where Beyonce and Jay Z once used his painting as a backdrop (though they did not credit him); and at the Walker Art Center, the Weisman Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In 2023, his longtime supporter Elizabeth Armstrong served as a guest curator for a survey exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum of Argue’s career. Argue would seem to have “made it.”
How should we make space for difficult work?
It wasn’t until the day after the opening reception of his survey show at the Weisman that Argue learned the accompanying survey book had been removed from the museum’s bookstore. Director Alejandra Peña-Gutiérrez later claimed that the decision was made based on concerns that several works in the book contained culturally insensitive imagery, but this was never directly communicated to Argue. The paintings in question drew from Argue’s own anger over the whitewashed version of history he had received as a child. But without context, the images were deemed too controversial.
Argue was devastated. “To have your own survey book banned from your survey exhibition—it ruined it for me. It really broke my heart.” He and others saw the conflict as an example of a trend toward censorship among art institutions and museums. And it raised the question: if institutions and museums are unable or unwilling to create safe, inclusive space for the context and conversation around genuinely difficult work, then who will?
Argue said he understands why institutions are running scared right now, and he doesn’t envy their position. But he fears artists will be too afraid to make difficult work in the first place.
As the influence of major art fairs such as Art Basel and Art Miami has grown, walk-in traffic at galleries has dwindled. “The galleries who don’t do those shows go out of business. The museums tend to stay away from it but the collectors that are buying that work are influential on the boards of those museums.” And if a gallerist can’t sell your work at the fair, you’re out. The result, in Argue’s opinion, is boring work.
“The context where you show your work is part of the meaning of your work.” When art has to be marketed as an exclusive luxury item, it becomes a commodity.
Argue credits Minneapolis gallerist Todd Bockley, who represented him early on in his career, for giving him the space to create difficult work. “At the time I didn’t realize it, but [Bockley Gallery] was just a really great place to be showing. He showed whatever I did. There’s no gallery now, even now, that will just let me put up anything.” To this day, Bockley has carried on a tradition of supporting a stable of artists doing important and sometimes difficult work.
Argue is based in New York, but he has retained close ties to his Minnesotan roots. He recalled with gratitude the many people and institutions who supported him and provided the situation for him to do his work the way he wanted. We would never have gotten the chickens without the people who gave Doug Argue the space he needed to paint them.