Image: Minnesota Marine Art Museum, Winona
‘Barbara McIlrath: LandSkyWater’ opens at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona on 19 September 2026 and remains on view through 3 January 2027.
The exhibition brings together paintings and drawings inspired by McIlrath’s travels along the Mississippi River between her farm studio in Pepin, Wisconsin, and her house in St. Paul, Minnesota. Seasonal colour changes in the Driftless Region inform the work.
McIlrath is particularly drawn to the shoreline of Lake Pepin in the Village of Old Frontenac, Minnesota, and to the prairie surrounding her farm in Hicks Valley, near the Village of Pepin. Her paintings range from textured impasto paint mixed with cold wax to delicately layered oils and gouache.
McIlrath describes the works as “including both carefully observed images of land, sky and water to more abstract compositions, discovered in the process of simplifying, improvising and questioning what I am seeing.”
A ‘Meet the Artist’ event with McIlrath is scheduled for 4 October, alongside a family workshop, ‘Drawing and Painting from Nature with Barbara McIlrath’.
