The early days of the Minnesota art scene were distinguished by impermanence and struggle. While traveling artists painted the Minnesota Territory for East Coast audiences, locals fought for their careers and for an artistic community. From this beginning, Minnesota artists built an established art scene, an art scene that became an outpost of the American scene, following along with and reacting to the history of American art.

Minnesota artists were modernists, American Regionalists, post-modernists, and eventually, punk and alternative artists in the era of Ronald Reagan. An American Outpost, the Minnesota Art Scene, 1840-1989 tracks this narrative, its artists, sages, and promoters, and the threads and throughlines that define Minnesota's art scene as both distinctly American and distinctly Minnesotan.

Katherine H. Goertz is an art historian with a background in the history of art exhibition and in the history of printmaking. She is currently the curator and registrar of the art collection of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota, where she works with works of art dating from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. She lives in St. Paul.