Anton Gág, the father of Wanda Gág, carved out a career as a painter of portraits, landscapes, and historical subjects. He also decorated homes, ran a photography studio, and designed murals for churches and other buildings. The Minnesota State Capitol displayed his most famous painting, “The Attack on New Ulm during the Sioux Outbreak, Aug. 19-23, 1862,” from 1923 to 2014.

Since its founding in 1963 as the Center Opera Company of the Walker Art Center, Minnesota Opera has maintained a reputation as a highly regarded opera company. In the twenty-first century it produces standard classics while also commissioning and creating compelling new works.

In 1879, lumber baron T. B. Walker invited the public into his downtown Minneapolis home to view his art collection. Over the next century, that collection evolved into the Walker Art Center, a world-renowned site for challenging work by innovative artists, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, and Kara Walker.

Katharine Densford was a pragmatic leader of American nursing as it gained political and academic recognition in the 1940s and 50s. She is remembered as a stateswoman whose leadership of Minnesota’s flagship school of nursing at the University of Minnesota provided the model for nursing education throughout the state and nation.

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Feminist Caucus was founded in 1973 to advocate for feminist positions on issues like poverty among women, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Its members lobbied the Minnesota State Legislature, endorsed candidates, and produced a US Senate candidate of their own in 1984.

The Church of St. Columba in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood is the only Minnesota work by the Chicago architect Francis Barry Byrne. Architectural historian and critic Larry Millett calls it “a high point of modern church architecture in the Twin Cities.”

In the fall of 1925, a series of six signs advertising Burma-Shave, a new brushless shaving cream, appeared for the first time along highway 65 from Minneapolis to Albert Lea and on highway 61 to Red Wing. The signs began an advertising phenomenon using clever rhyming jingles that lasted into the 1960s, including: “Your shaving brush / has had its day, / so why not / shave the modern way / with Burma-Shave?”

Over his long career, the architect Charles A. Hausler had a major impact on the built environment of St. Paul. As the first person to hold the office of city architect, he designed many public buildings, including the three branch libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie. He also designed churches, commercial buildings, and homes in a variety of styles, including Classical Revival, Prairie School, and Art Deco.

In 1937, the George A. Hormel Company, a meat-packing business in Austin, Minnesota, introduced SPAM luncheon meat to use up an excess of pork shoulder in their inventory. In the eighty years since its introduction, SPAM has fed millions of people and is available in more than forty countries and in over fifteen varieties and sizes.

Concerned by the anti-Japanese atmosphere in the United States in the 1920s, Dr. Sidney Gulick established the Committee on World Friendship Among Children and began sending friendship dolls to Japan. Japan reciprocated by sending friendship dolls to the US in 1927, with Minnesota receiving a doll known as "Miss Miyazaki."