Richard Haas gained fame in the 1970s for his enormous outdoor murals that transformed blank, drab building facades into grand architectural fantasies. In the early to mid-1960s, he was a graduate student and instructor at the University of Minnesota. In 2019, he wrote “I have always retained a strong and positive memory of your city and especially of your institution which I visited on a regular basis and where I learned so much about the history of art.”
He has periodically returned to make watercolor studies of the architecture of Minneapolis. Here the viewpoint seems to be near the Capella Building looking toward the Wells Fargo Center. This drawing served as the preparatory drawing for a print, an example of which the artist has also given to Mia.
