This book examines advances in architecture, design, and painting in a region widely recognized for its contribution to the Arts and Crafts and Prairie School movements. It features the work of many well-known American artists, including the architects Cass Gilbert, Harvey Ellis, Frank Lloyd Wright, Purcell and Elmslie, ceramicist and Arts and Crafts philosopher Ernest Batchelder, and the painters Homer Dodge Martin and Alexander Fournier.

The six essays also focus on the ceramic and metalwork production of the Handicraft Guild of Minneapolis, the Craftshouse of John Bradstreet, and American Indian art and artifacts created both for native and white use at the time.

Alan Lathrop discusses Minnesota architecture by combining his knowledge of architectural practitioners of the time with an awareness of international stylistic trends, particularly the tradition of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, in this first overview of the state's architecture of the period ever published. Michael Conforti and Jennifer Komar link the development of retailing in the late nineteenth century to the interior design practice and Arts and Crafts production of John Bradstreet.

Thomas O'Sullivan provides a study of Robert Koehler, one of the region's most respected painters, while he reviews the work of over two dozen of the state's other painters working at the time.

The special communal nature of Minnesota's artistic life is emphasized in Marcia Anderson's contribution. Her study of the Handicraft Guild of Minneapolis presents years of archival research on the Guild which she presents in the context of the international Arts and Crafts movement. Mark Hammons provides the first monograph ever published on the architectural partnership of Purcell and Elmslie, the most commissioned architects of the Prairie School after Frank Lloyd Wright.

Hammons analyzes the team-centered working process of the firm and relates their creative process and formal vocabulary to the contemporary metaphysical discourse that was the foundation of their architectural philosophy. Louise Lincoln and Paulette Molin study the nature of relationships between whites and the Chippewa and Dakota Indians in their discussion of native material culture. Lincoln and Molin decode a complex, nuanced cultural interchange embodying both traditional and assimilationist trends.

Their essay is the first in-depth examination of the range of American Indian art from this region; one that considers both objects crafted for native use and those produced for the tourist market.