In this video produced by the Minnesota Historical Society, Lou Bellamy and his daughter Sarah sketch out the history of Penumbra Theatre.

August Wilson (1945–2005) is among America’s most critically acclaimed playwrights. He penned several groundbreaking plays while living in St. Paul in the 1980s, including Pulitzer Prize winners Fences and The Piano Lesson. They are both part of Wilson’s magnum opus: a series of ten historical plays called the Pittsburgh Cycle. In the series, each decade of the twentieth century is represented through a play, exploring the cultural, spiritual, and daily lives of African Americans. MN90 producer Marisa Helms reports.

Seth Eastman was a soldier and an artist stationed at Fort Snelling in the 1830s and 1840s. As MN90 producer Marisa Helms reports, Eastman’s greatest contribution to history was his accurate and un-romanticized depictions of Dakota and Ojibwe people in the area of the fort. Because Eastman took an anthropological view in his art, today’s historians can learn about Native practices and cultural artifacts from the era.

Penumbra Theater Company, ca. 2010s. From Penumbra Theatre Company records (GV002), Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.

Actors in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, by August Wilson, at the Penumbra Theatre, 2014. Photograph by Michael Daniel. CC BY-SA 2.0

Actors onstage in August Wilson's Two Trains Running, 2003. From Penumbra Theatre Company records (GV002), Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.

Actors in a Penumbra Theatre Company production of Langston Hughes' Black Nativity, 1999. From folder 36, box 53 of Penumbra Theatre Company records (GV002), Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.

Lou Bellamy, August Wilson, and Claude Purdy (left to right), 1996. From Penumbra Theatre Company records (GV002), Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.

Cast members of Sally’s Rape onstage at Penumbra Theatre, ca. 1994. From Penumbra Theatre Company records (GV002), Archie Givens, Sr. Collection of African American Literature, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.