One day in the late 1980s, a woman showed up to the art gallery that Brian and Teresa McMahon ran on the main floor of their Brooklyn rowhouse. Throughout the ’80s, the McMahons’ home gallery had become something of an art hub among the sizable Polish community in the Greenpoint neighborhood; Teresa herself had grown up in Poland. The couple didn’t know the visitor, but she had a question: Would they be interested in taking her collection of Polish posters? An upcoming exhibition at Vandalia Tower in St.
Paul, curated by the McMahons — who now live in Stillwater — may be the first time a selection of these posters have been displayed since they were created in the 1980s. The McMahons took on the collection at the time, but they didn’t know what they’d agreed to: The posters were packed tightly in airtight archival storage tubes, and the woman who’d amassed them had no idea how many she had or what they said. The couple always intended to open the tubes — after all, they schlepped them from New York to the Twin Cities when they moved in 1990 — but the project always seemed to end up on the back burner.
Late last year, though, they finally began the delicate process of unrolling the posters, which had become quite brittle with age. Turns out, the collection contained more than 400 posters advertising movies and plays, social causes and cultural events, and many of them were able to be preserved in fairly good condition. For the St.
Paul show, the McMahons cu.
