(bright music) - Cy was really a force to be acknowledged and revered in the Fargo-Moorhead area.

Students who took art at Concordia during the Running period went there because of him and his designability.

- His Wikipedia article says that he was a regionalist painter, and that's a little too confining for Running.

He grew up in this big part of the United States we used to call the Great American Desert.

Born in Veblen, South Dakota, where his father was a Lutheran pastor.

They moved to two parishes in Montana, Big Sandy and Havre, and then to Idaho before they circled back to Minnesota to Zambrotta where he graduated from high school and went to Northfield to St. Olaf College.

Came to Concordia in 1940 to really start the art department.

- Cy Running was my teacher at Concordia College from 65 to 69, and I took design from him, I took painting from him.

He was a mentor to me and fellow students.

He was a wonderful guy.

He was known for his design work, his ability to break up space and organize space and everything was very figurative.

- He has a fine hand and a very firm hand when it comes to making things.

Good at drawing, good at making.

- [Mark Larson] He was inspired by his experience of living in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 1955 and 1956.

- [Mark Strand] I always thought when Cy painted, he always painted with a little bit of Mexico in his heart.

- The last huge mural that he did was this one for the Ylvisaker library at Concordia.

It's 54 feet long and 8 1/2 feet high.

He designed it and completed the painting in, I think, under four months, which is pretty amazing.

- It was painted from the spring of 1966 and finished up in the fall.

That summer of 66, he was really busy painting this thing.

He was commissioned by the family of Gordon Manternach.

Gordon was his neighbor who died at a young age in his 40s, I believe, and they had planned for this mural.

But it took 10 years before the funding came forward.

I'm a graduate of Concordia, and while there, I enjoyed this mural very much, sitting in the reading room of the library.

I remember when it first appeared with that lighted exit sign and the fire alarm with the kid pulling it, I was just really delighted.

It was dreamlike, and it's merging all kinds of periods of time, slightly illustrational.

It's there to make the students comfortable with the idea of being in a library.

It exhibits lifelong learning.

(bright music continues) - Running put little jokes in like graffiti on a wall that says "Toads make wartz," and he has little things like that that are hidden inside.

- You see a kid walking along nonchalant with a baseball bat and a couple of guys fixing a broken church window, and you just get the feeling that kid with a bat is probably running one of his friends.

And in the final panel, you notice a very nice tribute from Cy to his friend and neighbor, Gordon, "A Blithe Spirit," he calls him.

- My friend Mark Strand And I used to go look at it and we saw probably around what, 20, 25 years ago that it was starting to deteriorate from water, humidity, temperature changes.

And so we kept saying that at some point something needed to be done about it and wouldn't it be fitting if one of his ex students actually restore it and fix it.

And that didn't happen until a couple years ago where we actually got it going through the Rourke Art Gallery Museum under Jonathan Rutter.

It took about a year and a half to fully restore all of the 13 panels.

But it was a full-time job.

The damage was really extensive on the left side of the mural, the first three panels.

A lot of the canvas was just wasted away, rotted away, just deteriorated and fell apart.

It was like putting together potato chips.

After getting those pressed down in place, I had to put filler in between the potato chip pieces and then that was sanded down, then it was retouching with paint.

(bright music continues) - I like his color palette, like when you drive out here in the country and you see this yellow green everywhere in the landscape.

You contrast that with the yellow orange and there's the Running palette.

- There's a lot of greens and yellows in his palette.

You won't find any blue.

Just trying to figure out what he did so I could match it.

It was an interesting process in itself.

For those who remember it being in the library at Concordia, if they saw how it had deteriorated and then it was removed and people would ask what happened to it.

- One of the aides to one of the Concordia presidents said to me that mural was not beloved.

Well, we loved it, and we decided to fix it.

- For me personally, it was a matter of respecting Cy and his work and his legacy, and I've sort of been pushing for this for 20 some years.

It's a great story.

And if you look at murals from the past, that's what they are about.

Murals are about telling stories and history.

I'm now part of this mural.

It's great that one of his students was able to work on it and restore it, and just seeing what a legacy has developed around this man and realizing what a big deal he was and how talented he was.

And he was a great teacher.

- His biggest legacy is a lot of very talented, strong artists.

They believe in what they're doing, they're living well.

That's the greatest legacy.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.