The paintings in “Eyewitness Views,” a major exhibition opening September 10 at Mia, were made more than 250 years ago in cities thousands of miles from Minneapolis. They are so-called “view paintings”—views of events that were important at the time they were painted but are generally no longer remembered: balloon flights, volcanic eruptions, royal visits. They are  ...

The paintings in “Eyewitness Views,” a major exhibition opening September 10 at Mia, were made more than 250 years ago in cities thousands of miles from Minneapolis. They are so-called “view paintings”—views of events that were important at the time they were painted but are generally no longer remembered: balloon flights, volcanic eruptions, royal visits. They are  ...

Ifrah Mansour was born in Saudi Arabia, and by the time her family returned to their native Somalia a few years later it was too late. Civil war broke out, the government collapsed, and Mansour’s family—her parents, five siblings, and herself—soon left for a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, one of the oldest and largest in the  ...

Ifrah Mansour was born in Saudi Arabia, and by the time her family returned to their native Somalia a few years later it was too late. Civil war broke out, the government collapsed, and Mansour’s family—her parents, five siblings, and herself—soon left for a refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya, one of the oldest and largest in the  ...

It will last less than three minutes. But on August 21, when the sun will be totally blocked by the moon in parts of the United States for the first time since 1979, some schools will close, traffic will back up from Oregon to Appalachia, and inevitably we will hear that the world is ending. It’s being billed as  ...

LaDonna Sanders Redmond was 13—”an impressionable girl,” she says—when she went into the record store in her Chicago neighborhood with a friend and saw a big poster of Prince. It was the late 1970s. Redmond was into Michael Jackson as well as David and Shaun Cassidy, some classic soul and R & B. But now there was Prince.  ...

In 2004, Bruce Dayton helped Mia purchase a gate in China. The businessman and longtime Mia benefactor had done this before, in the late 1990s, when he and his wife bought a heavily carved, nearly 300-year-old ceremonial gate, along with a reception hall and a scholar’s study, on their way to making Mia’s Chinese galleries among the finest in the world.  ...

In 2004, Bruce Dayton helped Mia purchase a gate in China. The businessman and longtime Mia benefactor had done this before, in the late 1990s, when he and his wife bought a heavily carved, nearly 300-year-old ceremonial gate, along with a reception hall and a scholar’s study, on their way to making Mia’s Chinese galleries among the finest in the world.  ...

Since 2013, Mia has hosted several colonies of European honeybees on its roof, a striking if largely unseen part of its mission to preserve the planet and its treasures. But recently it became clear that merely hosting the bees was not enough if the museum wants to help bees. Providing bee-friendly flowers is the best way to support  ...

In 1931, the Minneapolis Institute of Art received a pair of rooms from the 1772 home of John Stuart, the British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in colonial Charleston, South Carolina. The Charleston Dining and Drawing Rooms, as they’re now known, are among the museum’s many period rooms, historic interiors that were disassembled in their original  ...