In real life, Gina Heath King is like many other Minnesotans, going to Vikings games, talking about the weather, and digging into her graduate studies. But when she enters the fictional world of Jane Austen, she becomes a bit more decorous. She straightens up. Her mind reaches back, and as she tries to explain why Austen’s stories  ...

In the Performing Arts Archive on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, there are 19 boxes of material relating to Gertrude Lippincott (left): correspondence, newsletters, clippings, photographs, and three audio cassette tapes. More of her papers are kept at the Minnesota Historical Society and the New York Public Library, and every year the  ...

Eugène Delacroix’s 1829 lithograph of a lion munching a rabbit looks like a stuffed animal next to the animated creatures he painted some 30 years later in Lion Hunt (1861), the signature image of “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh” (on view in Mia’s Target Galleries, now through January  ...

Eleanor Roosevelt was never entirely comfortable being a Roosevelt. The famous family burdened her with one tragedy after another, from an absent, alcoholic father to a mother who belittled her appearance, and both parents died young. She was an orphan when she married Franklin, her cousin, whose extramarital affairs pushed them apart early on. Yet  ...

A beekeeper and a waste management specialist walk into an art museum. They, along with an elected park commissioner and a water quality expert are at Mia to be interviewed by 21 teenage girls. These remarkable young women meet at the museum weekly for “Girls Design the World: Supporting Green Communities with STEAM,” a partnership  ...

There weren’t many places to go. Not if you wanted to catch up on what Picasso and Matisse were up to or go deep into art history. In 1931, when this photo was taken of Mia’s library, there wasn’t any cyberspace and there weren’t any encyclopedias floating around in it. There were only books, and you  ...

The museum shop at the Minneapolis Institute of Art reopened two years ago as the Store at Mia. The selection is now more carefully curated, in keeping with the overall ethos of a museum, and isn’t limited to books, postcards, and other materials directly linked to exhibitions or the collection. Many of the items are handmade as  ...

To look for Lily Place is to peel back the bandages of a mummy. She was once, for a few incandescent years in the 1920s, seemingly everywhere—London, Paris, Cairo, New York, and Minneapolis. And always at the right time. She donated to Mia all the art and artifacts filling the corridor in the photo above from  ...

They were some of the greatest works of western civilization. Paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Botticelli, Titian, Manet, Velazquez. Monuments to human imagination. And they were in as much danger from Hitler’s mania as anything else in Europe. The Monuments Men, as George Clooney’s 2014 movie revealed, saved thousands of artworks stolen by the Nazis from  ...

She seems more apparition than woman, as though conjured in a séance. But she was very real: Miriam McHugh Taney. And for years she seemed to be the museum’s all-purpose lecturer—onstage, in the galleries, on WCCO Radio. In weekly talks at the museum, she tackled everything from medieval France to the Italian Renaissance. A professional  ...