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Fresh perspectives on art, life, and current events. From deep dives to quick takes to insightful interviews, it’s the museum in conversation. Beyond the walls. Outside the frame. Around the world.

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The student, the curator, and the “fragments of memory” in “Eternal Offerings”

By Tim Gihring

When Tim Yip was conceiving the look of “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes,” Mia’s multimedia show of delicately inscribed vessels made for archaic ceremonies, he suggested including fragments of objects at the outset of the exhibition. He didn’t suggest why. Yang Liu, Mia’s curator of Chinese art and chair of its Asian  ...

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Sense of “belonging and identity” prompts 3M employees to sponsor Mia show

By Tim Gihring

As one of Minnesota’s largest companies, 3M has long supported Mia. But recently one of 3M’s employee groups came together to support an exhibition on its own: Teo Nguyen’s “Việt Nam Peace Project,” a series of photorealistic paintings depicting the kind of lush landscapes that often serve as the backdrop to  ...

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Poet frogs, mustard-seed books, and other tales from “The Art of Literacy”

By Tim Gihring

More than a thousand years ago, in the early 11th century, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, a book often called the world’s first novel. The name was a nom-de-plume. The author was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, and she and a few other noblewomen—notably Sei Shonagon, the author  ...

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Revisiting the Caribbean: A Q&A on “Fragments of Epic Memory”

By Tim Gihring

In 2019, the Art Gallery of Ontario purchased some 3,500 photographs of Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, taken between 1840 and 1940. They had been collected by Patrick Montgomery, an archivist in New York, and capture the changing lives, landscapes, and labor conditions in the century between  ...

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Self-guided tour showcases women in art at Mia

Though long neglected, rejected, anonymized, and otherwise diminished, women artists have nevertheless added their voices to art-making throughout time and across cultures. Mia has assembled this tour of art by women, from the historical to the contemporary, to experience in person or online.   Gallery 243 Shahzia Sikander, Arose, 2020 Shahzia Sikander reinvents and challenges  ...

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Celebrating the matriarchal world of Zulu ceramics during Women’s History Month

In the world of Zulu ceramics, pottery is a primary vehicle for women to assert and increase their prestige within Zulu society. Even as plastic and enamel alternatives proliferate, there are still many Zulu women, primarily in rural areas, creating functional terracotta wares that contribute to the daily workings of their communities and serve as  ...

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Who is Tim Yip, the Oscar-winning designer behind “Eternal Offerings”?

By Tim Gihring

When Tim Yip won the Academy Award for art direction, for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in 2001, he was so nervous—as Catherine Zeta-Jones handed him the Oscar—that he was only able to thank his family and the film’s director, Ang Lee, before the band played him off the stage. It was  ...

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“Kitchen Dance,” a film inspired by Mia’s iconic Frankfurt Kitchen, debuts in March

By Diane Richard

Three years after it was created, Kitchen Dance has finally moved to the front burner. In the spring of 2020, when the pandemic sent many of us home to our collective sorrow and sourdough starters, it postponed the premiere of a seven-minute film inspired made through an enterprising collaboration. It will now  ...

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How love grows cold: The curious adage behind a visiting painting

By Tom Rassieur Mia’s recent exhibition “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence” prominently featured a painting by Luca Signorelli (c. 1450–1523) with the title Allegory of Fertility and Abundance. Painted in various shades of gray, it resembles a relief sculpture carved in stone, its five figures—three adults and two children—all in some degree of nudity. A woman  ...

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Self-guided tour celebrates African-American art history at Mia

For Black History Month, Mia has created a self-guided tour exploring three centuries of art by African-American artists now on view at the museum. Pick up a tour guide on your next visit or take the virtual tour here online. Gallery 304 Joshua Johnson, Portrait of Richard John Cock, c. 1817 What is the first  ...

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