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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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Chris Farrell talks October 3 at the MIA on Matisse, creativity, and why you're not going to retire

You’re tired of bosses. You’re tired of agendas. If one more person populates your Google calendar with a meeting you didn’t ask for, you’re going to…retire. Why not, assuming your financial house is in order. Chris Farrell, an economics correspondent and personal finance guru for Marketplace Money, has an unexpected answer: “It’s so exciting to  ...

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Chris Farrell talks October 3 at the MIA on Matisse, creativity, and why you’re not going to retire

You’re tired of bosses. You’re tired of agendas. If one more person populates your Google calendar with a meeting you didn’t ask for, you’re going to…retire. Why not, assuming your financial house is in order. Chris Farrell, an economics correspondent and personal finance guru for Marketplace Money, has an unexpected answer: “It’s so exciting to  ...

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Red and Hot: The Many Loves of Modigliani

Modigliani’s first name was Amedeo, literally the “one who loves God.” Certainly he loved women—a lot. A sulky, handsome Italian, he had large black eyes, shiny black curls, and a big soft mouth. He had charming manners, too, and being Italian he was stylishly dressed (often in corduroy). Amedeo loved poetry. He knew thousands of  ...

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Fair to middling: A dinner that’ll test a print dealer’s good manners

Imagine having a yard full of creeping Charlie and inviting Gertrude Jekyll over for a garden party. That’s what it feels like to have the dealers from the annual Minneapolis Print and Drawing Fair to my house for dinner. Someone always hosts the dinner one evening during the fair, which runs this weekend, September 20  ...

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Caricatures: Sketching out reality

As an editorial cartoonist, I am drawn to Study of Putti by the master draftsman Annibale Carracci, on view in “Marks of Genius,” for two reasons. First, I always love seeing the sketches and working drawings of great artists. In fact, I largely prefer these to the seeing the finished artwork. This is because the  ...

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Just in time for the new Apple Watch, an exhibition about our relationship with the hours

The new Apple Watch that was unveiled this week, with its potential to merge timekeeping with the body and its rhythms, feels like the future, like something new. But it may be more like a return—time, after all, has only recently become fixed, divorced from our actual experience of the world turning. Which is where  ...

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Did men dress better in the past? The argument from art history.

Despite all the evidence from the Minnesota State Fair, men are supposedly dressing better. GQ recently offered that the newish term “metrosexual,” meaning a modern man who looks after his appearance, is already all but extinct as such habits have become mainstream. We’re all metrosexuals now. Right. One look at the fellows in the “Fancy  ...

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Carrion on: Paul Shambroom brings back the dead for “The Nature of Nature”

I first met Paul Shambroom while working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, when he presented editor Brian Anderson with his idea of setting up a photo booth in front of the Shinders newsstand at Sixth Street and Hennepin Avenue, in downtown Minneapolis, on two Saturday nights. He wanted to capture the avenue’s night owls in the era  ...

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Flower Vendors: Simply Awesome, Awesomely Simple

The great American bebop bassist and composer Charles Mingus observed, “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple—awesomely simple—that’s creativity.” What has drawn me to write about Flower Vendors, of all 100 drawings in “Marks of Genius,” is the reverence it shows for human life by capturing and honoring a particularly inconspicuous, unspectacular  ...

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Behind the gallery walls and into James Holmberg’s “Forever”

What do you find when you peel back a gallery wall? This was a driving question for Minnesota artist James Holmberg and he needed to find the answer. In his most recent work, featured in the MAEP exhibition “Forever,” Holmberg works with architectural structures, like those in the gallery wall, zeroing in on commonplace objects  ...

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