Blog
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.
The Latest
Mia’s 2022 Holiday Gift Guide
By Molly Lax
Ready or not, the holiday shopping season is here. We’ll make it easy: the Store at Mia has something unique and creative for everyone on your list. Here’s what we’re excited about this year. Inspired by Botticelli In celebration of the major exhibition “Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks of the Uffizi,” ...
Renaissance man: Why Botticelli still matters (maybe more than ever)
By Tim Gihring
A few weeks ago, as the long hot summer in Minnesota began to cool, I called up Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi Galleries, in Florence, Italy. For six years, Schmidt had been the head of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at Mia. He is tall, with a deep voice, ...
Reviving the revolutionary salon music for “Révolution à la Mode”
By Peter Sheppard Skærved
The Minneapolis Institute of Art is one of my favourite museums on either side of the Atlantic. I live in London, which is not short of galleries, but if Mia were there I would visit regularly. I have come to know and love the museum, over many years visiting my ...
How Marcia Resnick captured the spirit of Downtown New York, and lived to tell
By Frank H. Goodyear III, Lisa Hostetler, and Casey Riley
The exhibition Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be is on view at Mia from August 13 to December 11, 2022. The following introduction has been excerpted from the exhibition catalogue, Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be, available from The Store at Mia. Copyright ...
How a starving artist became Van Gogh Inc. (and what he might think of that)
For Mia’s current exhibition on Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of olive groves, the museum collaborated with Minneapolis jewelers Jac & Violet to create earrings inspired by the artist. You can buy them from the Store at Mia, along with Van Gogh socks, a Van Gogh brooch of his face, a Van Gogh action figure, even ...
Cleaned and repaired, fish skin coats from Siberia reveal indigenous knowledge
By Alex Bortolot
Visitors to “Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan,” on view at Mia through September 11, will be continuously astonished by the diversity of materials that makers across the Japanese archipelago have fashioned into garments. Some materials make a lot of sense: a linen-like textile woven from banana plant fiber sounds perfect ...
Divine threads: The making of an extraordinary robe in “Dressed by Nature”
By Diane Richard
If you were an Ainu robe maker, how would your design process begin? Would you draw swirls and biomorphic shapes on your precious trade cottons? Or would you just start cutting? Would you opt for embroidery floss with POP!, thinking “That red thread really works, especially if I make crawling oho ...
Tattoo artist Emi Nijiya on inspirational art at Mia and queer-friendly inking
By Kate Brenner-Adam
Working in an art museum, you often see just as much art on the visitors’ skin as you do on the wall. I’ve always loved looking at tattoos as art, so I talked to local tattoo artist Emi Nijiya for this Pride Month blog post because they own Jackalope, an all ...
Touched by Van Gogh: What a newly discovered fingerprint tells us about a Mia masterwork
By Diane Richard
One-hundred thirty-three years ago, on a day in late November, Vincent van Gogh reached for his freshly painted canvas. It was during his self-imposed stay at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France, where his windows overlooked a grove of craggy olive trees with a mountainous backdrop. That ...
How Anne Frank’s distorted legacy paved the way for “The Nazi Drawings”
By Tim Gihring
On July 15, 1944, a few weeks after her 15th birthday, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at ...