Artist Sarah Burns has brought an odd feeling of home to the MIA with her MAEP exhibition “midday.” Her sculptures are given plenty of breathing room in the gallery, spaced like strangers at a party, a meditation on vaguely familiar objects taking unfamiliar forms. If you’re curious how someone sees beauty in innocuous items, or  ...

At 16, she was an imperial concubine in the Forbidden City. Soon, in a desperate bid to open China to the outside world, she seized power for herself. Now, a new book claims Cixi, who ruled China as the empress dowager for much of the second half of the 19th century, was the real instigator  ...

The controversy over the Washington Redskins’ name and logo is flaring up again after recent high-profile criticism from sportscaster Bob Costas, Keith Olbermann, and even President Obama. And protestors are seizing the moment: they’ll be at the Metrodome on Thursday when that certain Washington football team plays the Vikings. But a look through the MIA  ...

The controversy over the Washington Redskins’ name and logo is flaring up again after recent high-profile criticism from sportscaster Bob Costas, Keith Olbermann, and even President Obama. And protestors are seizing the moment: they’ll be at the Metrodome on Thursday when that certain Washington football team plays the Vikings. But a look through the MIA  ...

Artists are generally carefree, of sunny disposition, rarely given to dark or macabre thoughts. I don’t know if you knew that. But a few of them, at least, have created these fantastic images of ghosts found in the MIA collections. Some  are more stereotypically Halloweeny than you’d expect to find in an art museum, others  ...

This weekend, the MIA opens a must-see exhibition for photography fans: 31 Years: Gifts from Martin Weinstein, featuring a good chunk of the more than 500 photographs given to the MIA over the decades by the former trial attorney and current gallery owner, including greats like August Sander, Josef Ruzicka, W. Eugene Smith, and his  ...

“Everything is bigger in America.”  I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size,  ...

“Everything is bigger in America.”  I heard this repeatedly from English friends while living in London in the 1970s and ’80s. And, for the most part, they were right. Cars, houses, shopping malls, food portions—everything was bigger in America. Even the saga of J.R. Ewing on Dallas, the era’s emblematic TV show, symbolized the size,  ...

Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a  ...

Lou Reed has gone on to that great conceptual-art exhibition called the afterlife, reunited with Andy Warhol and all the rest. He’d hung around well past the point that the New York he embodied—the avant-garde, amoral, downtown scene of the 1970s and ’80s—had faded into sports bars and luxury condos, Giuliani-ized and Bloomberg-ized into a  ...