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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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Shifting museum space to Native place

By Juan Lucero and Jill Ahlberg Yohe

It was time for a change. We knew it. The museum knew it. The world knew it. Recently, we changed Mia’s Native Art galleries. In our hearts and minds, as curators during this time of reckoning for museums all over the globe, we knew that our responsibility  ...

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Learning and earning: An intern reflects on museums behind the scenes

By Henock Mwanasomwe

I am a fourth-year student at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, studying Management Information Systems at the Carlson School of Management. I was given the opportunity to intern at Mia through Genesys Works, a non-profit organization that equips youth from under-represented communities with the technical and business abilities to succeed in  ...

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As Russia invades, Katherine Turczan reflects on her photographs of Ukraine

By Tim Gihring

In1997, Katherine Turczan began showing a series of photographs she had made in Ukraine. “From Where they Came” debuted at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, and featured portraits of children, nuns, and other Ukrainians trying to find their place in a country once  ...

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What is haunting America? And why does it matter now?

By Lacey Prpić Hedtke

At the beginning of the pandemic, I started looking more closely at America’s chart. There was chatter among astrologers that 2020 was going to be an active year, and now we know that it was. At the time, I was writing about contemporary witch culture for the catalogue of “Supernatural  ...

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The spirit world called. This artist answered.

By Tim Gihring

One morning, in the 1850s, Harriet Hosmer wakes up and senses someone in the room. It’s 5 o clock. She’s sleeping behind a tall screen that wraps around her bed. The doors to her room are locked. She asks if anyone is there. And suddenly someone is there, now in front of  ...

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Making contact: “Supernatural America” explores our long fascination with the unexplained

By Robert Cozzolino, Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings

Mia’s exhibition “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art” is finally coming home for its finale, opening February 19 in the Target Gallery, after debuting last summer at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, and moving to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. What  ...

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“The Nazi Drawings” and the forgotten history of the Holocaust

Rachel McGarry remembers the moment she began to understand the Holocaust. It was 1981. She was a kid turning cartwheels in a friend’s suburban basement, with the television on. Suddenly, a woman onscreen began recounting her imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. “It was gripping,” says McGarry, who now realizes she was watching a documentary called  ...

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Let it breathe: The science behind Aaron Dysart’s “Latitude” installation

By Tim Gihring

Aaron Dysart has long admired scientists—the way they see the world, and how they explain it. “I adore science,” says the Minneapolis artist. “Artists and scientists are both trained observers, we just go about it really differently with really different outcomes.” Years ago, Dysart was introduced to John Schade, an ecologist  ...

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100 years after receiving it, Mia conserves a Late Gothic manuscript

By Alex Bortolot, with contributions from Sherelyn Ogden and Rachel McGarry

In 1921, the collector Herschel V. Jones gave Mia an antiphonary, a manuscript of sung portions of the Christian Mass and the Divine Office, known as antiphons. It was created in 1439 and used by a community of nuns at the Congregation of Fontissalientis  ...

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Conservation connection: MN couple brings art back to life

Art conservation is essential to Mia’s mission, preserving art and allowing it to be shown. Consider supporting the museum’s conservation work in your year-end giving. Learn more about our Art Champions. By Tim Gihring // Kevin and Leela Scattum were meeting with a couple of curators from Mia when Pujan Gandhi, the museum’s Jane Emison  ...

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