It’s good to be the king. It’s good to be the queen, for that matter. But in Florence, Italy, in the 1400s and early 1500s, it was great to be the Medicis. Not royalty, but rulers nonetheless—a rich, powerful family who oversaw the rise of Florence as the intellectual and artistic  ...

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,”  ...

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,  ...

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  ...

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  ...

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  ...

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  ...

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  ...

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  ...

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  ...