Exhibitions

Upcoming Exhibitions

Skulls and skeletons are a popular subject in Japanese art. They appear in paintings, prints, and book illustrations as secondary elements but also as primary subjects, especially with the increased understanding of anatomy in the 19th century.
This exhibition shows skeletons in a lifelike, humorous manner, exhibiting a playfulness to the usually terrifying and haunting nature of skeletons. The highlight is the recently acquired pair of six-panel folding screens by Takeuchi Ryūa, a truly memorable and unique work of skeletons at play.

Skeletons with plants and lanterns on a textured background.

Bare Bones: Skeletons in Japanese Art

For many Japanese artists, the process of conceptualizing and producing an artwork underwent fundamental, widespread change after the end of World War II in 1945. The strong emphasis on continuity was abandoned by some in favor of a radical new path, previously unheard of, especially in the crafts section.
The birth of an avant-garde and formal declaration for innovations is notable throughout different media. One approach for avant-garde artists was to create sculptures instead of functional objects. In 1948, a group of five ceramic artists, among them Yagi Kazuo (1918–1979), Yamada Hikaru (1923–2001), and Suzuki Osamu (1926–2001), founded Sōdeisha, literally the Crawling through Mud Association. The Sōdeisha group was active until 1998. While more than 60 artists were members at some point, not every ceramic artist who created innovative sculptures joined. Artists like Kawamoto Gorō (1919–1986) and Morino Taimei (born 1934) preferred to work independently and pursued their own paths.
Individualism is a key factor in Japanese contemporary ceramics today. This exhibition sheds light on the beginning of the break with Japanese ceramics traditions by showcasing works from independent artists and Sōdeisha members created before 1990.
Generous support is provided by the Joan B. Mirviss and Robert J. Levine Endowment Fund for Japanese Ceramics and the Gale Family Endowment—named for a generous gift from Alfred P. Gale—which strengthens the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s efforts to reach a spectrum of audiences through a variety of programs, events, exhibitions, and publications focused on the museum’s renowned collection of Asian Art.

This book is a survey of the avant-garde in Japanese ceramics between 1948 and 1990, from art historian Andreas Marks.
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Related Events 

Cracked ceramic with textured pattern and straight lines.

Breaking Tradition: The Avant-Garde in Japanese Ceramics, 1948 to 1990

Gilles Peress is one of the most esteemed documentary photographers of his generation. Born in France, Peress made his first photographic series in 1970, having previously studied political science and philosophy in Paris. He soon joined Magnum Photos, the international cooperative photography agency committed to documenting world events, people, places, daily life, and culture.
This exhibition features selected photographs Peress made in the 1970s and 1980s that bear witness to the ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland. Commonly called “The Troubles,” this political and nationalistic struggle saw the Unionist, mostly Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, who pledged loyalty to the United Kingdom, in violent conflict with Irish nationalists and republicans, mostly Irish Catholics, who sought a re-united Ireland. The violent civil unrest persisted from the late 1960s until the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Peress employs a humanist aesthetic in his photographs, portraying his subjects with respect and compassion. His images reveal a poignant manifestation of the human condition, reflecting his belief that photography holds the power to illuminate human suffering and inspire empathy.

Related Events

People wearing masks and holding objects in a street setting.

2009.68.9

Gilles Peress: The Northern Ireland Conflict, 1968–1998

&#8220;Latitude 33°&#8221; explores migration, inheritance, and belonging through objects shaped by displacement. Named after the cartographic line crossing North Africa and the Middle East, the exhibition traces artist Zin-Tamir’s cultural lineage.
When migration forces people to leave material possessions behind, stories, embodied knowledge, and remade craft traditions become vital vessels of cultural transmission. Within Mia, these objects exist in a state of quiet dislocation, powerfully echoing the profound, universal tensions of departure and arrival.
Zin-Tamir has exhibited at institutions including the Rochester Art Center, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, the Haifa City Museum, Locust Projects, and the Harn Museum of Art, among others. She was a 2021 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship recipient and received support from the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Minnesota Jewish Arts Council, and an Exhibition Grant from Artis Contemporary.
This exhibition is part of the <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Blue circular fabric sculpture next to golden Hebrew letters on wall.

Rotem Zin-Tamir: Latitude 33°

This exhibition presents a rare selection of Chinese album leaves from the Ming through the Qing dynasty (14th–19th Century) from Mia&#8217;s collection. Intended for intimate viewing by hand, album leaves fostered quiet reflection and close looking. Within these modest formats, artists condensed expansive worlds into refined spaces filled with landscapes, flowers, birds, and poetic scenes.
The exhibition juxtaposes the meticulous elegance of court academy gongbi painting with the expressive freedom of literati xieyi styles. Executed on silk and paper with ink and color, these works reveal centuries of technical mastery, literary imagination, and contemplative artistic vision.

Two open books with Chinese calligraphy and drawings next to a wooden box.

Quiet Visions: Chinese Album Painting from Ming to Qing

Not all of the artistry at Mia comes from outside the museum—many employees are artists as well, and this exhibition spotlights their work.
The Staff Art Show was organized and curated by Team Mia, a group of museum staff devoted to cultivating a positive work environment, encouraging generosity and relationship-building among staff, providing accessible opportunities for connection and growth, and recognizing and celebrating museum employees. We are pleased to showcase the immense talent among us.

Painting of six people in an office setting with colorful attire, sitting and standing.

2018.13.1

Artists at Work: The Mia Staff Art Show

In the year 8 CE, Roman author Ovidius Naso—a.k.a. Ovid—completed a wild, messy, wonderful poem reimagining and combining more than 250 myths. The 11,995-line tale is as elusive as its shape-shifting characters, who magically disguise themselves or are transformed into stars, animals, and plants. Eros, god of love, propels the besotted to eternal glory or embarrassment and death.
With its rediscovery, translation, and publication into multiple languages during the Renaissance, Ovid&#8217;s poem became a fountain of ideas for artists, second only to the Bible. This exhibition highlights prints exploring the myths of change found in the poem by artists such as Giuseppe Scolari and Lucas van Leyden.

Engraving depicting a story from Metamorphosis, where Actaeon surprises Diana, the goddess of the hunt, as she bathes. As punishment for his intrusion, Actaeon is turned into a stag and eaten by his dogs. The print depicts the exact moment of Actaeon’s transformation.

2024.95.1

Ovid

This exhibition brings together Mughal-period paintings and luxury objects from India alongside Mughal-inspired jades created during the Qianlong reign of China&#8217;s Qing dynasty (18th century), revealing a rich artistic dialogue across Asia. Drawn from Mia&#8217;s collection, these works reflect shared imperial interests in precious materials, exceptional craftsmanship, and cosmopolitan aesthetics.
Mughal artists integrated painting, calligraphy, gold illumination, and intricate ornamentation, drawing on Persian, Central Asian, and Indian artistic traditions. In turn, Qianlong-period jades inspired by Mughal forms demonstrate how these artistic languages traveled, were reinterpreted, and acquired new meanings at the Qing court. Together, these works illuminate the movement of ideas, materials, and techniques across cultures, highlighting the interconnected artistic traditions of early modern Asia.

On the left is a carved jade vase with intricate designs, including floral patterns and figures in relief, standing on a wooden base. On the right is a colorful painting depicting a lively battle scene.

Layered Splendor: Mughal Art Across India and Qing China

The Netherlands played an outsize role in the emergence of modern art. Beyond Vincent van Gogh and Piet Mondrian, most Dutch artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries remain unfamiliar to American audiences. This exhibition invites visitors to meet innovators who forged new artistic paths and expanded the possibilities of artistic expression.
Through drawings, prints, paintings, and more, discover how Dutch artists helped shape modern art across an extraordinary range of styles, from Realism and Impressionism to Symbolism, Expressionism, and Abstraction. The works on view include beloved Mia favorites alongside several recent additions to the collection.

The image is an abstract painting featuring swirling shapes and patterns in warm shades of brown, beige, and red.

L2026.41

Dutch Art from Van Gogh to Van Breda

This exhibition features a focused selection of 35 works of art from Mia’s extensive collection of postwar and contemporary art. The pieces represent a diverse range of American and international visual artists who explore the many meanings of place—from specific physical locations to larger conceptual and spiritual ideas, even fictional imaginings of what constitutes a place.
Ranging from the 1960s to the present, this mixed-media installation brings together personal and collective stories, memories, beliefs, traditions, and histories. The exhibition showcases works from a diverse group of artists, including Kiki Smith, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha, George Morrison, Maya Lin, Renee Stout, Luis González Palma, Tacita Dean, Alec Soth, Cara Romero, Christiane Baumgartner, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, among others. Each piece is unique but also incorporates a thread in the invisible weave of culture. &#8220;From These Places&#8221; offers visitors a chance to experience a content-rich display that includes landscapes and interior scenes, urban views, invented places, and social and political realms—touching on the past, present, and future.

The image depicts a girl with long hair swimming in blue water, surrounded by a variety of animals.

L2025.93.1

From These Places

Japan has a rich tradition of creating exquisite, skillfully made masterpieces of lacquer or metal that serve a specific function. These bowls, plates, vases, boxes, and other containers are made with time-honored materials and techniques, embodying a steadfast commitment to technical mastery and a continued pursuit of innovative expression.
This exhibition unveils the essence of Japanese craftsmanship, or kōgei, showcasing the highest level possible to achieve. Each one of the 54 lacquer or metal objects on view was created by a different artist whose work has never been shown at Mia before, including nine artists whom the Japanese government designated as Living National Treasures.
This exhibition is organized in collaboration with and with support from KOGEI USA.

Decorative rectangular lacquer box with swirling orange design.

Contemporary Metal and Lacquer from Japan

See Impressionism in a new light and meet the women artists who changed the landscape of modern painting. &#8220;Women Impressionists and the Land&#8221; brings together around 70 paintings, drawings, prints, and decorative arts by Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, and others.
Moving beyond the domestic subjects for which many of these artists are best known, this exhibition explores forests, waterways, farms, gardens, and parks as places of experimentation, independence, and discovery. Featuring works from Mia, the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other public and private collections, this exhibition reveals a fresh side of Impressionism.
&#8220;Women Impressionists and the Land&#8221; is organized by the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Presenting Sponsor: Bank of America | Major Sponsor: Nora McNeely Hurley Foundation

Painting depicting a person wearing a white dress sitting upright on a blanket spread over a grassy expanse and reading with an umbrella and fan nearby.

Women Impressionists and the Land

Ink Rhythms on the Breeze: The Art of Chinese Fan Paintings

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

Kenji Nakahashi: A Confident Life

Mary

This exhibition explores the intimate world of Chinese fan painting—where poetry, calligraphy, and painted images converge in the palm of the hand. Featuring circular silk fans from the Song and Yuan dynasties (10th–14th centuries) and folding fans from the Ming and Qing period (14th–early 20th centuries), these works reflect centuries of refined aesthetic practice, personal expression, seasonal contemplation, and spiritual reflection.
Whether created by court artists or literati scholars, each fan carries the rhythm of the brush and the breeze: a fleeting moment captured in ink. Drawn from Mia’s rich collection, the selected fans invite viewers to experience how art, nature, and verse were held—literally and symbolically—in one’s grasp.

fan mounted as an album leaf; two fishermen at sea during a storm; rocks and bending trees in foreground lower right, fishermen at lower left, bamboo behind boat with a mountain range in the distance

For as long as there have been cameras, photographers have trained their lenses upon the human form: our heads, shoulders, knees, toes, and much more. The body is an expressive instrument, able to convey meaning through the smallest of gestures: a flick of the wrist, a purse of the lips, a bow from the waist.
Drawn from Mia’s permanent collection, all of the print photography in this show invites us to revel in the wonder of our corporeal nature—our vast capacities for communication, even in stillness, to manifest joy, playfulness, sorrow, alienation, and many other emotions through bodily signs and signatures.

Two separate photographic images forming one large image; large black-and-white image of three clasped hands at bottom center; smaller color images surrounding image of hands and handwritten notes

Contemplative, humorous, inventive, and surreal. These are just a few of many apt descriptions of the artworks of the Japanese artist Kenji Nakahashi. His active imagination, curiosity for his immediate environment, and embrace of the mundane provided endless inspiration and subjects for his art, inviting questions and reflections about life and everyday objects.
Born and educated in Japan, Nakahashi moved to New York City in 1973 at the age of 26, finding in the bustling metropolis the creative stimuli that would sustain his practice for the rest of his life. Best known for his concept-driven photography, Nakahashi actively experimented with a diverse range of mediums, including drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking. Relying on absurdity, visual and textual puns, and unusual juxtapositions, Nakahashi’s enigmatic images encourage viewers to contemplate both the strange and captivating aspects of everyday life.
Blending playfulness and intellectual vigor, Nakahashi often toyed with viewer’s expectations, depicting such mundane objects as street signs, drinking glasses, a hot-water bottle, and analog clocks in unfamiliar or even surreal contexts. Other subjects include storefronts, subway platforms, soaring skyscrapers, and mysterious fictional landscapes. He routinely flattened and fragmented the built environment of the city and its inhabitants into abstract geometric and kaleidoscopic forms, resulting in images that surprise, challenge, and delight.
Celebrating a recent anonymous gift of Nakahashi’s work to Mia’s collection, this exhibition showcases more than 60 photographs, prints, drawings, watercolors, collages, and one painting, representing the artist’s career from the 1970s through the early 1990s.

Two identical round clocks placed on opposite trays of a metal balance scale. Both clocks have white faces with black numbers and hands. The clock on the left shows the time at 12:04, while the clock on the right displays 12:15.

Few people outshine Mary’s glorious stardom. During 2,000 years of veneration, many legends have augmented the biblical outlines of her life. The stories have provided rich inspiration for artists, who often made their best efforts to create beautiful and affecting images of the Blessed Mother, Virgin, Mother of God, Our Lady, Madonna, Queen of Heaven.
This exhibition traces the life of this modest, yet courageous woman through prints and drawings from Mia’s extensive collection. They show her doing the ordinary—caring for children, moving house, and picnicking—and the extraordinary—greeting royalty and physically rising to heaven.

Black and white drawing depicting two figures, Mary and Joseph, seated in a forest-like setting with trees and bushes. Both are wearing flowing garments, and Mary is holding a child.

Current Exhibitions

The Abstract Worlds of Yoshida Hodaka and Chizuko

Meeting Point: The Mary Ingebrand-Pohlad Collection of Latin American Art

Teen Perspectives: Yesterday and Today

Hiroshige&#8217;s 100 Views of Edo x Emily Allchurch

Yoshida Hodaka (1926–1995) was born into a family of artists. He was the second son of Yoshida Hiroshi (1876–1950), a leading Western-style artist in Japan during the early 20th century. Hodaka leaned toward abstraction and began exploring that path after his father&#8217;s death in 1950. In 1953, Hodaka married Chizuko (1924–2017), a trained painter. In addition to oil painting, both Hodaka and Chizuko worked in the woodblock print medium. In 1992, Hodaka created a set of six extraordinarily large prints that depict walls with great attention to structural features and surface details. This exhibition showcases the entire wall set together for the first time, along with Chizuko’s abstract works and playful groups of butterflies.

abstract image: layers of bright orange and bright red loops and curlicues over brown circles extending from the upper left across to the lower right of the painting; bright blue, orange, brown, red, and tan squares throughout; horizontal bright blue narrow rectangles almost dance across the image.

This exhibition features paintings, sculptures, and religious images from the collection of Mary Ingebrand-Pohlad, a longtime trustee and supporter of Mia. Living between Minneapolis and Palm Springs, California, the collector has built a collection that reflects California as a place where American and Latin American cultures intersect.
Blending depictions of the arid landscapes of the American West with works by artists of Latin American descent—many of whom have lived or worked in the United States—the collection offers a lens through which to understand the region’s cultural interplay. Artists such as Diego Rivera, Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and Miguel Covarrubias invite viewers to consider the resilience and creativity that emerge from these crossings, where geography and identity continuously shape one another.

abstract painting of a woman's face with expressive eyes and gray-brown hair and swirls of orange, red, and brown colors in the background

This exhibition features artwork by Twin Cities high school students that explores the connection between art and wellness. The teen artists look at how mental and behavioral health, identity, and creativity have been linked over time, and how people today use creative tools to heal, express themselves, and care for their communities.
The students met with artist-mentors at Mia for seven weeks this winter. Alexandra Beaumont, Shea Maze, and BakiBakiBaki shared their experiences and approaches to art making and contributed their own works to the exhibition. Facilitator Lissa Karpeh provided art therapy directives, or prompts, to guide the creative process.
Funding for this project is provided by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, as part of its commitment to investing in community-led solutions so everyone has the opportunity to achieve their healthiest life.
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People viewing a mixed media artwork featuring two figures.

Utagawa Hiroshige&#8217;s (1797–1858) iconic landscape series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” (modern-day Tokyo), first published in the 1850s, stands as one of the most celebrated collections of Japanese prints. Individual prints from this series of 118 are widely regarded as some of the finest achievements in Japanese art. Hiroshige captures locations in and around Edo during all four seasons, often from unique perspectives.
Inspired by Hiroshige’s compositions, British artist Emily Allchurch (born 1974) created “Tokyo Story” using digital collage and photography. Allchurch traveled to Tokyo in 2009 and visited places pictured by Hiroshige. While many places have changed radically and bear no resemblance to Hiroshige&#8217;s images, Allchurch photographed details of the urban landscapes she encountered through various angles and focuses.
Following Hiroshige&#8217;s compositional arrangements, dramatic cropping, and color gradations, Allchurch also manipulated details of the photographic data to create views that are at once familiar and strangely fresh. This exhibition connects the past and the present by featuring Hiroshige’s captivating sceneries along with Allchurch’s modern adaptations.

Print of a Japanese temple covered in snow with people walking around