Exhibitions

Upcoming Exhibitions

In the first half of the 20th century, Germany experienced the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the revolution that followed, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Modern art played an important role in the discourse of the period, and politics influenced the arts.
This exhibition features more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), the distinguished modern art museum of the Berlin State Museums. It traces the German experience in the visual arts over four decades.
Beginning with the Expressionist reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the exhibition moves on to the New Objectivity movement, the modern style of the 1920s. Between the wars, German artists participated in international experiments with abstraction. Painters and sculptors critiqued social currents, but most were silenced under the Nazis. This exhibition concludes with an epilogue that examines the ambiguous aftermath of World War II.
&#8220;Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945&#8221; has been organized by the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in cooperation with Mia.

Painting of a woman with black-brown bobbed hair and curls falling over her forehead wearing a black dress and holding a cigarette seated at a table in a nightclub setting with two mean behind her and a champagne chiller holding an opened bottle of of champagne

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

&#8220;Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time&#8221; celebrates the enduring power, beauty, and symbolism of horses in Chinese art and culture. Across millennia, the horse has galloped through China’s imagination—as chariot puller, zodiac sign, loyal companion, and poetic metaphor.
This exhibition explores the horse as both a real creature and a cultural emblem—embodying strength, status, virtue, and aspiration. From ritual bronzes to scholar’s miniatures, imperial scrolls to popular expressions, the horse reveals a rich interplay of mythology, mobility, and meaning. As we welcome a new Year of the Horse, these timeless images invite reflection on what it means to move, strive, and endure.

Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time

Derived from a Nahuatl word, a huipil is a traditional blouse worn by women throughout Mesoamerica, particularly among the Maya, since before the 16th century when Spanish explorers arrived in the region. The garment remains especially prevalent in Guatemala’s highland regions, where a majority of Maya descendants reside today.
Huipiles are traditionally handwoven on a backstrap loom in two or three rectangular panels, later sewn together. Decoration, motifs, and color choices serve as a visual language that uniquely identifies the wearer’s village and social standing.
The selection presented in this exhibition comes from a significant donation of textiles made to the museum by Richard Simmons and his wife. Their contribution has greatly enhanced representation of Latin American culture in the museum’s collection.

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Guatemala woman's ceremonial blouse, or huipil, featuring white, red and orange colors

An Indigenous Art: Huipiles from Mia&#8217;s Collection

This exhibition brings together paintings and photographs from the collection of Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer that explore the rich and complex meanings of industrial art during the first half of the 20th century. Spanning the late 1920s to the early 1940s, these works illuminate the importance of artistic creativity during a period shaped by economic hardship, social unrest, and the dominance of industrial manufacturing. Paintings by Harry Gottlieb, Edmund Lewandowski, Ben Shahn, and others appear alongside photographs by prominent figures such as Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange, offering a unique cross-section of artistic life during a tumultuous era.

Black-and-white photograph of a cemetery with brick rowhouses and steel mills in the background

Built to Last: The Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art

<blockquote>“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
&nbsp; 

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 51,” Leaves of Grass (1855)
</blockquote>
For 250 years, the United States has defined itself in terms of plurality. Its Latin motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), notes the interdependence of the multiple and the singular in our national conception.
This exhibition explores the diversity of American experience that photographs can hold, and the manner in which photographers have sought to “contain multitudes,” in the words of the 19th-century writer Walt Whitman, by maintaining an expansive ecosystem of images celebrating the contradictions of American life, culture, and history.

young woman wearing a turquoise tank top, turquoise and black skirt, white shoes and white beaded headdress, seated bareback on a white speckled horse, standing in front of a backdrop painted with blue sky and white clouds

Containing Multitudes

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

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

Amy Usdin portrays the continuous cycle of life and entropy in her fiber art. Her exhibition explores the blurred lines between past and present, emphasizing our fragile ties with each other and the earth while advocating for the stewardship of both.
With a BFA in graphic communications from Washington University in St. Louis, Usdin spent years as an art director before starting her studio practice in 2018. She&#8217;s exhibited widely, including prestigious surveys that represent the diversity and breadth of contemporary craft and fiber art. Usdin&#8217;s work has been published in Fiber Art Now’s Excellence in Fibers, and she&#8217;s received multiple awards and grants from the Surface Design Association, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council.
Usdin is a 2024 recipient of the Stone &amp; DeGuire Contemporary Art Award from Washington University, the 2024–2025 Minneapolis College of Art and Design–Jerome Fellowship, and the 2025–2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship.
This exhibition is part of the <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>, celebrating 50 years in 2025.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

view of a room with a hanging sheer textile in neutral shades with three small display tables places in front

Amy Usdin: After All

When we photograph a landmark, we zoom in to capture a detail. We pan out to better document the expanse of a vista. We might even include a person as a reference for scale.
Drawn entirely from Mia’s collection, the artworks in “Site Lines: Photographing Historic Spaces” reveal how photographers have chosen to document historical sites since the 19th century. What emerges are conventions that cut across countries and time, providing us insight into photography’s role in determining the history and meaning of built environments around the world.

Photograph of the Sphinx, partially excavated, in the foreground and one of the great pyramids in the background

Site Lines: Photographing Historic Spaces

Bergen, a vital Hanseatic port, nurtured a centuries-long silversmithing tradition shaped by global trade and European influence. This exhibition traces the craft’s evolution from the Baroque period of the early 17th century to the early 20th century, culminating in the Viking Revival of the late 18th and 19th centuries—a period of national awakening inspired by archaeological finds and Norse mythology.
Notable are the fantastical silver Viking ships by Marius Hammer, a master of the revival style, blending historical motifs with dazzling craftsmanship. Alongside bridal crowns, tankards, and domestic wares, these works reflect how Norwegian silversmiths expressed identity, wealth, and cultural pride through silver across eras of profound artistic transformation.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in collaboration with KODE and Mia.

small silver and enamel sculpture of a Viking dragon boat

Crowning the North: Silver Treasures from Bergen, Norway

“In the Presence Of” presents four key artworks, all on loan to Mia, by the renowned Cambodian-born artist Sopheap Pich. Buddha 3 (2010), Caged Heart (2009), Upstream 2 (2011), and Rang Phnom Flower (2015) evoke key moments in Pich’s practice and his engagement with Cambodian culture, history, and nature.
The artist transforms rattan, bamboo, and burlap into arduously made, yet delicate sculptures that gesture to, rather than replicate, his chosen subjects. His embrace of these natural materials alludes to Cambodia’s recent histories, through his childhood memories there, as well as his eventual return as an adult.

Photo of a mound of woven bamboo orbs and tubes amassed together

Sopheap Pich: In the Presence Of

Step into the splendor of Cambodia’s Khmer Empire in &#8220;Royal Bronzes: Cambodian Art of the Divine,&#8221; a groundbreaking exhibition in collaboration with the Guimet – National Museum of Asian Arts, France, and the National Museum of Cambodia. While Angkor’s monumental stone temples are world renowned, this exhibition highlights the empire’s exquisite bronze artistry—statues, ritual objects, and artifacts that reveal a fascinating blend of artistic mastery, religious devotion, and royal power.
Featuring more than 200 objects, including a colossal sculpture of the Hindu god Vishnu—a Cambodian national treasure—this exhibition offers an unprecedented look at Khmer bronze craftsmanship brought to light through recent archaeological discoveries. Witness the enduring legacy of Cambodia’s sacred metallurgical traditions and their profound cultural significance.
Tickets for Mia members go on sale Monday, September 22, 2025, and for the public Monday, October 6, 2025.
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bronze sculpture of a reclining Vishnu showing his face with two arms bent at the elbow

Royal Bronzes: Cambodian Art of the Divine

The exhibition “José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” celebrates one of the greatest 19th-century landscape painters in the Americas. Trained at the prestigious Academia de San Carlos, Mexico&#8217;s fine arts academy, Velasco became an influential figure in his home country of Mexico, much like his contemporaries Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church in the United States. His impressive panoramic views of the Valley of Mexico—home of modern-day Mexico City—are painted with exquisite detail, honoring both the country’s rich historical heritage and the rapid modernization it underwent in the late 1800s.
Organized by the National Gallery, London, and Mia, the exhibition showcases paintings coming from renowned museums in Mexico and the Czech Republic. It offers an unprecedented opportunity for Mia’s audience to view Velasco&#8217;s works, as many have seldom been displayed outside their home countries.
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painting of a valley in Mexico, with ridges of brown, yellow and green, and a lake and snow-capped mountains in the distance

José María Velasco: A View of Mexico

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.

The Abstract Worlds of Yoshida Hodaka and Chizuko

A Little Fun at My Work: Women in Design and Craft

And More by More They Dream Their Sleep: Mezzotints by Yōzō Hamaguchi Part II

From the Divine to the Mortal: Storytelling in Chinese Painting

Mary Sully: Native Modern

The exuberant 20-century ceramic artist Clarice Cliff famously said, in response to critics, “Having a little fun at my work does not make me any less of an artist, and people who appreciate truly beautiful and original creations in pottery are not frightened by innocent tomfoolery.&#8221;
Drawing from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, along with gifts from the Tamara and Michael Root collection of studio ceramics, this exhibition at the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis showcases the delights and talents of women in the fields of modern and contemporary industrial design and craft. The exhibition features examples of design from Cliff as well as British silver designer Kate Harris, American inventor Marion Weeber, and prolific designer Eva Zeisel. Studio ceramics include works from important American ceramic educator Laura Andreson, Finnish contemporary artist Kirsi Kivivirta, and clay sculptor Karen Karnes, among others. The exhibition is on view in twenty cases in the ground-floor concourse and skyway levels of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis.
Wells Fargo Center Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. &#8211; 5 p.m. 
Generous support provided by:  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-69398" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png" alt="" width="85" height="85" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 85w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 32w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 50w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 64w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 85px) 100vw, 85px" />

Yōzō Hamaguchi (1909–2000) was a master of color mezzotints, a technique that allowed printmakers to reproduce complex details of an artwork. Photography had rendered it obsolete by the 1900s, but Hamaguchi revived the technique after encountering it during a stay in Paris in the 1930s. There, he met American poet e.e. cummings, who gifted him a tool to achieve the signature tones in mezzotint. In the 1980s, Hamaguchi paid homage to the poet with the “e.e. cummings suite” of prints titled with lines from the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
This exhibition explores how Hamaguchi transformed the ordinary into the uncanny, featuring prints generously donated by Charles and Robyn Citrin and Bill and Roberta Stein.
This exhibition is presented in two parts:
<ul>
<li data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Part I: November 27, 2024–July 20, 2025</li>
<li>Part II: August 2, 2025–April 5, 2026</li>
</ul>

abstract painting of wavy green, pink, and blue lines against a black background

2023.101.8

The narrative painting genre has been popular in Chinese art since the Han dynasty nearly two thousand years ago. The subjects of these paintings vary widely, from mythology and classic literature to history and political satire. For centuries, the most popular subjects were transcendent scenes evoking Buddhist and Taoist doctrines. Over time, many artists shifted their focus to the more mundane world—scenes of scholar-officials and ordinary people going about their lives. This gallery features paintings from Mia’s permanent collection that showcase how Chinese artists have used narrative painting to illustrate tales from both the divine and mortal realms.

image of a chinese hunt on a silk screen with people on horses set against a beige background

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, Mary Sully was a reclusive artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive works informed by her Native American and European ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully&#8217;s groundbreaking production highlights recent Mia acquisitions, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art.
Major support for Mia’s presentation provided by Lorraine R Hart.

Watch a conversation with Philip Deloria, a history professor at Harvard University, as he explores Mary Sully’s eclectic style as an expression of her grounding in Plains aesthetics and material culture. Deloria also discusses her emergence as a newly recognized artist immersed in the principles of both Native arts and American modernism.
<a style="color: black;" href="https://vimeo.com/showcase/2905962?video=1066385345" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="background-black">Watch Video</button></a>

Philip Deloria on "Mary Sully: Native Modern" 

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Detailed view of Mary Sully's Spring artwork, which shows a repeated pattern of green, red, and beige shapes

Current Exhibitions

Transcendent Clay: The Kondō Family’s Path of Porcelain Innovations

Otto Dix: The War Portfolio

Survival of the Fittest: Lessons from La Fontaine in Textile and Porcelain

Hokusai | Monet

Spanning almost a century of creativity, &#8220;Transcendent Clay&#8221; offers a panoramic look at the achievements of the Kondō family of ceramicists based in Kyoto, Japan. The legacy of porcelain-making began with Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985) in the 1930s and continued with his sons Yutaka (1932–1983) and Hiroshi (1936–2012), who broke free to pursue original, individual expressions. Ultimately it was the grandson Takahiro (born 1958) who emerged as the family’s greatest innovator by developing the secret technique of applying a “silver mist” (gintekisai) of metallic droplets to his modern forms.
This exhibition brings together a wide range of works including freehand-painted vases, pure-white jars, and Takahiro’s dramatic shapes and textures, which he describes as “water born from fire.” Most of the works are from the collection of Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz, long-time supporters of Mia.

Watch a conversation with Joe Earle, former head of Asian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as he explores the evolution of the ceramic lineage of the Kondō family. Then ceramic artist Kondō Takahiro, collector Jeffrey Horvitz, and gallerist Joan Mirviss join Earle for a panel discussion, moderated by Andreas Marks, Mia’s curator of Japanese and Korean art.
<a style="color: black;" href="https://vimeo.com/showcase/2905962?video=1085806222" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="background-black">Watch Video</button></a>

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porcelain statue of a head and top of the torso with arms at side with blue and green underglazes and "silver mist" overglaze

Otto Dix (1891–1969) served in the German army during World War I. For three years, he led a machine-gun unit and experienced the horror of trench warfare firsthand. When the war ended, in 1918, many of Dix’s countrymen wanted to celebrate the valor of military service and rebuild German power; others wanted to forget and move forward. Dix belonged to a smaller cohort who wanted to scrutinize how a war that raged for four years and left ten million dead could happen in the first place. In the early 1920s, Dix created a series of fifty raw etchings—published as Der Krieg (The War)—that are less an account of Dix’s wartime activity than a sequence of PTSD-induced flashbacks.
Content advisory: This exhibition contains images of suffering, death, and bodily decay.

Black and white etching by Otto Dix of soldiers in gas masks during Word War I.

Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) taught children how to live in a dictatorship. His Fables depict a world of talking animals, but the lessons they teach are about power&#8217;s abuses and the skills needed to survive. From their first publication in 1668 during the absolutist reign of King Louis XIV, Fables captivated artists, who illustrated scenes from the tales on a variety of surfaces. This exhibition presents textiles and ceramics that were inspired by La Fontaine and circulated in the elite domestic spaces of privileged children and their caregivers. These items vividly bring to life scenes from famous stories such as the tortoise and the hare, the kite and the nightingale, and the rooster and the pearl.

Use this guide to prepare for a visit to the exhibition or to stimulate conversations in the galleries. Consider printing a few guides so that students can get a close look at the artworks by working in small groups.
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Textile image of a brown bird gripping a branch, with a pillar and flowers in the background

In 1897, the French painter Claude Monet made four paintings of the chrysanthemums in his garden in Giverny, capturing them not in a vase but en plein air—painting the flowers as they grew. He had been an avid collector of Japanese prints since the 1870s, and his unexpected, expressive use of space in this experiment recalls the Large Flowers series of prints made between 1833 and 1834 by Katsushika Hokusai. This exhibition brings the Large Flowers and Chrysanthemums series into conversation, exploring the symbiotic artistic connections between Japan and France in the 19th century.

Drawing of pink, peach, and light red chrysanthemums and a horsefly by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai