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

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

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 will be available in September 2025.

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.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-113411" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-855x111.png" alt="lockup of sponsor logos" width="723" height="94" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-855x111.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-2000x259.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-385x50.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-768x99.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-1536x199.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-2048x265.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 723px) 100vw, 723px" />
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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

“Gatsby at 100” explores how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby shaped—and was shaped by—the visual art of his time. This exhibition brings together works from Mia’s collection that embody the decadence, excess, and social upheaval of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, highlighting paintings, books, and works on paper that are rarely on view. Like Fitzgerald, artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse, as well as regional artists like Wanda Gág and Clement Haupers, endeavored to capture the contradictions of the Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald himself.

Lithograph of a woman in a black dress reclining on a sofa set against a yellow background

Gatsby at 100

The Minnesota State Fair comes to Mia! In August, a special panel of judges, made up of Mia&#8217;s curators and leadership, head to the fair with a mission—to carefully select and judge crop art shown at the Great Minnesota Get-Together. The winners are awarded &#8220;Best in Show,&#8221; and their pieces are exhibited at Mia for a limited time in September among our other cultural masterpieces.

Photo of crop art featuring a 5-point star in yellow seeds with the words "Crop Star" spelled out in the middle in black seeds and set against a background of black seeds

Cream of the Crop: A Minnesota Folk Art Showcase

This exhibition centers on Egon Schiele’s haunting and rarely seen masterpiece, Sawmill (1913), on loan from a private collection. A mill, located on the boundary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is surrounded by piles of freshly cut timber, but itself seems to be in a process of collapse. The mill can be read as a symbol of the empire, which in 1913 was in a precarious state as its provinces demanded autonomy. The exhibition represents two outcomes for the sawmill’s timber: a wooden bridge in another painting by Schiele and avant-garde wooden furniture, created mostly by Schiele’s friend and mentor, the designer Josef Hoffmann.

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Abstract painting of a sawmill surrounded by dark green landscape and distant dark gray mountains

Timber! Art and Woodwork at the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Daoism, one of China’s major belief systems, envisions a universe guided by harmony and natural order. Emerging as an organized religion after 100 CE, Daoism developed sacred texts, temples, and a celestial pantheon. Among its vivid rituals are embroidered priestly robes—chiefly the sleeveless jiangyi and the long-sleeved daopao. These garments, rich in cosmic symbolism, feature diagrams of paradise, sacred mountains, phoenixes, and zodiac animals. Worn during rituals, they transform priests into embodiments of the cosmos.
Drawn from Mia’s collection, this exhibition reveals the spiritual depth, artistic brilliance, and ritual significance woven into these rare Daoist robes.

Photograph of an outstretch Daoist robe with long sleeves, with white fabric at the cuffs and beige fabric with orange, yellow, and brown embroidery on the body

Threads of the Way: Daoist Priest Robes from China’s Qing Dynasty

For her exhibition, Hend Al-Mansour features four installation portraits of Arab women from Minnesota. Each work explores the women’s relationships with their heritage, as interpreted by the artist. By blending traditional motifs and architectural elements with portraiture, the artist creates unique portrayals of Arab American women and their involvement in our communities. Alongside her installations, Al-Mansour is also debuting a new animation.
Saudi American artist Hend Al-Mansour studied medicine in Cairo, Egypt, and practiced medicine in Saudi Arabia. She was a fellow in cardiology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. In addition to her medical degree, Al-Mansour holds an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MA in art history from the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul. She&#8217;s exhibited internationally and received numerous awards, including the Minnesota State Art Board&#8217;s (MSAB) Creative Support in 2024 and 2022; the MSAB Artist Initiative grant in 2019; the McKnight Fellowship in 2018; the Jerome Fellowship of Printmaking in 2013/14; and the Juror&#8217;s Award of the Contemporary Islamic Art in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2012. Al-Mansour is a member of Rosalux Gallery; the Interfaith Artists group; and The Habibties, a group of multiethnic women artists that promotes cultural diversity in the United States.
This exhibition is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, celebrating 50 years in 2025.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Photo of a room constructed of fabric with an arched entry

Hend Al Mansour:Mihrab: Portraits of Arab American Women

Hend Al-Mansour: Mihrabs: Portraits of Arab American Women

Photography’s mechanical origins have sometimes relegated the medium to that of a tool. The impulse to alter, embellish, and add soon became standard photographic practice. Photographers added colored pigment to the metal surfaces of early daguerreotypes, painted paper photographs, and wrote text directly on their prints and negatives. In sum, they annotated their photographs.
Drawing mostly from Mia’s collection, “Annotations” considers an array of hand-applied interventions on and within photographs, across the medium’s history and through different processes. The photographers’ additive gestures bring viewers closer to a photograph’s role as an object made at a specific time and by a particular individual.

mottled and patchy aerial view of a colorful cityscape that is intersected by a river, and is rendered in blue, white, yellow, and pink pigments with a white sky

Annotations

Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection

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

Catch of the Day: Humans and Marine Animals in Japan

Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys

&#8220;Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection&#8221; includes more than two hundred gilt-bronze sculptures, paintings, silk hangings, and carpets that were created in Tibet between the 1300s and early 1900s. Buddhist ritual objects are displayed in the context of an elaborate private household shrine, a space used for offerings, devotional prayer, rituals, and contemplation. With its flickering candlelight, sonorous chanting, and the subtle smell of incense, the glittering room provides an oasis for peaceful contemplation within the galleries at Mia.
Tour a selection of objects in this guide. 
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Prepare your students for a visit with this guide. 
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Step Inside the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room &#8211; 3D Virtual Tour 
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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" />

Living on an archipelago, surrounded by water on all sides, the Japanese have always had a close relationship with the sea. The marine life depicted in Japanese art, however, is often more symbolic than real, meant to convey literary, visual, or seasonal associations. Sometimes, even the connections to the sea are abstract, such as geometric patterns meant to evoke fishnets or scales on dishes and clothing. This exhibition explores the sea creatures that permeate Japanese art and culture, and dives into their deeper meaning.
<h2>Name That Fish</h2>
In October, Mia held an online contest to give Imai Sadamasa’s Napoleon Fish a nickname. After combing through hundreds of great visitor submissions, the artist chose Edmund Fishgerald.

Photo of a sculpture of a fish in blue, green, teal, and green-yellow tones

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Presented by
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“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is a groundbreaking exhibition that marks the first major showcase of the Dean Collection, owned by renowned musicians and cultural icons Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) and Alicia Keys.
Organized by the Brooklyn Museum, “Giants” highlights nearly 100 significant works by Black diasporic artists, including Gordon Parks, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, and more. The exhibition reflects the Deans&#8217; passion for supporting established and emerging artists while fostering important dialogues about art, culture, and identity.
“Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys” is organized by Kimberli Gant, Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, and Indira A. Abiskaroon, Curatorial Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum.
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For school and university group tours of &#8220;Giants,&#8221; please submit a <a href="https://form.asana.com/?k=tqLIfnaCtjGam1FAAZ24Nw&amp;d=67236691525505">tour request form</a>.
See the Deans (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), &#8220;Giants,&#8221; and Mia on <a href="https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/gma3/video/alicia-keys-swizz-beatz-tour-art-world-120416625" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Good Morning America</a>.
Mia offers free admission to ticketed exhibitions for veterans and active duty military and families, Minnesota WIC, MCAD students and staff, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board staff, and museum professionals. You can reserve free admission tickets by calling Visitor Experience at 612-870-3000.
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Watch a conversation with the Deans (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys) and Kimberli Gant, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, for an insider’s look into “Giants.” They explore the origins of the show, their collaborations with artists, and the powerful works that bring the exhibition to life.
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The Deans (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), Kimberli Gant, and “Giants”

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https://vimeo.com/showcase/2905962/video/1064443689

Deborah Roberts is a mixed-media artist celebrated for her artworks that explore topics of Black childhood. This conversation provides a unique chance to hear Roberts share her artistic journey, techniques, and the motivations behind her powerful work.
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https://vimeo.com/showcase/2905962/video/1059475860

Artist and educator Nick Cave creates spaces of memorial by combining found historical objects with contemporary dialogues on gun violence and death. His renowned Soundsuits are sculptural responses to the anxiety, trauma, and loss caused by gun violence, while also holding space for hope, renewal, and healing. Cave shares deeper insights into his practice and the impact of his work within and beyond the spaces of the museum.
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Meleko Mokgosi is an artist, associate professor, and co-director of graduate studies at the Yale School of Art, as well as the co-director of the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program in New York City. He&#8217;s renowned for his large-scale works that engage history painting and cinematic tropes to uncover notions of colonialism, democracy, and liberation across African history.
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Use this guide in your classroom before visiting the museum or in the galleries during a self-guided visit. It highlights selected artworks that illustrate each of the exhibition’s main themes.
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Explore the exhibition together by looking, thinking, and discussing artworks and ideas. Use the questions in this guide to inspire conversation—pick and choose which ones are right for you.
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This guide is a tool to help teenagers explore the exhibition. Experience each room of the exhibition with the corresponding portion of the guide.
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This guide is designed for adults to use as they explore the exhibition. It offers suggestions, prompts, and important context that may provide useful information as you experience this special exhibition.
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Listen to the soundtrack playing in the exhibition.
<a style="color: black;" href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5dSEza6GrXKRBxizFlOT0g?si=etnK0m7FRwakpRjIq82RrA&amp;nd=1&amp;dlsi=3fa19625c8d14a58" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="background-black">Listen to Playlist</button></a>

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https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5dSEza6GrXKRBxizFlOT0g?si=etnK0m7FRwakpRjIq82RrA&nd=1&dlsi=3fa19625c8d14a58

Hear the songs curated by DJ Runna for the exhibition&#8217;s opening party at Mia.
<a style="color: black;" href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5Guld7dBYa82qe6GyoZtup?si=NSgWoc_xR0u_o58RPUw1bw" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="background-black">Listen to Playlist</button></a>

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Color photo of an African American woman with an afro wearing a beaded halter top set against a blue background

Current Exhibitions

Charles Matson Lume: lacuna (for Gustaf Sobin)

The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole

City Views

Artists at Work: The Mia Staff Art Show

Charles Matson Lume’s &#8220;lacuna (for Gustaf Sobin),&#8221; 2025, uses common materials such as plastic sheeting, hologram tape, and light, while the word lacuna is uncommon and means gap or empty space, derived from the Latin words lake or lagoon. The themes found in his site-specific installation are based on light, poetry, beauty, and mortality.
Matson Lume is a visual artist whose art is engaged in the pas de deux of light and matter. He’s exhibited his work at numerous institutions, including the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), Babel Kunst (Trondheim, Norway), Kemijärvi Art Gallery (Kemijärvi, Finland), and Hunter College, (New York City). Matson Lume has received fellowships from the Bush Foundation, Jerome Foundation, Adolph &amp; Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. He&#8217;s participated in artist residencies in Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, and the United States. Matson Lume holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and lives in Saint Paul.
<div id="attachment_112626" style="width: 112px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-112626" loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-112626" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/18155320/ext_202503140001-Web-800px-425x570.jpg" alt="Black-and-white photograph of a white man with a bushy mustache wearing glasses and a tie and sports jacket" width="102" height="137" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/18155320/ext_202503140001-Web-800px-425x570.jpg 425w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/18155320/ext_202503140001-Web-800px-172x231.jpg 172w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/18155320/ext_202503140001-Web-800px.jpg 547w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 102px) 100vw, 102px" />Portrait of Gustaf Sobin. Courtesy of Esther Sobin. © Esther Sobin.</div>
Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005) was a poet and novelist who was born in Boston and earned a BA from Brown University. In 1962, he moved to Paris, met mentor René Char, and settled in Provence. Sobin’s poetry explored existence and transcendence through negation, omission, and lacuna—voids or gaps in meaning. His notable collections include Wind Chrysalid’s Rattle (1980), Towards the Blanched Alphabets (1998), and Collected Poems (2010). He also translated works by Henri Michaux and René Char. Sobin lived in France for over 40 years.
Learn more about his work and read a 2013 review of his Collected Poems in <a href="https://raintaxi.com/collected-poems-gustaf-sobin">Rain Taxi</a>.
The exhibition is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, celebrating 50 years in 2025.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

an abstract pieces of art with blue, teal, and orange colors made from plastic sheeting, hologram tape, mylar sleeping bags, sequined fabric, paper mache snowy owls, EMT conduit tubing corners, Kodak proofing paper, Bytek tape, and monofilament line

This exhibition is the first to present South African photographer Ernest Cole’s images of Black lives in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Created during a consequential period in American history, these photographs were rarely released during Cole’s lifetime and were believed to have been lost until they resurfaced in 2017. Brought together for the first time in this exhibition, the pictures reflect both a new-found hope and freedom that Cole felt in America, as well as an incisive eye for inequality and systemic racism in the United States. Seen through the eyes of a man who fled the apartheid regime in South Africa, this trove of images provides a revealing window into late 20th-century American society.
Organized by Aperture. Curated by Leslie M. Wilson, PhD.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-110822" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085743/2012_aperture_wordmark_black.jpg" alt="" width="191" height="41" />
This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-110821" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-855x107.png" alt="" width="191" height="24" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-855x107.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-2000x251.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-385x48.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-768x96.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-1536x193.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-2048x257.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 191px) 100vw, 191px" />
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-110820" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-855x428.png" alt="" width="179" height="90" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-855x428.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-2000x1000.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-385x193.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-768x384.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-1536x768.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-2048x1024.png 2048w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-800x400.png 800w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 179px) 100vw, 179px" />

Watch a  conversation with Leslie Wilson, Academic Curator and Director of Research Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, as she explores the complexities of South African photojournalist Ernest Cole&#8217;s documentary work in the United States.
<a style="color: black;" href="https://vimeo.com/showcase/2905962/video/1057327290" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="background-black">Watch Video</button></a>

Leslie Wilson: Is This the America of Ebony?

https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/17135753/THEA5472-smaller-scaled.jpg

https://vimeo.com/showcase/2905962/video/1057327290

Black-and-white photograph of a group of people, mostly white and one Black woman and young Black girl, standing behind a barricade

Ernest Cole. Midtown Manhattan.

In the final years of the 1400s, printed representations of European cities began to appear more frequently. Some of the images seemingly place the viewer on a hill, looking across the countryside to the city. Others offer a bird’s-eye view. Mia is fortunate to own some of the great landmarks in the development of these trends, such as The Nuremburg Chronicle (1493), which illustrates dozens of cities, and Jacopo de Barbari’s View of Venice (1500), which shows the island city on an imposing scale and in minute detail. As the ancestors of Google Earth and other mapping apps, they offer an aesthetic and civic experience lacking in their electronic counterparts.

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.

Colorful scene of mountains in blue, green, teal, purple, and orange with a bright pink sky