Basket weaving gets a bad rap. Baskets are “decorative arts and functional objects,” says Nicole LaBouff, associate curator of textiles at Mia. “Because of that, they tend to be overlooked and downplayed as women’s work, or ‘craft.’” The exhibition “Unexpected Turns: Women Artists and the Making of American Basket Weaving Traditions,”  ...

In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted in Buenos Aires by agents of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. He was interrogated, drugged, and put on a plane to Jerusalem, where he stood trial nearly a year later for orchestrating the deaths of millions of Jews in the Nazis’ so-called Final Solution. The  ...

When Cole Rogers and Carla McGrath founded the Highpoint Center for Printmaking, in Minneapolis, in 2001, the plan was always to focus on three things: education, community access, and the “pro shop,” where prominent artists could work with Rogers, a master printer, to see their visions roll off the presses and  ...

Won’t You Celebrate with Me won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my  ...

What is “Islamic” about Islamic art? Is there even such a thing as Islamic art? These questions are increasingly debated in the museum world and in academia. But they are not merely academic. Starting on September 23, Mia is opening two new “Islamic art” galleries on the museum’s second floor. One  ...

On March 24, 2020, the day before Minnesota’s shelter-in-place order, Piotr Szyhalski went into his basement studio, took out a sheet of paper, some ink, and a brush, and began drawing. When he finished, he had an image of a severed head, plants sprouting from the eye sockets, with the hand-lettered  ...

By Ian Karp In 1988, after a life of relocation, the punk artist, writer, teacher, activist, and squatter Fly Orr—known as Fly—landed on New York City’s Lower East Side. Soon after, she moved into an East Village squat (an illegally occupied building, usually neglected, vacant, or abandoned) and became involved with the community art space  ...

(An audio version of this story can be heard in season 2 of Mia’s The Object podcast, as Unspeakable Love: The Rebel Who Went Too Far.) On the night of February 11, 1873, Simeon Solomon is arrested. He’s 32 years old. He’s handsome, with dark red curly hair and a short wispy  ...

I began working at Mia in 2018, specifically because I felt its free admission made it an accessible museum, so that anyone who wants to visit can visit. Since then, I’ve realized that financial access is only one layer of accessibility, and what is represented inside also impacts the way visitors  ...

In a fast-paced and divisive world, we can be quick to make judgments. In fact, we often make decisions based on biases or first impressions. At Mia, we believe that art has the power to open up our minds, introducing us to the stories of people across space and time. And  ...