By Tim Gihring This is a transcript of The Object podcast, episode eight, first broadcast in April 2019. You can listen, subscribe, and find all-new episodes here, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Assassins are everywhere in art museums. Depictions of assassins, I mean, not like some ninja actually hiding in a suit of armor.  ...

By Jennifer Komar Olivarez Mia’s Purcell-Cutts House, in the East Isles neighborhood of Minneapolis, is one of a kind. It was designed by William Gray Purcell and George Grant Elmslie specifically for Purcell and his wife, Edna, and their two sons. But it was also informed by Purcell’s desire to create a home for the  ...

By Tim Gihring Erika Lee’s grandfather came to the United States from China in 1918, sailing into the harbor of San Francisco. He was 16, a farmer’s son. The Chinese Exclusion Act that was designed to stop him and all other Chinese immigrants, except for students, teachers, merchants, diplomats, and tourists, had been in place  ...

By Tim Gihring As long as there have been people, people have moved. Left home for someplace new, for better or for worse. But there have never been so many people on the move who would rather have stayed—who have been forcibly displaced—as there are today: nearly 70 million worldwide, according to an estimate from the  ...

Why do we care so much about the wildfires that ravaged Australia? Most of us have never been to the continent, let alone describe the ecologies impacted by the natural disaster, beyond “cute, cuddly” kangaroos and koalas. In contrast to natural disasters closer to home, we care about Australia because we feel like we know  ...

The hamlet of Gee’s Bend is in the Black Belt of Alabama, a reference to the rich dark soil that enabled the region’s cotton plantations and to the thousands of enslaved African Americans who worked them. After emancipation, Gee’s Bend fell into a cycle of sharecropping, debt, and poverty. A dam built in 1962 flooded  ...

By Tamira Amin, Learning Innovation Fellow at Mia Forced migration and its horrors are never too far from my mind. My extended family is strung out across four continents. Couples have married and elders have been laid to rest without reunion. My parents fled violence in Ethiopia over 30 years ago and I have yet  ...

A few years ago, a curator at Mia asked the museum’s library to find a specific edition of an out-of-print book from 1902. He was preparing an exhibition on anti-Semitism and was intrigued by the illustrations in the book, called The Spirit of the Ghetto, about the Lower East Side of Manhattan when it was the  ...

Artist Martha Rosler wanted to bring the war home. As the Vietnam War escalated half a world away, she wanted Americans to recognize their proximity to it, and perhaps even their complicity with it. She did just that in the work that appears in “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975,” an exhibition  ...

On a Saturday morning in late October, about a dozen kids and their families gathered at Mia for a discussion of civic engagement. What is it? Why is it important? And, perhaps most curiously, why are we talking about it in a museum? It’s a program called Family Conversations — a collaboration between Mia Family  ...