Five minutes of silence. On a warm August morning in the Hamptons, outside New York City, I was sitting on the floor at The Watermill Center, meditating. This time of year, the Center is abuzz with small teams of people working with the center’s founder—renowned theater director and artist Robert Wilson—to shape their project, be it opera,  ...

Did your response include any women artists of color? These are the questions leading the charge for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ international Women’s History Month social media campaign, #5womenartists. Mia is one of more than 300 organizations around the world participating in this effort to increase gender parity in the arts by sharing  ...

On January 1, 1912, the empress dowager of China signed the abdication papers that ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule—including the Qing Dynasty that encompassed her own family, so evocatively depicted in Mia’s current exhibition “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson.” China became a republic. And the last  ...

It’s a sartorial tale as old as time: I need to carry some stuff, and I’m not wearing any pockets. People are always navigating the gap between form and function, evolving the ways in which our clothing can be both practical and representative of who we are as a person.  And it was no different during the Edo  ...

Robert Wilson is not known for his words. His early theatrical masterpiece “Einstein on the Beach,” created with Philip Glass, is five hours long and has almost no real dialogue. His first major theater works, in the 1960s and ’70s, were completely silent. Last week, he gave a sold-out talk with Mia director Kaywin Feldman and  ...

The history of human existence is also the history of infectious disease. The plague killed 25 to 50 percent of Europe’s population in just a few years in the 1300s. The flu, which we contend with every winter, killed up to a fifth of the global population between 1918 and 1920. This year’s flu season  ...