The Store at Mia has been morphing for years now, from something of a postcard and catalogue kiosk into a bonafide boutique, selling the artisanal equivalent of the art on the gallery walls. But the latest redesign pushes the concept of store as living room, object as lifestyle. Gone is the enormous “cash wrap,” or sales counter, that  ...

Among the scenes of royal pageantry and natural disaster in Mia’s colorful look at history painting in the 1700s, “Eyewitness Views: Making History in 18th-Century Europe,” is a wide, detailed view of the Spanish palace at Aranjuez, south of Madrid, in 1756. Red paper lanterns line the gardens and palace walls, and a fleet of pleasure barges  ...

George Morrison was born in 1919 in the now-vanished town of Chippewa City near the Grand Portage Reservation, along Lake Superior in northeastern Minnesota. He was Ojibwe in an era before Native Americans could vote or were even granted citizenship in the United States, one of 12 children in an impoverished family. He was isolated from almost everything but his  ...

On October 23, U.S. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson held a meeting with the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. Two official photos of the session were released the same day, one by Americans, the other by Afghans. At first glance, the photographs appear to capture the same scene; but, if you look more closely, differences  ...

Late in 2016, Mia was given a crazy quilt, the kind comprised of many tiny pieces, usually unrelated and unmatched. It was made around 1882. As the registrar at Mia in charge of processing new art acquisitions, examining every object being considered for addition to our collection, it was my job to look over every detail of the quilt. My thoughts  ...

With its colored lights and uncanny vibrations, Mia’s Divining Rod appears to work the same way its ancient inspiration did in ostensibly helping people find fresh water—with a little magic. In fact, the winning proposal of the third annual 2016 3M Art and Technology Award has an internal logic, powered by the kind of like/dislike feedback we’ve become accustomed to  ...

Some of the first scientific instruments and experiments, like those shown in the “Science and Sociability” exhibition in Mia’s Georgian drawing room (seen above), attempted to understand the nature and origin of electricity. George Adams, Jr.’s friction machine, for instance, from 1780, rotated a glass cylinder against a silk flap to generate and store static electricity. Benjamin Franklin,  ...

A few years ago, Omer Fast was presented with a dilemma. The Israeli-born filmmaker had been invited to create a solo show at the Martin Gropius-Bau, a prominent contemporary art space in Berlin, Germany, where he has lived since 2001. He would have seven galleries to fill—a tall order in any case, but they were also all in a  ...

“Rose is A Rose is A rose is A rose.” Gertrude Stein’s famous line illustrates our propensity for collapsing words and images into universal meanings, identities that need no interpretation. When we see the word “rose,” she suggests, we picture the rose in our mind’s eye. But a Cherokee rose is not  ...

I was a cub reporter at the Minneapolis bureau of the Associated Press when historic flooding inundated the Red River Valley between Minnesota and North Dakota in the spring of 1997. It followed a historically cold winter in Minnesota, full of blizzards and record-low temperatures, that left a massive amount of snow still on the ground in April—when it  ...