Blog
Fresh perspectives on art, life, and current events. From deep dives to quick takes to insightful interviews, it’s the museum in conversation. Beyond the walls. Outside the frame. Around the world.
The Latest
The surrealist in love: What Chagall's wedding portrait says about artists and marriage
Artists are supposedly bad at marriage. The evidence: Picasso, to use one word. Hemingway, to use another. Elizabeth Taylor, if you just want to drop the mic. There’s an entire movie (and a pretty good one at that) devoted to Picasso’s destructive infidelity, and of course an entire industry devoted to picking through the carcasses of artists’ ...
The surrealist in love: What Chagall’s wedding portrait says about artists and marriage
Artists are supposedly bad at marriage. The evidence: Picasso, to use one word. Hemingway, to use another. Elizabeth Taylor, if you just want to drop the mic. There’s an entire movie (and a pretty good one at that) devoted to Picasso’s destructive infidelity, and of course an entire industry devoted to picking through the carcasses of artists’ ...
NewsFlash: As the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" turns 50 today, a reflection on Mia's Dave Muller show
It’s impossible to hear the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the way it was heard when it was released, in 1967, 50 years ago today. Filled with instruments rarely heard in British rock music, such as the sitar, and technical experiments including double-tracked vocals and variable tape speeds, it was like nothing that had been ...
NewsFlash: As the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” turns 50 today, a reflection on Mia’s Dave Muller show
It’s impossible to hear the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the way it was heard when it was released, in 1967, 50 years ago today. Filled with instruments rarely heard in British rock music, such as the sitar, and technical experiments including double-tracked vocals and variable tape speeds, it was like nothing that had been ...
NewsFlash: Should Damien Hirst have copied an Ife head?
Damien Hirst’s popular show at this year’s Venice Biennale, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” is an underwater fantasy about objects found after a fictional shipwreck. It’s his first exhibition of new work in 10 years. Some critics had begun to wonder if he’d run out of ideas. The answer might depend on your worldview. One of the sculptures ...
Social science: How to recreate an Enlightenment-era "science party"
About two years ago, I was conducting research at the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis when Mia curator Nicole LaBouff approached me with a question about solar microscopes. She was planning an exhibition called “Science and Sociability in 1700s England,” now open in the Queen Anne and Georgian period rooms at Mia. The Georgian Drawing Room is arranged as though for a “scientific ...
Social science: How to recreate an Enlightenment-era “science party”
About two years ago, I was conducting research at the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis when Mia curator Nicole LaBouff approached me with a question about solar microscopes. She was planning an exhibition called “Science and Sociability in 1700s England,” now open in the Queen Anne and Georgian period rooms at Mia. The Georgian Drawing Room is arranged as though for a “scientific ...
A comics expert explains the secret pleasures of Mia's Guillermo del Toro show
Somehow, over the years, Rurik Hover wound up with 85 boxes of comic books. Now he’s starting to sell—”culling out the crap,” as he puts it. And not just his comics but other people’s, too. He’s gone from a fan to a collector to a dealer, a cycle that has made him something of an expert ...
A comics expert explains the secret pleasures of Mia’s Guillermo del Toro show
Somehow, over the years, Rurik Hover wound up with 85 boxes of comic books. Now he’s starting to sell—”culling out the crap,” as he puts it. And not just his comics but other people’s, too. He’s gone from a fan to a collector to a dealer, a cycle that has made him something of an expert ...
Why immigrants value art: Stories from Mia’s "Global Movements" artists
On May 11, Mia opens Global Movements, a four-day series of programs on immigration, migration, and the arts. Among the presenters are several Twin Cities artists, and we asked them how art has been important in their lives and work. Here are some of their responses. Cy Thao A Hmong painter and former state legislator whose epic 50-painting series The Hmong Migration ...