Andrea Carlson wasn’t sure the museum would go for it. After all, as she puts it, the participants and collaborators in Let: an act of reverse incorporation are “kicking in the front door of historic institutional power.” Carlson, who grew up in Minnesota and now lives in Chicago, has long drawn on her Anishinaabe (Ojibwe),  ...

“Well, he’s never gonna be president now…that’s one less thing to worry about.” Thomas Jefferson’s taunting of his rival in the hit musical Hamilton has reverberated through the end of this never-ending election season, along with serious questions about the fitness of candidates and political traditions. And it’s prompted the Mia staffers in the museum’s  ...

Lady Tashat had roommates at first, fellow mummies, perhaps three or five altogether. They almost certainly didn’t know each other in life, but in death they were inseparable. In the late 1800s, mummies, statues, and other ancient objects were flowing out of Egyptian digs to Europe and America, to museums and millionaires. The director of the  ...

He entered my room quietly. I was at my desk. He closed the door behind him. It was just the two of us. He carried a book in his hand. He said, “How are you?” I did the polite thing. We had a conversation. In the light from my desk, he was handsome, this dorm  ...

The Minneapolis Society for the Blind was touring Mia in October 1951 when they stopped in front of the museum’s ancient Assyrian relief and laid hands on it. The relief, being a relief, is perfectly suited to tactile appreciation. It was carved from stone more than eight centuries BCE, one of many such panels found in  ...

On September 9, in a suburb of San Francisco, 119 people gathered at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge to dine on Peking duck, bird’s nest soup, and other classic Chinese dishes. Most of the diners were Minnesotans. Kevin Smith, the president of the Minnesota Orchestra, rose to speak. “Who would have thought that this little group from Minnesota  ...

They were sixth-grade students from the old Hawthorne School on the north side of Minneapolis, on a field trip to Mia sponsored by the Junior League, and they had every right to be surprised. It was the spring of 1956, and the field trip was called Eyes on the East—at the time, Americans certainly were  ...

Thomas Moran came to the United States with his family when he was 7. They came from northwest England, the blackened heart of the Industrial Revolution, anchored by textile mills that employed Moran’s father and many relatives before him. Their town was among the bleakest spots: “ruinous and miserable,” according to one account, its main  ...

Gustav Klimt liked to vacation along the Attersee, a picturesque lake east of Salzburg, near the Austrian Alps. For Klimt, who spent most of his time painting in Vienna, these forays into nature were restorative. He rose early and painted into the evening, stopping at intervals to eat, swim, nap, or row. The locals who saw him  ...

It’s difficult to know what the teacher, identified only as Mrs. L.C. Harris, was telling her pupils. That the chess set in Mia’s Charleston Drawing Room was made in China in the late 1700s? That it was carved from ivory, in a time before elephants were endangered? That the piece she’s holding was known as an Elephant Castle,  ...