Lee Coren always seems to be moving. Her social media is filled with scenes of foreign cities, azure oceans, and—her favorite escape—rocky deserts. It’s hard to see when she has time to work. Yet her travels, in fact, inform her work: subtly striking, environmentally friendly handbags, backpacks, and wallets—many featuring landscapes photographed during her trips. Constructed  ...

Heading far west to paint the Grand Canyon in 1911 and 1912, Arthur Wesley Dow was, as usual, thinking about the Far East. For 20 years, Dow had applied the forms and harmonies of Asian art to small New England scenes, and now he had to wonder whether the trusty principles of Japonisme could help  ...

Lucretia may be hungry. She appears to eye the plates of food before her with something like regret, the disappointment of knowing she will soon be leaving this world without having stuck around for dessert. The guests, for their part, don’t seem to notice Lucretia at all. They are partying. And they are in the  ...

For years, the Hammering Man didn’t get a break unless he broke down. He broke down a lot, actually, given the repetitive movement of his arm and hammer—up, down, up, down, day after day, year after year. His motor often wore out, and Bill Skodje, Mia’s senior preparator and exhibition designer, would have to repair  ...

Linnea Oliver, who makes jewelry under the studio name Bird of Virtue, has a reliable way of jumpstarting her creative process: She heads to the beach. “The beach is so linear, so austere, that there doesn’t appear to be a lot going on there,” she says, “but in that sense it’s also a blank canvas.” She  ...

If you haven’t been to the Fountain Court at Mia to see the Blue Wash tapestries by Helena Hernmarck, now is the time. The four, 20-foot-long tapestries are due to come down in late July, and it could be years before they are on view again. During the year that these  ...

He seems so innocent, even naive, though there is a good explanation for this. Mia acquired Chac Mool in 1947 from a respected art dealer, believing he was a masterpiece of ancient mesoamerican sculpture, in the manner of other Chac Mool sculptures found in the Chichen Itza ruins in Mexico.  He became a prominent fixture at the  ...

Mia’s period rooms may seem like time capsules, settings preserved in a museum as though their owners have simply stepped away. But in reality they are illusions, a mix of old and new, fact and fiction. As part of our Living Rooms project, Mia commissioned Anthony Marchetti, a Minneapolis-based photographer, to visit the original sites  ...

Sam Maslon grew up on the north side of Minneapolis in the early 1900s, when the neighborhood was a Jewish enclave. His family was poor, but he managed to go to Harvard Law School on a scholarship. He rented a room in the home of law professor Felix Frankfurter, a future justice of the U.S.  ...

A hundred years ago, they were a numerous if unusual species. Starkly beautiful, strangely familiar. Of this world and yet not completely; they seemed to inhabit a parallel universe. They were, as Mia’s first director, Joseph Breck, put it in a 1914 speech, “pale ghosts of reality.” They were everywhere in Mia in the museum’s early decades, from the  ...