It was my favorite painting at Mia when I was a kid: The Birthday Party, by the American artist John Singer Sargent. I looked for it whenever I visited the museum with my parents or on a field trip. The subject would captivate any child, but for me the image encapsulated what it would  ...

Dave Muller owns a lot of records. He assembled the soundtrack to his life many years ago—a roomful of records filed alphabetically—and he keeps supplementing it. (“The A’s start here,” he said on a tour of the shelves, then walked down the hall a bit. “The Beatles start about here.”) For a brief period in the pre-digital  ...

Rita Mehta had worked for Target for seven years—touring factories abroad, learning about sustainable sourcing, assessing product quality from Asia—when she realized she wanted to do the opposite of all that. She wanted to rediscover America—American-made products—specifically for women. Guides to men’s goods had already swung toward American brands; Mehta would do the same for women. She  ...

In its hundred-year history, Mia has hosted a number of royals. Early on, they hailed from Europe: the queen of Romania, in 1926, and the crown prince of Sweden that same year. More recently, however, the monarchs have come from Africa. On November 30, the King of Kings for the entire Congo Basin paid a visit  ...

“Resistance, Protest, Resilience,” an exhibition of about 60 photographs connecting the protest movements of the 20th century to today’s political, social, and racial conflicts, opened at Mia on November 5. My interest in images of protesters can be traced to my three-year exploration of the avant-garde art and photography of 1960s and 1970s Japan for  ...

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. —Sitting Bull, 1875 In the Hunkpapa land of Sitting Bull, history is always being made. On a warm, sunny day in August,  ...

Don’t be surprised if the most popular image to emerge from “Martin Luther: Art and the Reformation,” Mia’s comprehensive look at the objects and art behind Luther’s 16th-century revolt against the Catholic Church, is not of the pulpit from which he preached his last sermons, or the life-size model of his  ...

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  ...