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  ...

In 2003, Geoffrey Warner created his first weeHouse, a prefabricated, 336-square-foot retreat for a violinist, delivered by semi to an off-the-grid site near Pepin, Wisconsin. A Dwell reader’s dream, it quickly became an icon of stripped-down modern living. He and his team at Alchemy Architects, based in St. Paul, have since built some three dozen  ...

The first dead person I ever saw in daylight was a young boy lying next to a road in Tanzania. It was early morning and we were driving south on the country’s main highway when I saw the crows fly up out of a ditch. I craned my neck to see what they’d been eating.  ...

This week, the Friends of the Institute will host the 33rd annual Art in Bloom festival at Mia. It may well be 75 degrees outside. But the first AIB, back in 1983, introduced flowers into the museum after a spate of particularly long, snowy winters at a time when winter was much colder and longer in  ...

The Kenyan moonlight—serious moonlight—revealed a zebra. Then another. And another. A herd had congregated along the perimeter of Nairobi National Park. This was just the beginning of a cultural exchange between a group from Mia and our Nairobi partners in “Girls Design the World: Supporting Green Communities with STEAM,” and we were already inspired. Since  ...

By the early 1970s, Mia was getting claustrophobic. It hadn’t built any new galleries since the 1920s, and, like so much of the ’70s, was suffocating from excess. Witness the wallpaper. This photo was taken in March 1972 at the groundbreaking of the museum’s new expansion, which would open in fall 1974. A minimalist addition designed by  ...

Andrea Swensson, who hosts The Local Show on MPR’s 89.3 The Current and writes its music blog, launched a podcast last September called The O.K. Show. It explores the intersection of mental health and creativity, the emotions that artists express in music, and how music, in turn, can impact those emotions. It’s candid and conversational,  ...

Harriet Goodhue Hosmer was one of the leading female sculptors of the 1800s, possibly the only woman of her time to gain complete financial independence through her art. Like Rosa Bonheur, another highly successful and unorthodox woman artist, Hosmer was encouraged by her father to pursue art and physical activity—she was a sickly child—and traveled west  ...

Rosa Bonheur was one of a kind—the most renowned female artist of her day and fiercely independent, dressing like a man in defiance of Victorian-era gender roles. Most of her work featured animals—lions, horses, goats. She frequented slaughterhouses to better understand the anatomy and emotions of animals. “I became an animal painter because I loved to move among  ...