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  ...

The story of the Purcell-Cutts House windows is kind of a race to the finish line. The house was supposed to be completed in time for architect William Gray Purcell and his family to move in by Christmas 1913. The exterior construction was just wrapping up in the fall, and the house had to be sealed up before Minnesota’s  ...

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,  ...

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  ...