The painting landed in Minneapolis like a pope: Titian’s The Temptation of Christ, purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in late 1925. A Titian. There were less than a dozen Titians in America at the time. Now we—a 10-year-old museum in a part of the country that was a forested frontier just a couple  ...

Sonya Clark didn’t plan to be ubiquitous in Minnesota. It just happened, one invitation after another, such that she will have artworks in three Twin Cities exhibitions this winter, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, at All My Relations gallery, and in Mia’s upcoming “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” survey of  ...

Édouard Manet’s Le Fumeur (The Smoker) was unveiled at Mia in 1968 by Anthony Clark, then director of the museum. A solitary person with a pipe was sort of a 19th-century meme, and  Manet made various drawings and etchings of his subject, a  comfortably bewhiskered man believed to be his neighbor, that have circulated widely—they’re in the collections of  ...

They were among the first works to enter Mia’s collection, four large-scale female allegories of the Four Elements (from left to right): Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Mrs. C. J. (Ella) Martin had spotted the cartoons, that is, designs drawn to scale, at the gallery of Edmund Brooks, a Minneapolis dealer specializing in rare books, and she bought the set expressly to give  ...

It’s hard to know what these schoolchildren—boys standing, girls on the floor—thought of the Charleston Drawing Room and the adjacent dining room, moved to Mia from one of the finest colonial mansions in Charleston, South Carolina. The period rooms opened in 1931 as a memorial from the Bell family. Judging from the setup and the clothing, this photo was  ...

As part of Mia’s Living Rooms initiative, a reanimating of its period rooms, the Queen Anne space has been transformed into a Jane Austen Reading Room. There are chairs, tables, and shelves full of books by Austen and her contemporaries for visitors to sit and read, like Austen famously did in her brother’s Chawton House library.  ...

As part of Mia’s Living Rooms initiative, a reanimating of its period rooms, the Queen Anne space has been transformed into a Jane Austen Reading Room. There are chairs, tables, and shelves full of books by Austen and her contemporaries for visitors to sit and read, like Austen famously did in her brother’s Chawton House library.  ...

In real life, Gina Heath King is like many other Minnesotans, going to Vikings games, talking about the weather, and digging into her graduate studies. But when she enters the fictional world of Jane Austen, she becomes a bit more decorous. She straightens up. Her mind reaches back, and as she tries to explain why Austen’s stories  ...

In real life, Gina Heath King is like many other Minnesotans, going to Vikings games, talking about the weather, and digging into her graduate studies. But when she enters the fictional world of Jane Austen, she becomes a bit more decorous. She straightens up. Her mind reaches back, and as she tries to explain why Austen’s stories  ...

In the Performing Arts Archive on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, there are 19 boxes of material relating to Gertrude Lippincott (left): correspondence, newsletters, clippings, photographs, and three audio cassette tapes. More of her papers are kept at the Minnesota Historical Society and the New York Public Library, and every year the  ...