Mia has hosted local art since the very beginning. A look back traces the ongoing dialogue in art circles of what, exactly, local art is. In 1920, about to open its sixth annual local art exhibition, the museum sought to downplay any regionalism, aspiring to something more universal: “The world is so bound together these days that there  ...

On October 18, Mia opens “Delacroix’s Influence: The Rise of Modern Art from Cézanne to van Gogh,” a star-studded painting show with a historical sweep worthy of its protagonist. Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin, Renoir—they’ll all be here, along with the man they’re indebted to, Eugène Delacroix himself. Indeed, Delacroix has already arrived: In another of Mia’s birthday-year surprises, the French  ...

Look closely and you can see the name of Alfred Pillsbury under “lender.” It’s not hard: The cursive writing is clear as a carving, seemingly typed. As Mia’s registrars like to joke now, the primary job requirement for their predecessors long ago was good handwriting. And this person, probably a secretary in the director’s office,  ...

Radios have their own museums these days. But in the late 1940s or early 1950s, when this photo was taken of Mia director Richard Davis chatting with Florence Murphy and Pat Maloney on KUOM, radio was still the best way to communicate just about anything to a wide audience—including art history. Not long after the  ...

Stoic, vigilant, fierce—Mia’s guardian lions watch over the 24th Street entrance of the museum. Today, the lions are a symbol of Mia, featured on postcards, mugs, and prints in the Store at Mia. But prior to 1998, going back to when the museum was built in 1915, their pedestals were unoccupied. In the 1990s, Ella Crosby was looking  ...

Her handbag can talk. It’s a kind of proto-Walkman, a portable record player called Solocast. And it played some of the first audio guides that Mia rented to visitors. Actually, it’s not clear that the arrangement ever got that far. Solocast solicited the museum’s director, who seemed eager to buy. And there’s some correspondence about placing orders.  ...

Lucretia was lost almost as soon as Rembrandt painted her, in 1666. Her portrait wasn’t in the inventory of works remaining in Rembrandt’s house after his death, and if it went to a buyer it wasn’t noted. By the time that Herschel V. Jones came across the painting, in the mid-1920s, it was in the  ...

Hers was not the most familiar name on the guest list (that would be Stephen King or Sally Field or even Meredith Monk). But when Ann Hamilton received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama at the White House on Thursday, no one who knows her work would have been surprised. In her four-decade career as  ...

They called them rap sessions. Free-form conversations. Just you and me, man. No shoes, no problem. This was the late 1960s or early 1970s, in the Print Study room of the museum. And Barbara Kaerwer, coordinator of Mia’s Student Volunteer program, appears perfectly comfortable meeting the teens where they’re at, tucked sideways in a chair,  ...

He holds the bronze owl in a curiously darkened room, posing for a newspaper photographer as though the incredible bird has just hatched before the flash bulbs. Umehara Sueji was a professor of archaeology and a historian of Far East cultures at the University of Kyoto when he came to Mia in January 1954 to  ...