June 14, 1969, seems to have been a warm, sunny day in Minneapolis. Which was lucky, given that the MIA chose to uncrate Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair, perhaps her most famous painting, outside the museum. It’s not the usual protocol—then or now. But what a wonderfully strange insider experience for the gentleman and young boy  ...

If your Italian fails you while trying to read Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, on display through August 30 at the MIA, it’s not you. Leonardo created his notebook with mirror writing, transcribing his sentences backward and right to left. Yet recognizing the trick behind Leonardo’s coded script requires only the slightest Sherlockian effort compared  ...

By Dan Dennehy, senior photographer and head of Visual Resources at Mia It looks innocent enough: Richard Avedon, the celebrated New York fashion photographer, sitting cross-legged on the gallery floor surrounded by young admirers. But something tells me they are not talking f/stops and Tri-X. It is, after all, the summer of 1970. The counter-culture  ...

This summer, the MIA has Leonardo on the brain. The exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci, the Codex Leicester, and the Creative Mind,” now on display in the Target Galleries, features the master’s original notes and drawings along with contemporary examples of invention and visionary design. But there are links to da Vinci’s life and work throughout  ...

This summer, the MIA has Leonardo on the brain. The exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci, the Codex Leicester, and the Creative Mind,” now on display in the Target Galleries, features the master’s original notes and drawings along with contemporary examples of invention and visionary design. But there are links to da Vinci’s life and work throughout  ...

Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of the band Devo and a prolific composer for film, television, and advertising, is sharing the MIA’s second-floor Target Galleries this summer with Leonardo da Vinci. Both men are known for their fearless inventiveness. Only one of them, as far as we know, wore a conical red hat while stripping the clothes  ...

When the fourth graders in the MIA’s Saturday morning Gallery Club were told they’d be discussing Paul Revere, perhaps the wide-eyed young man on the left with arms folded didn’t expect it would include talk of tea parties. The students had most likely read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s dramatic re-telling “of the midnight ride of Paul  ...

Someone give them a glass of chardonnay. By the 1980s, when this photo was taken at the MIA in the Charleston Drawing Room, the ‘Tute, as people called it then, was grappling with how to dismantle crusty notions of art as an upper-class activity, the museum as sacrosanct, even as its leaders often held exclusive  ...

Someone give them a glass of chardonnay. By the 1980s, when this photo was taken at the MIA in the Charleston Drawing Room, the ‘Tute, as people called it then, was grappling with how to dismantle crusty notions of art as an upper-class activity, the museum as sacrosanct, even as its leaders often held exclusive  ...

Plunging into the MIA’s Target Galleries to see Leonardo da Vinci’s incredible Codex Leicester, on view through August 30, visitors come to a room containing works by a Minnesota boy born five centuries later. The connection might at first appear to be water: the codex pages show Leonardo struggling to understand the properties of water, while  ...