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  ...

The MIA’s period rooms are tucked in the back of the museum’s third-floor galleries, spaces you can walk into and feel enveloped in a “moment in time.” But period rooms change, even after the museum first installs them. The MacFarlane Room has evolved dramatically over the past 40 years, as I came to understand while  ...

The MIA’s period rooms are tucked in the back of the museum’s third-floor galleries, spaces you can walk into and feel enveloped in a “moment in time.” But period rooms change, even after the museum first installs them. The MacFarlane Room has evolved dramatically over the past 40 years, as I came to understand while  ...

Many baby boomers will remember The Family of Man, MoMA’s epic coming-out party for humanistic photography, a voyeur’s view of life on Earth in the decisive postwar moment. It was a cinematic global group hug conceived to illustrate our essential oneness and to soothe a generation anxiously adjusting to the new political order that emerged in the Atomic Age. Its archetypal  ...

By Dan Dennehy, senior photographer and head of Visual Resources at Mia Many baby boomers will remember The Family of Man, MoMA’s epic coming-out party for humanistic photography, a voyeur’s view of life on Earth in the decisive postwar moment. It was a cinematic global group hug conceived to illustrate our essential oneness and to soothe a generation anxiously adjusting to  ...

He looks bemused, the man in the middle, which is often how we react to his own art. He’s Alexander Calder, master of mobiles. And his expression is probably no reflection on the artwork that the guy on the right is solemnly holding up for judgment: Calder was often bemused, “evidently always happy,” as his  ...

Richard Prince never has to prove his point. The photographers whose work he’s accused of appropriating prove it for him nearly every time: He re-photographs their images, adds an almost incidental element or simply takes it out of context, and they complain (or sue) because he makes millions. Imagery, he suggests, is always selling something. Art, at  ...

The MIA was built with a few missing limbs. The original plan more closely resembles Versailles than the museum that was built, and it wasn’t long—about a decade, actually—before the MIA began to crave more room. In 1925, the museum sought to remedy this the same way it began: by throwing a dinner for wealthy  ...

It’s safe to say he was objectified: a hunk of flesh, chiseled and polished. In a museum full of objects, including a few idealized men, he was a living statue. The occasion was the 1985 Rose Fete, an annual public party that the MIA had held since 1959. In the early days, it was organized  ...

Some of the men in the portraits stand straight, their eyes alert. The medals decorating their freshly pressed uniforms shine under the studio lighting. Others seem disinterested in pageantry and pride, their ill-fitted military fatigues hardly adorned at all. One man brandishes an excessive number of medals and ribbons on the pocket over his heart.  ...