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  ...

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  ...