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Fresh perspectives on art, life, and current events. From deep dives to quick takes to insightful interviews, it’s the museum in conversation. Beyond the walls. Outside the frame. Around the world.
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A life in photos: MIA visitors share their #tbt images
The images in the current exhibition “100+: A Photograph for Every Year of the MIA.” drawn from the museum’s collection, chronicle the century since the MIA was founded. Visitors were invited to share their own photographs and the stories behind them. Here are a few of these #tbt submissions, flashbacks to meaningful moments in their ...
Once at MIA: Vikings pride
A lot of people didn’t think this ship would float. The Hjemkomst was built on the prairie, for one thing, in northwest Minnesota, far from any ocean or even a respectable lake. In fact, it was built in a former potato warehouse in Hawley, near Moorhead, by a junior-high guidance counselor named Bob Asp. It took ...
Once at MIA: Art on the move
In 1967, a semi-tractor trailer was loaded with a curated, museum-quality exhibition and sent out on the highways and byways of Minnesota. Occasionally, it would return to port, refill with art, and hit the blacktop again. Its 1968–69 exhibition of early American painters made 48 stops across the state, including the Red Lake Indian Reservation and Stillwater State ...
How old are they? A new website guesses the ages of famous faces in our collection—with revealing results
This past week, everyone’s favorite online distraction has been How-old.net, which quickly guesses the age and gender of people in images you submit. It was created by Microsoft engineers to showcase the algorithms they’ve built, like face detection software. But it raises at least as many questions about our expectations of aging and gender, and ...
A Mother's Day tribute from "The Habsburgs": The story of Maria Theresa, Europe's mother-in-law
She was a “lean in” kind of woman. Mother of 16 children and ruler of most of Europe. And if she didn’t exactly have to fight for everything she got, Maria Theresa did have to fight to keep it. A portrait of Maria Theresa as a 10-year-old girl, in 1727, hangs in “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s ...
A Mother’s Day tribute from “The Habsburgs”: The story of Maria Theresa, Europe’s mother-in-law
She was a “lean in” kind of woman. Mother of 16 children and ruler of most of Europe. And if she didn’t exactly have to fight for everything she got, Maria Theresa did have to fight to keep it. A portrait of Maria Theresa as a 10-year-old girl, in 1727, hangs in “The Habsburgs: Rarely Seen Masterpieces from Europe’s ...
Once at MIA: Wrestling with Depression
“In troubled times such as these,” the MIA lamented in 1931, “there is a tendency to discard, as unnecessary luxuries, many things which seem essential to life in prosperous days. Interest in books and music and art is packed away with the party dress.” The Great Depression was on, though it wasn’t clear how long ...
The lions in springtime: A floral tribute to Ella Pillsbury Crosby is an Art in Bloom surprise
The lions guarding the front steps of the MIA have never moved. Never flinched. Never roared. But this week, they bloomed. The duo sprouted floral manes, courtesy of Art and Flowers Design Studio, as the MIA’s latest birthday year surprise. Giant poms of dianthus—some 200 blooms in each ball—loop through the lions’ paws, counterweights to ...
Once at MIA: The tiny boxer
They could have been playing stickball. Or whittling. Or pushing a hoop around with a branch. Or whatever kids did for fun in the 1920s. But no, they were at the Minneapolis School of Art at the crack of dawn drawing a mini pugilist, dwarfed by the platform he’s perched on yet ready to punch ...
Once at MIA: A master works
You can bifurcate American ceramics, like time itself, into two very different halves: before and after Warren Mackenzie. Because a half century ago he turned the medium into art, despite his protests ever since that he’s done nothing of the sort. From his Stillwater studio he would turn out 50 to 200 pots a day. ...