You’ve heard of selfies, those cell-phone self-portraits full of awkward arm angles and blurry, presumably beautiful backdrops. Now the trend is bookshelfies: posing in front of your book collection to demonstrate your analog intellectualism. Printed books, after all, are now increasingly viewed as rare art objects. And in the age of sharing and curating, people  ...

Recently, to celebrate the launch of MIA Stories, our crack social-media team put together a bit of a New Yorker-style caption contest on Twitter and Facebook for a few artworks around here that are just begging for thought bubbles. We got plenty, including at least one haiku. Here, a few of our favorites. Douglas Volk’s  ...

Recently, to celebrate the launch of MIA Stories, our crack social-media team put together a bit of a New Yorker-style caption contest on Twitter and Facebook for a few artworks around here that are just begging for thought bubbles. We got plenty, including at least one haiku. Here, a few of our favorites. Douglas Volk’s  ...

It’s the epicenter of sushi, the slimy storehouse of prized tuna and pie-eyed tourists in Tokyo: the Tsukiji fish market. And it will shortly be moving from its cosmopolitan locale to a climate-controlled distribution center on a manufactured island, according to a story in the New York Times. The world’s largest fish market, Tsukiji occupies  ...

It’s the epicenter of sushi, the slimy storehouse of prized tuna and pie-eyed tourists in Tokyo: the Tsukiji fish market. And it will shortly be moving from its cosmopolitan locale to a climate-controlled distribution center on a manufactured island, according to a story in the New York Times. The world’s largest fish market, Tsukiji occupies  ...

Local musical gem Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles will be playing a special concert at the MIA on Thursday, September 26. Regulars on the Twin Cities’ venue circuit, why are they so excited to play at the museum? I asked leading lady Lucy to find out… Katie Hill: What makes performing in the MIA  ...

A colleague and I recently returned from a week in Latvia, a trip made possible thanks to a wonderful benefactor who has invested in MIA staff innovation. And a week hardly makes me an expert on this Baltic nation, almost continuously occupied—by Russians, Germans, Swedes, Soviets—for the better part of 1,000 years. Still, what struck  ...

I recently popped in to visit the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. It was a pilgrimage of sorts, as I’d been intrigued by rave reviews of the museum and the fact that in 2011 it won the Kenneth Hudson European Museum of the Year award for “the most unusual, daring and, perhaps, controversial  ...

There have been a lot of cameras on the museum roof recently. Not to keep an eye on the pigeons. Or even for the great skyline view, though it doesn’t hurt. It’s our bees—some 200,000 at their peak—that have attracted the likes of Andrew Zimmern (his Appetite for Life segment airs October 1 on MSN.com).  ...

Ordinarily, museums don’t encourage visitors to take super-high-resolution photographs of the art with the goal of exact replication. But for 10 days, through September 17, a contingent of five technicians from Japan, two reps from the Kyoto Culture Association, and a project manager are hunkered in the MIA’s Visual Resources area doing exactly that. When  ...