Just as the MIA opens Inscribe These Words, an exhibition drawn from the Judaica collection about writing the word of God, comes this news from the New York Times: leaders of the largest branch of Judaism, the Reform movement, are initiating a reinvention of the bar and bat mitzvah process. The movement stems from a  ...

In the late 1990s, I got a job working in the darkroom at the MIA. My single Sisyphean task was to make seven black-and-white prints of every object in the museum for its various archives. The reward was a chance to peer into obscure corners of the collection. I was particularly taken with the work  ...

Of late, one of the questions I am asked most frequently about India is, “Is it safe?” As a woman who has spent nearly eight continuous years either visiting or living in India, I am saddened by the question. As a result of my travels there, I know much more about the country’s millennium-old stone  ...

Of late, one of the questions I am asked most frequently about India is, “Is it safe?” As a woman who has spent nearly eight continuous years either visiting or living in India, I am saddened by the question. As a result of my travels there, I know much more about the country’s millennium-old stone  ...

Welcome to MIA Stories. The unveiling. Every week here you’ll find new exclusive behind-the-scenes stories and photos. Stories from Minnesota artists and leaders about the artwork that inspires them. Stories that connect current events to incredible art in the collection. Strange but true stories. Travel stories. Your stories. Why are we doing this? Tell you  ...

I recently came across an astonishing figure: Of the 14,298 food products introduced into supermarkets in 1995, a mere 12 percent were successful. This is where focus groups can help, and they’re now a standard consumer research tool informing everything from political campaigns to corn flakes. Museums benefit from focus groups, too, as they’re an opportunity  ...

“The Cat’s Paw,” which Sir Edwin Henry Landseer’s 1824 painting rather painfully illustrates (on view in gallery G321), was a popular 17th-century fable about a cunning monkey who persuaded a cat to retrieve some chestnuts from a fire. A “cat’s paw” came to mean an easily duped person—a sucker. Now technology has enabled an even  ...

Nothing is sacred anymore. There is no taboo that hasn’t been broken, no religion that hasn’t been ridiculed, no god that hasn’t been deposed. The only thing sacred now, supposedly, is our right to keep nothing sacred. And yet, on a personal level, we know this isn’t true. As explored in the MIA’s new exhibition,  ...

Nothing is sacred anymore. There is no taboo that hasn’t been broken, no religion that hasn’t been ridiculed, no god that hasn’t been deposed. The only thing sacred now, supposedly, is our right to keep nothing sacred. And yet, on a personal level, we know this isn’t true. As explored in the MIA’s new exhibition,  ...

1) Adieu to the unfriendly Frenchman? The gruff Gallic waiter and the petty Parisian hotelier loom as large in the tourist imagination as the Eiffel Tower. Who cares if they’re as unreal as Tintin? The Paris tourism board, that’s who. It’s distributed tens of thousands of brochures called “Do You Speak Touriste?” to cafes, hotels,  ...