Visitors to “Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan,” on view at Mia through September 11, will be continuously astonished by the diversity of materials that makers across the Japanese archipelago have fashioned into garments. Some materials make a lot of sense: a linen-like textile woven from banana plant fiber sounds perfect  ...

If you were an Ainu robe maker, how would your design process begin? Would you draw swirls and biomorphic shapes on your precious trade cottons? Or would you just start cutting? Would you opt for embroidery floss with POP!, thinking “That red thread really works, especially if I make crawling oho  ...

Working in an art museum, you often see just as much art on the visitors’ skin as you do on the wall. I’ve always loved looking at tattoos as art, so I talked to local tattoo artist Emi Nijiya for this Pride Month blog post because they own Jackalope, an all  ...

One-hundred thirty-three years ago, on a day in late November, Vincent van Gogh reached for his freshly painted canvas. It was during his self-imposed stay at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France, where his windows overlooked a grove of craggy olive trees with a mountainous backdrop. That  ...

On July 15, 1944, a few weeks after her 15th birthday, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at  ...

In 1966, Gabriel Weisberg and Yvonne Herzog met over a game of ping-pong on a transatlantic crossing. Gabriel was an American art-history student, on his way to France to work on his PhD dissertation; Yvonne was a Swiss social worker, heading home to Geneva after a year in Canada. By the  ...

Among the earnest images of farmers, weavers, and other redoubtable peasants in “Reflections on Reality: Drawings and Paintings from the Weisberg Collection,” Mia’s quietly alluring show of Realist art, is a bored-looking boy in a blue shirt: Yves Österlund, age 9. Österlund was the son of artists who worried he was too undisciplined for art  ...

Among the ghosts and the UFOs, the seers and the somnambulists, the Ouija Boards and something called a Spiritoscope, now on view at Mia in the exhibition “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art,” the séance dress of Louise Parke is strikingly personal. Here is a handmade cotton cloak, worn by  ...

It was time for a change. We knew it. The museum knew it. The world knew it. Recently, we changed Mia’s Native Art galleries. In our hearts and minds, as curators during this time of reckoning for museums all over the globe, we knew that our responsibility  ...

I am a fourth-year student at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, studying Management Information Systems at the Carlson School of Management. I was given the opportunity to intern at Mia through Genesys Works, a non-profit organization that equips youth from under-represented communities with the technical and business abilities to succeed in  ...