Mia is Home

 

When Mia reopened, after closing temporarily to slow the spread of the coronavirus, it took a while for Lisa Arnold to feel comfortable returning. The St. Paul artist hadn’t been out much in seven months— not to a restaurant, or a store, or a friend’s home. The closure of the museum had been particularly tough. “Art is how I connect with myself and the world,” she says.Then she took the plunge. She arrived at Mia at 10 a.m., walked up to the galleries, and cried. “Mia felt like a beacon, the lighthouse on the shore,” she says. “Like an exhale I hadn’t felt in half a year.”

Now she returns nearly every Friday. The museum is the one place she feels safe to meet up with friends. There’s plenty of space. You can move around. The ventilation is good. It feels, she says, “like home.”

The museum even satisfies her urge to travel. Ordinarily, she and her husband would be exploring someplace far from home. Now they explore the galleries, immersing themselves in art from Asia and Africa and Europe. “You can travel the world in half an hour,” she says, “and still feel safe.”

This is how she will keep going. “Mia is filling all of my needs,” she says, including perhaps the biggest one: the need to know that life will go on. “This is culture and it’s always going to be here,” she says of the museum. “It feels like a promise being kept by the art—we’ll believe in you if you keep believing in us, and we’ll get through this together.”