One morning, in the 1850s, Harriet Hosmer wakes up and senses someone in the room. It’s 5 o clock. She’s sleeping behind a tall screen that wraps around her bed. The doors to her room are locked. She asks if anyone is there. And suddenly someone is there, now in front of  ...

Mia’s exhibition “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art” is finally coming home for its finale, opening February 19 in the Target Gallery, after debuting last summer at the Toledo Museum of Art, in Ohio, and moving to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. What  ...

Rachel McGarry remembers the moment she began to understand the Holocaust. It was 1981. She was a kid turning cartwheels in a friend’s suburban basement, with the television on. Suddenly, a woman onscreen began recounting her imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps. “It was gripping,” says McGarry, who now realizes she was watching a documentary called  ...

Aaron Dysart has long admired scientists—the way they see the world, and how they explain it. “I adore science,” says the Minneapolis artist. “Artists and scientists are both trained observers, we just go about it really differently with really different outcomes.” Years ago, Dysart was introduced to John Schade, an ecologist  ...

In 1921, the collector Herschel V. Jones gave Mia an antiphonary, a manuscript of sung portions of the Christian Mass and the Divine Office, known as antiphons. It was created in 1439 and used by a community of nuns at the Congregation of Fontissalientis  ...

Art conservation is essential to Mia’s mission, preserving art and allowing it to be shown. Consider supporting the museum’s conservation work in your year-end giving. Learn more about our Art Champions. By Tim Gihring // Kevin and Leela Scattum were meeting with a couple of curators from Mia when Pujan Gandhi, the museum’s Jane Emison  ...

I am honored to share some insights into the miniature curatorial project I’ve curated in Gallery 261 of Mia’s Americas collection. Jill Ahlberg Yohe, Associate Curator of Native American Art, had invited me to curate a case for an upcoming rotation of objects in the galleries. Jill has worked with other talented artists  ...

This year, with supply-chain worries shaking up shopping lists, rest assured the Store at Mia is stuffed with inspired, unique gifts for all ages and interests, online and in person. (Mia members save 10 percent by the way, and you can gift memberships as well.) We asked museum staff—among the store’s best customers—for their top picks. Gretchen  ...

Basket weaving gets a bad rap. Baskets are “decorative arts and functional objects,” says Nicole LaBouff, associate curator of textiles at Mia. “Because of that, they tend to be overlooked and downplayed as women’s work, or ‘craft.’” The exhibition “Unexpected Turns: Women Artists and the Making of American Basket Weaving Traditions,”  ...

In May 1960, Adolf Eichmann was abducted in Buenos Aires by agents of Mossad, Israel’s secret service. He was interrogated, drugged, and put on a plane to Jerusalem, where he stood trial nearly a year later for orchestrating the deaths of millions of Jews in the Nazis’ so-called Final Solution. The  ...