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Fresh perspectives on art, life, and current events. From deep dives to quick takes to insightful interviews, it’s the museum in conversation. Beyond the walls. Outside the frame. Around the world.

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Mia goes to Paris: Olympic sports (or things that should be) in art

By Tim Gihring

The 2024 Summer Olympics opens in Paris on July 26 with thirty-two sports, including some newish events like surfing, skateboarding, and breaking (aka breakdancing). The Games evolve. When Paris hosted in 1900, poodle clipping was a trial event (of course)—groom the most poodles in two hours. (It didn’t catch on, c’est  ...

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Mia seeks volunteers for revamped guide program

For many years, Mia’s volunteer guides—known as docents then—underwent two years of training, a kind of master’s in Mia’s collection and facilitating tours. Much has changed. For the next cohort of guides, starting in September, the training period will be thirteen weeks—a mix of online and in-person classes. And the volunteering options have been simplified  ...

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Pictures of health: Teen artists on how racism affects wellness

Ella Alden Pope moved a lot when she was younger, from one part of the Twin Cities to another. The housing varied along with the neighborhoods, from well-maintained to well-worn. And she could tell the difference, physically as well as mentally. “It’s hard to focus and do your best when you’re not feeling healthy day  ...

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Juneteenth at Mia unites BIPOC staff around joy and resilience

By Taylor Bye

On June 20, Mia not only threw a Juneteenth celebration for the community but for its own staff. During the day, the Mia BIPOC Employee Resource Group (ERG) coordinating team organized a panel discussion with members of Black Greek Letter Organizations, fraternities and sororities that emerged at both historically Black colleges  ...

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An exhilarating preview of Mia’s fall Toulouse-Lautrec show

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of Parisian nightlife in the 1880s and ’90s are as emblematic as they are engaging, windows into a vanished world that feels strangely familiar. You’ve seen them, even if you weren’t sure what you were looking at or who the artist was. This fall, you’ll have the chance to see and  ...

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Celebrating Pride Month with Zanele Muholi’s photography

Two photographs by self-described visual activist Zanele Muholi, taken in 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa, are now on view in Mia’s lobby. The artist, whose use of they/them pronouns is intentionally pluralistic to acknowledge their ancestors, began this series of portraits in 2006, centered on the lives of Black trans and queer people in  ...

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Queerness in the collection: Rarely seen portraiture for Pride Month

By Allison Jones

Mia’s collection goes far beyond what you see in the galleries—at any given time, only a small percentage can be shown on the walls. Of the pieces in storage, the majority are prints and drawings, but these works don’t languish behind the scenes: everyone is welcome to make an appointment to view  ...

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About that viral video “Let’s do National Gymnastics!” from “The Shape of Time”

In the final gallery of “The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989,” the special exhibition on view at Mia through June 23, is a 10-minute video of people exercising. Called Let’s do National Gymnastics!—the exclamation point largely ironic—it’s a stylized edit of a highly regimented routine: arm swinging, neck twisting, and leg lunging to  ...

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That time Robert Rauschenberg came to Mia

By Tim Gihring

Robert Rauschenberg is having a moment. Again. For the first time in thirty years, his 1980s series based on his travels to Chile, Japan, the Soviet Union, and half a dozen other countries—called the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, or ROCI—is on view, in a London gallery. And as the 60th Venice  ...

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Mia mourns the passing of Frank Stella

Frank Stella, a giant of the art world who helped shift its center of gravity to the United States in the post-war era, died on May 4 in New York. He was 87. Stella has long had an outsize presence at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His monumental painting Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II has held a  ...

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