This week, the museum announced a refreshing of its name—two names, actually: Mia (pronounced Mee-ah), replacing the acronym MIA, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, instead of Arts. These may seem like small changes to reflect contemporary language, but in deeper ways they reconnect the museum with its 100-year-old roots. The founders believed that museums  ...

If the Minneapolis Institute of Art’s (Mia’s) 100th anniversary celebration feels familiar, it’s probably not because you were around for the 1915 party. But you might remember the 1983 Centennial Celebration, when the museum sunk a time capsule into its front steps. The museums’s building was not yet a hundred years old then, but the Mia’s  ...

Nothing small was ever going to be performed on the steps of the MIA, the neoclassical columns perfect for tales of Samson and Delilah, gods and their oracles. In July 1919, it was Swords and Plowshares, an epic morality play about war and peace, that was staged out front by the Civic Players of Minneapolis,  ...

June 14, 1969, seems to have been a warm, sunny day in Minneapolis. Which was lucky, given that the MIA chose to uncrate Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair, perhaps her most famous painting, outside the museum. It’s not the usual protocol—then or now. But what a wonderfully strange insider experience for the gentleman and young boy  ...

If your Italian fails you while trying to read Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester, on display through August 30 at the MIA, it’s not you. Leonardo created his notebook with mirror writing, transcribing his sentences backward and right to left. Yet recognizing the trick behind Leonardo’s coded script requires only the slightest Sherlockian effort compared  ...

By Dan Dennehy, senior photographer and head of Visual Resources at Mia It looks innocent enough: Richard Avedon, the celebrated New York fashion photographer, sitting cross-legged on the gallery floor surrounded by young admirers. But something tells me they are not talking f/stops and Tri-X. It is, after all, the summer of 1970. The counter-culture  ...

This summer, the MIA has Leonardo on the brain. The exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci, the Codex Leicester, and the Creative Mind,” now on display in the Target Galleries, features the master’s original notes and drawings along with contemporary examples of invention and visionary design. But there are links to da Vinci’s life and work throughout  ...

This summer, the MIA has Leonardo on the brain. The exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci, the Codex Leicester, and the Creative Mind,” now on display in the Target Galleries, features the master’s original notes and drawings along with contemporary examples of invention and visionary design. But there are links to da Vinci’s life and work throughout  ...

Mark Mothersbaugh, co-founder of the band Devo and a prolific composer for film, television, and advertising, is sharing the MIA’s second-floor Target Galleries this summer with Leonardo da Vinci. Both men are known for their fearless inventiveness. Only one of them, as far as we know, wore a conical red hat while stripping the clothes  ...

When the fourth graders in the MIA’s Saturday morning Gallery Club were told they’d be discussing Paul Revere, perhaps the wide-eyed young man on the left with arms folded didn’t expect it would include talk of tea parties. The students had most likely read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s dramatic re-telling “of the midnight ride of Paul  ...