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  ...

In1997, Katherine Turczan began showing a series of photographs she had made in Ukraine. “From Where they Came” debuted at the Minneapolis Institute of Art as part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, and featured portraits of children, nuns, and other Ukrainians trying to find their place in a country once  ...

At the beginning of the pandemic, I started looking more closely at America’s chart. There was chatter among astrologers that 2020 was going to be an active year, and now we know that it was. At the time, I was writing about contemporary witch culture for the catalogue of “Supernatural  ...

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  ...