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&#8220;Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection&#8221; includes more than two hundred gilt-bronze sculptures, paintings, silk hangings, and carpets that were created in Tibet between the 1300s and early 1900s. Buddhist ritual objects are displayed in the context of an elaborate private household shrine, a space used for offerings, devotional prayer, rituals, and contemplation. With its flickering candlelight, sonorous chanting, and the subtle smell of incense, the glittering room provides an oasis for peaceful contemplation within the galleries at Mia.
Tour a selection of objects in this guide. 
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Prepare your students for a visit with this guide. 
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Step Inside the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room &#8211; 3D Virtual Tour 
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Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection

The exuberant 20-century ceramic artist Clarice Cliff famously said, in response to critics, “Having a little fun at my work does not make me any less of an artist, and people who appreciate truly beautiful and original creations in pottery are not frightened by innocent tomfoolery.&#8221;
Drawing from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, along with gifts from the Tamara and Michael Root collection of studio ceramics, this exhibition at the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis showcases the delights and talents of women in the fields of modern and contemporary industrial design and craft. The exhibition features examples of design from Cliff as well as British silver designer Kate Harris, American inventor Marion Weeber, and prolific designer Eva Zeisel. Studio ceramics include works from important American ceramic educator Laura Andreson, Finnish contemporary artist Kirsi Kivivirta, and clay sculptor Karen Karnes, among others. The exhibition is on view in twenty cases in the ground-floor concourse and skyway levels of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis.
Wells Fargo Center Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. &#8211; 5 p.m. 
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A Little Fun at My Work: Women in Design and Craft

Living on an archipelago, surrounded by water on all sides, the Japanese have always had a close relationship with the sea. The marine life depicted in Japanese art, however, is often more symbolic than real, meant to convey literary, visual, or seasonal associations. Sometimes, even the connections to the sea are abstract, such as geometric patterns meant to evoke fishnets or scales on dishes and clothing. This exhibition explores the sea creatures that permeate Japanese art and culture, and dives into their deeper meaning.
<h2>Name That Fish</h2>
In October, Mia held an online contest to give Imai Sadamasa’s Napoleon Fish a nickname. After combing through hundreds of great visitor submissions, the artist chose Edmund Fishgerald.

Photo of a sculpture of a fish in blue, green, teal, and green-yellow tones

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Catch of the Day: Humans and Marine Animals in Japan

Yōzō Hamaguchi (1909–2000) was a master of color mezzotints, a technique that allowed printmakers to reproduce complex details of an artwork. Photography had rendered it obsolete by the 1900s, but Hamaguchi revived the technique after encountering it during a stay in Paris in the 1930s. There, he met American poet e.e. cummings, who gifted him a tool to achieve the signature tones in mezzotint. In the 1980s, Hamaguchi paid homage to the poet with the “e.e. cummings suite” of prints titled with lines from the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”
This exhibition explores how Hamaguchi transformed the ordinary into the uncanny, featuring prints generously donated by Charles and Robyn Citrin and Bill and Roberta Stein.
A second rotation of this exhibition will run August 2, 2025, through April 5, 2026.

yellow-pink cherries with green stems suspended in air set against a black background

And more by more they dream their sleep: Mezzotints by Yōzō Hamaguchi

Otto Dix (1891–1969) served in the German army during World War I. For three years, he led a machine-gun unit and experienced the horror of trench warfare firsthand. When the war ended, in 1918, many of Dix’s countrymen wanted to celebrate the valor of military service and rebuild German power; others wanted to forget and move forward. Dix belonged to a smaller cohort who wanted to scrutinize how a war that raged for four years and left ten million dead could happen in the first place. In the early 1920s, Dix created a series of fifty raw etchings—published as Der Krieg (The War)—that are less an account of Dix’s wartime activity than a sequence of PTSD-induced flashbacks.
Content advisory: This exhibition contains images of suffering, death, and bodily decay.

Black and white etching by Otto Dix of soldiers in gas masks during Word War I.

Otto Dix: The War Portfolio

The narrative painting genre has been popular in Chinese art since the Han dynasty nearly two thousand years ago. The subjects of these paintings vary widely, from mythology and classic literature to history and political satire. For centuries, the most popular subjects were transcendent scenes evoking Buddhist and Taoist doctrines. Over time, many artists shifted their focus to the more mundane world—scenes of scholar-officials and ordinary people going about their lives. This gallery features paintings from Mia’s permanent collection that showcase how Chinese artists have used narrative painting to illustrate tales from both the divine and mortal realms.

image of a chinese hunt on a silk screen with people on horses set against a beige background

From the Divine to the Mortal: Storytelling in Chinese Painting

Spanning almost a century of creativity, &#8220;Transcendent Clay&#8221; offers a panoramic look at the achievements of the Kondō family of ceramicists based in Kyoto, Japan. The legacy of porcelain-making began with Kondō Yūzō (1902–1985) in the 1930s and continued with his sons Yutaka (1932–1983) and Hiroshi (1936–2012), who broke free to pursue original, individual expressions. Ultimately it was the grandson Takahiro (born 1958) who emerged as the family’s greatest innovator by developing the secret technique of applying a “silver mist” (gintekisai) of metallic droplets to his modern forms.
This exhibition brings together a wide range of works including freehand-painted vases, pure-white jars, and Takahiro’s dramatic shapes and textures, which he describes as “water born from fire.” Most of the works are from the collection of Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz, long-time supporters of Mia.

Watch a conversation with Joe Earle, former head of Asian art at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as he explores the evolution of the ceramic lineage of the Kondō family. Then ceramic artist Kondō Takahiro, collector Jeffrey Horvitz, and gallerist Joan Mirviss join Earle for a panel discussion, moderated by Andreas Marks, Mia’s curator of Japanese and Korean art.
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porcelain statue of a head and top of the torso with arms at side with blue and green underglazes and "silver mist" overglaze

Transcendent Clay: The Kondō Family’s Path of Porcelain Innovations

In 1897, the French painter Claude Monet made four paintings of the chrysanthemums in his garden in Giverny, capturing them not in a vase but en plein air—painting the flowers as they grew. He had been an avid collector of Japanese prints since the 1870s, and his unexpected, expressive use of space in this experiment recalls the Large Flowers series of prints made between 1833 and 1834 by Katsushika Hokusai. This exhibition brings the Large Flowers and Chrysanthemums series into conversation, exploring the symbiotic artistic connections between Japan and France in the 19th century.

Drawing of pink, peach, and light red chrysanthemums and a horsefly by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai

74.1.210 Hokusai | Monet

This gallery invites visitors to experience the Age of Enlightenment anew, showing works produced and circulated between 1775 and 1815—an era of disruption across intellectual, philosophical, and political frontiers. Art served various purposes in this period: as an indicator of colonial might, a means to communicate a principled stance against slavery, and an avenue through which to publicly revere great thinkers. The artworks assembled evoke the monumental ambitions that marked the time.

Painting of a battle scene with the main focus being a knight with his arm raised on a white horse charging into battle

Revolutions, Republics, and Restoration

Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) taught children how to live in a dictatorship. His Fables depict a world of talking animals, but the lessons they teach are about power&#8217;s abuses and the skills needed to survive. From their first publication in 1668 during the absolutist reign of King Louis XIV, Fables captivated artists, who illustrated scenes from the tales on a variety of surfaces. This exhibition presents textiles and ceramics that were inspired by La Fontaine and circulated in the elite domestic spaces of privileged children and their caregivers. These items vividly bring to life scenes from famous stories such as the tortoise and the hare, the kite and the nightingale, and the rooster and the pearl.

Use this guide to prepare for a visit to the exhibition or to stimulate conversations in the galleries. Consider printing a few guides so that students can get a close look at the artworks by working in small groups.
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Textile image of a brown bird gripping a branch, with a pillar and flowers in the background

Survival of the Fittest: Lessons from La Fontaine in Textile and Porcelain

Born on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota, Mary Sully was a reclusive artist who, between the 1920s and 1940s, created highly distinctive works informed by her Native American and European ancestry. This first solo exhibition of Sully&#8217;s groundbreaking production highlights recent Mia acquisitions, works that complicate traditional notions of Native American and modern art.
Major support for Mia’s presentation provided by Lorraine R Hart.

Watch a conversation with Philip Deloria, a history professor at Harvard University, as he explores Mary Sully’s eclectic style as an expression of her grounding in Plains aesthetics and material culture. Deloria also discusses her emergence as a newly recognized artist immersed in the principles of both Native arts and American modernism.
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Philip Deloria on "Mary Sully: Native Modern" 

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Detailed view of Mary Sully's Spring artwork, which shows a repeated pattern of green, red, and beige shapes

Mary Sully: Native Modern

This exhibition features paintings, drawings, prints, and more by local high school student artists who participated in a program reflecting on the last five years in Minneapolis. Taking inspiration from the exhibition &#8220;Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,&#8221; students were encouraged to see themselves as giants. Artists Kprecia Ambers, Leslie Barlow, Graci Horne, Lissa Karpeh, and Akiko Ostlund, whose work is also on view, worked with students during multiple visits to create this powerful exhibition.
Sponsored by:
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Questions about how to get involved in Teen Perspectives? Email teenprograms@artsmia.org.

Photograph of the backs of three young people who are standing in front of an artwork in a Mia gallery

Teen Perspectives: Minneapolis as Monument

“Remnants” brings together artworks by South African artists who focus on the invisible and visible structures of colonization and apartheid (1948–1994)—and their historical impacts. In some instances, artists directly critique the destructive forces of apartheid on South Africans of color. By centering the everyday lives of people living under the regime of apartheid, these works reveal the individual humanity of their subjects while illuminating the forces of their oppression. In response to South Africa’s democratization in 1994, artists in this show devise fresh visual language for a newly expressive era. Drawn mostly from Mia’s collection, the works within this show reveal the breadth of artistic practice that flourished during and after the apartheid regime.

Black-and-white photograph of overgrown hedges that have become so thick they look like a wall

Remnants

In the early days of the Renaissance, artists emphasized order. Inspired by ancient Roman architecture and sculpture, they created structured compositions and statuesque figures that evoked lofty, rational thought. However, new ideas began to emerge. In 1506, the excavation of the ancient Laocoön sculpture, depicting the Trojan priest and his sons writhing as they&#8217;re attacked by sea serpents, released Renaissance figures from static poses. Artists began to manipulate the science of perspective and often dropped the idea of images representing the world as seen through a window. Earthy and outlandish thought flourished. Many images became just plain weird. With their creativity unleashed, artists left to us the joy of strangeness.
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WCCO TV: Mia exhibition touts &#8220;The Weirdening of the Renaissance&#8221;
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Pencil sketch of four muscular naked men on top of each other's shoulders against a beige background

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The Weirdening of the Renaissance

Vivid brightness. Glowing. Deep pink. These are some of the definitions listed in Merriam-Webster&#8217;s for “radiance.” Many of these qualities are present in this exhibition of drawings and paintings on paper selected from Mia’s collection, including promised gifts to the museum. Color and light (often called tone or tonal value) are fundamental elements of visual depiction. Whether abstract or representative, each featured work is an eye-catching enticement for viewers to experience how vivid color and light interact. The artists in &#8220;Radiance&#8221; explore the visual effects of capturing intense sensations of color and light as a primary means for optical description, perceptual expression, and generating meaning.

Abstract collage of a dragon made with the bright colors of red, orange and blue against a muted beige background

Radiance

Photography’s mechanical origins have sometimes relegated the medium to that of a tool. The impulse to alter, embellish, and add soon became standard photographic practice. Photographers added colored pigment to the metal surfaces of early daguerreotypes, painted paper photographs, and wrote text directly on their prints and negatives. In sum, they annotated their photographs.
Drawing mostly from Mia’s collection, “Annotations” considers an array of hand-applied interventions on and within photographs, across the medium’s history and through different processes. The photographers’ additive gestures bring viewers closer to a photograph’s role as an object made at a specific time and by a particular individual.

mottled and patchy aerial view of a colorful cityscape that is intersected by a river, and is rendered in blue, white, yellow, and pink pigments with a white sky

Annotations

Rajput paintings evoke many moods and senses. They tell stories about the beliefs, desires, myths, poetry, and power that shaped the royal Rajput courts of northern India during the 16th to 19th centuries. Rajput artists chose subject matter that was meant to engage all of our senses (taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight) and elicit emotional responses—an aesthetic experience known as rasa. Love, laughter, fury, compassion, disgust, horror, heroism, wonder, and tranquility are the nine rasas of Indian aesthetics and offer one way to interpret Rajput paintings.

A watercolor painting of over 10 people watching a thunderstorm approach. Some people are inside and some are on a balcony.

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Ongoing Exhibitions

Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection

A Little Fun at My Work: Women in Design and Craft

Catch of the Day: Humans and Marine Animals in Japan