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Not all of the artistry at Mia comes from outside the museum—many employees are artists as well, and this exhibition spotlights their work.
The Staff Art Show was organized and curated by Team Mia, a group of museum staff devoted to cultivating a positive work environment, encouraging generosity and relationship-building among staff, providing accessible opportunities for connection and growth, and recognizing and celebrating museum employees. We are pleased to showcase the immense talent among us.

Colorful scene of mountains in blue, green, teal, purple, and orange with a bright pink sky

Artists at Work: The Mia Staff Art Show

&#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

An aristocratic transplant to the bohemian haunts of Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured the nightclubs and cabarets of Montmartre in the 1880s and ’90s, setting to canvas and paper their glittering lights and dazzling entertainments. Among his favorite spots were Le Chat Noir, Le Mirliton, and, above all others, the Moulin Rouge. One of his most remarkable paintings, At the Moulin Rouge, captures a night at the legendary nightclub with a band of regulars, including several of its most famous performers and Toulouse-Lautrec himself.
On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, At the Moulin Rouge is at the center of this exhibition about Toulouse-Lautrec, his circle of fellow artists, and how they depicted the transformation of Parisian nightlife at the turn of the century. The exhibition features a dozen rarely seen works from Mia’s collection, including French posters and drawings from the era.
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Upcoming Events

Image of At the Moulin Rouge, a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

At the Moulin Rouge

Art from Latin America and the Caribbean has been collected by Mia since the 1940s, particularly in the form of ceramics, objects in gold, and textiles produced by artmakers of the ancient civilizations that populated Central and South America. The collection has significantly increased over the years largely because of donations and purchases of works by historical and contemporary artists. These artworks constitute today the foundation in which the museum plans to build a more consistent and inclusive collection, one that can better represent the diversity and creativity of Latin American artists.

Latin American Art at Mia II

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 promised 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. 
Generous support provided by:  <img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-69398" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png" alt="" width="85" height="85" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 85w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 32w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 50w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/01101447/LOGO-std_blk1web.png 64w" sizes="(max-width: 85px) 100vw, 85px" />

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

Collectors Fay Gallus and Richard Sweet recently gave Mia an exceptional group of photographs: works by Eugene Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Irving Penn, Alec Soth, Weegee, and other celebrated photographers of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This show honors the generosity of these collectors in supporting Mia’s mission of collecting, preserving, and making accessible outstanding works of art. At the same time, it underscores the strength of Mia’s photography collection, which continues to grow from important donations like this one, enriching the communities the museum serves.

A Generous Outlook: Gifts from Fay Gallus and Richard Sweet

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>
You’re invited to help name a sculpture featured in the exhibition. Between October 10 and 31, 2024, Mia is hosting a naming content for Imai Sadamasa&#8217;s fish sculpture (pictured above).
You can click the button below to submit your entry, or participate via Instagram and Facebook or in person at Mia using a QR code.
<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdJBV4mdrqZHG_MfOSZRrRrFq3Oumd533Lu0mngMigf1Yd8RQ/viewform?usp=pp_url&amp;entry.1695263847=I'd+like+to+receive+emails+from+Mia+about+upcoming+events+and+exhibitions." rel="noopener"><button class="background-black">SUBMIT YOUR NAME</button></a> 
The artist will personally choose the winning name, which we’ll announce on social media. The lucky winner will receive a custom plush replica of the sculpture. In-person participants can claim a unique enamel pin featuring Sadamasa’s fish.

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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.

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

One of the leading peintres-graveurs, or painter-printmakers, of late nineteenth-century Paris, Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) applied her painterly skill to a variety of print techniques. Balancing color, line, and texture, she breathed life into intimate scenes of domestic labor and leisure. &#8220;Cassatt on Paper&#8221; presents highlights from Mia’s collection of prints by Cassatt, offering a rare view into the life and art of this important woman artist.

Cassatt on Paper

In the final years of the 1400s, printed representations of European cities began to appear more frequently. Some of the images seemingly place the viewer on a hill, looking across the countryside to the city. Others offer a bird’s-eye view. Mia is fortunate to own some of the great landmarks in the development of these trends, such as The Nuremburg Chronicle (1493), which illustrates dozens of cities, and Jacopo de Barbari’s View of Venice (1500), which shows the island city on an imposing scale and in minute detail. As the ancestors of Google Earth and other mapping apps, they offer an aesthetic and civic experience lacking in their electronic counterparts.

City Views

This exhibition is the first to present South African photographer Ernest Cole’s images of Black lives in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Created during a consequential period in American history, these photographs were rarely released during Cole’s lifetime and were believed to have been lost until they resurfaced in 2017. Brought together for the first time in this exhibition, the pictures reflect both a new-found hope and freedom that Cole felt in America, as well as an incisive eye for inequality and systemic racism in the United States. Seen through the eyes of a man who fled the apartheid regime in South Africa, this trove of images provides a revealing window into late 20th century American society.
Organized by Aperture. Curated by Leslie M. Wilson, PhD.
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This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-110821" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-855x107.png" alt="" width="191" height="24" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-855x107.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-2000x251.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-385x48.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-768x96.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-1536x193.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085228/Ford-single-black-2048x257.png 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 191px) 100vw, 191px" />
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-110820" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-855x428.png" alt="" width="179" height="90" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-855x428.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-2000x1000.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-385x193.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-768x384.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-1536x768.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-2048x1024.png 2048w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/18085126/2018-LogoBW-Horizontal-800x400.png 800w" sizes="(max-width: 179px) 100vw, 179px" />

Black-and-white photograph of a group of people, mostly white and one Black woman and young Black girl, standing behind a barricade

Ernest Cole. Midtown Manhattan.

The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole

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.

From the Divine to the Mortal: Storytelling in Chinese Painting

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 nineteenth century.

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.

Textile image of a brown bird gripping a branch, with a pillar and flowers in the background

Calendar

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

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Featured Events

Public Tours

Meet at Mia

Giants Preview Party

Studio Sessions

Art & Wine After Dark

Vitality Arts: Botanical Watercolor

Art & Dining After Dark

Calendar

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

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Ongoing Exhibitions

Artists at Work: The Mia Staff Art Show

Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection

At the Moulin Rouge