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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. 
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="auto, (max-width: 85px) 100vw, 85px" />

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

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

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.

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

Radiance

“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

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.

Painted Poetry: Art of the Rajput Courts

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

2024.79

The Weirdening of the Renaissance

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

For her exhibition, Hend Al-Mansour features four installation portraits of Arab women from Minnesota. Each work explores the women’s relationships with their heritage, as interpreted by the artist. By blending traditional motifs and architectural elements with portraiture, the artist creates unique portrayals of Arab American women and their involvement in our communities. Alongside her installations, Al-Mansour is also debuting a new animation.
Saudi American artist Hend Al-Mansour studied medicine in Cairo, Egypt, and practiced medicine in Saudi Arabia. She was a fellow in cardiology at Mayo Clinic, Rochester. In addition to her medical degree, Al-Mansour holds an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MA in art history from the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul. She&#8217;s exhibited internationally and received numerous awards, including the Minnesota State Art Board&#8217;s (MSAB) Creative Support in 2024 and 2022; the MSAB Artist Initiative grant in 2019; the McKnight Fellowship in 2018; the Jerome Fellowship of Printmaking in 2013/14; and the Juror&#8217;s Award of the Contemporary Islamic Art in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2012. Al-Mansour is a member of Rosalux Gallery; the Interfaith Artists group; and The Habibties, a group of multiethnic women artists that promotes cultural diversity in the United States.
This exhibition is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, celebrating 50 years in 2025.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Photo of a room constructed of fabric with an arched entry

Hend Al Mansour:Mihrab: Portraits of Arab American Women

Hend Al-Mansour: Mihrabs: Portraits of Arab American Women

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.
This exhibition is presented in two parts:
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<li data-pm-slice="1 1 []">Part I: November 27, 2024–July 20, 2025</li>
<li>Part II: August 2, 2025–April 5, 2026</li>
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abstract painting of wavy green, pink, and blue lines against a black background

2023.101.8

And More by More They Dream Their Sleep: Mezzotints by Yōzō Hamaguchi Part II

This exhibition presents vibrant artworks created during 12 Vitality Arts workshops for adults 55 and better that took place this year. Vitality Arts workshops spark creativity, make meaningful connections, and celebrate participants as artists vital to our community. These workshops encourage older adults to tap into their creativity while connecting with others and the museum’s collection. 
The participants, guided by professional teaching artists, explored a variety of artistic mediums, honing their skills and discovering their creative voices. From drawing and portraiture to watercolor, acrylic, collage, weaving, and pastels, this exhibition celebrates the unique talents and vision of each student. Diverse community partnerships are also a vital part of the Vitality Arts program at Mia, helping us invite older adults of all backgrounds to experience the joy of making art.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-115288" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-855x196.png" alt="Logos for E. A. Michelson Philanthropy and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, sponsors of Vitality Arts " width="440" height="101" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-855x196.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2000x459.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-385x88.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-768x176.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-1536x352.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25143917/Vitality-Arts-Sponsor-Lockup_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2048x470.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 440px) 100vw, 440px" />

photograph of three paintings hanging on the wall

Vitality Arts: A Celebration of Creativity, Connection, and Community

Daoism, one of China’s major belief systems, envisions a universe guided by harmony and natural order. Emerging as an organized religion after 100 CE, Daoism developed sacred texts, temples, and a celestial pantheon. Among its vivid rituals are embroidered priestly robes—chiefly the sleeveless jiangyi and the long-sleeved daopao. These garments, rich in cosmic symbolism, feature diagrams of paradise, sacred mountains, phoenixes, and zodiac animals. Worn during rituals, they transform priests into embodiments of the cosmos.
Drawn from Mia’s collection, this exhibition reveals the spiritual depth, artistic brilliance, and ritual significance woven into these rare Daoist robes.

Photograph of an outstretch Daoist robe with long sleeves, with white fabric at the cuffs and beige fabric with orange, yellow, and brown embroidery on the body

Threads of the Way: Daoist Priest Robes from China’s Qing Dynasty

This exhibition centers on Egon Schiele’s haunting and rarely seen masterpiece, Sawmill (1913), on loan from a private collection. A mill, located on the boundary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is surrounded by piles of freshly cut timber, but itself seems to be in a process of collapse. The mill can be read as a symbol of the empire, which in 1913 was in a precarious state as its provinces demanded autonomy. The exhibition represents two outcomes for the sawmill’s timber: a wooden bridge in another painting by Schiele and avant-garde wooden furniture, created mostly by Schiele’s friend and mentor, the designer Josef Hoffmann.

Abstract painting of a sawmill surrounded by dark green landscape and distant dark gray mountains

Timber! Art and Woodwork at the Fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

“Gatsby at 100” explores how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby shaped—and was shaped by—the visual art of his time. This exhibition brings together works from Mia’s collection that embody the decadence, excess, and social upheaval of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, highlighting paintings, books, and works on paper that are rarely on view. Like Fitzgerald, artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse, as well as regional artists like Wanda Gág and Clement Haupers, endeavored to capture the contradictions of the Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald himself.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library is convening a variety of programs that invite us to revisit the book and consider how its themes apply today.
<a href="https://thefriends.org/fitzgerald/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="black-background">Learn More</button></a>

The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library

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Lithograph of a woman in a black dress reclining on a sofa set against a yellow background

Gatsby at 100

Yoshida Hodaka (1926–1995) was born into a family of artists. He was the second son of Yoshida Hiroshi (1876–1950), a leading Western-style artist in Japan during the early 20th century. Hodaka leaned toward abstraction and began exploring that path after his father&#8217;s death in 1950. In 1953, Hodaka married Chizuko (1924–2017), a trained painter. In addition to oil painting, both Hodaka and Chizuko worked in the woodblock print medium. In 1992, Hodaka created a set of six extraordinarily large prints that depict walls with great attention to structural features and surface details. This exhibition showcases the entire wall set together for the first time, along with Chizuko’s abstract works and playful groups of butterflies.

abstract image: layers of bright orange and bright red loops and curlicues over brown circles extending from the upper left across to the lower right of the painting; bright blue, orange, brown, red, and tan squares throughout; horizontal bright blue narrow rectangles almost dance across the image.

The Abstract Worlds of Yoshida Hodaka and Chizuko

The exhibition “José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” celebrates one of the greatest 19th-century landscape painters in the Americas. Trained at the prestigious Academia de San Carlos, Mexico&#8217;s fine arts academy, Velasco became an influential figure in his home country of Mexico, much like his contemporaries Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church in the United States. His impressive panoramic views of the Valley of Mexico—home of modern-day Mexico City—are painted with exquisite detail, honoring both the country’s rich historical heritage and the rapid modernization it underwent in the late 1800s.
Organized by the National Gallery, London, and Mia, the exhibition showcases paintings coming from renowned museums in Mexico and the Czech Republic. It offers an unprecedented opportunity for Mia’s audience to view Velasco&#8217;s works, as many have seldom been displayed outside their home countries.
<h2>Access Art Your Way</h2>
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Look for the “C” symbol next to artworks in the gallery. With your phone, simply tap the icon to view label information in the format that works best for you, whether that’s translation into 136 languages, large-print text, or other accessible options.
Please note: This accessibility feature is available exclusively for this exhibition.
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<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-113411" src="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-855x111.png" alt="lockup of sponsor logos" width="723" height="94" srcset="https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-855x111.png 855w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-2000x259.png 2000w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-385x50.png 385w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-768x99.png 768w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-1536x199.png 1536w, https://images.artsmia.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/07111531/Velasco_SponsorLockup_Horizontal_Wide_K-2-2048x265.png 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 723px) 100vw, 723px" />
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painting of a valley in Mexico, with ridges of brown, yellow and green, and a lake and snow-capped mountains in the distance

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Tuesday, May 28, 2024

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MAEP: Celebrating 50 Years of Minnesota Creativity at Mia

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Tuesday, May 28, 2024

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Ongoing Exhibitions

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

From the Divine to the Mortal: Storytelling in Chinese Painting

Radiance