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

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.

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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

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

This exhibition explores the intimate world of Chinese fan painting—where poetry, calligraphy, and painted images converge in the palm of the hand. Featuring circular silk fans from the Song and Yuan dynasties (10th–14th centuries) and folding fans from the Ming and Qing period (14th–early 20th centuries), these works reflect centuries of refined aesthetic practice, personal expression, seasonal contemplation, and spiritual reflection.
Whether created by court artists or literati scholars, each fan carries the rhythm of the brush and the breeze: a fleeting moment captured in ink. Drawn from Mia’s rich collection, the selected fans invite viewers to experience how art, nature, and verse were held—literally and symbolically—in one’s grasp.

fan mounted as an album leaf; two fishermen at sea during a storm; rocks and bending trees in foreground lower right, fishermen at lower left, bamboo behind boat with a mountain range in the distance

Ink Rhythms on the Breeze: The Art of Chinese Fan Paintings

In the 1830s, Scottish artist David Roberts journeyed through Egypt, capturing its monumental temples, tombs, palaces, and timeless landscapes with dramatic vision. Trained as a theatrical scene painter, Roberts conveyed romantic grandeur and scale like few before him, balancing accuracy with artistic imagination.
His on-site drawings were later transformed into hand-colored lithographs and published in the landmark series The Holy Land, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia (1842–1849). With the invention of photography in 1839, these prints, widely celebrated in their day, became the last of the great hand-made views of Egypt.

view into an Egyptian temple hall lined with colossal carved statues of pharaohs, buried up the knees in sand, with a small group of men in Arab dress gathered at the center of the hall

Along the Nile with David Roberts

Utagawa Hiroshige&#8217;s (1797–1858) iconic landscape series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo” (modern-day Tokyo), first published in the 1850s, stands as one of the most celebrated collections of Japanese prints. Individual prints from this series of 118 are widely regarded as some of the finest achievements in Japanese art. Hiroshige captures locations in and around Edo during all four seasons, often from unique perspectives.
Inspired by Hiroshige’s compositions, British artist Emily Allchurch (born 1974) created “Tokyo Story” using digital collage and photography. Allchurch traveled to Tokyo in 2009 and visited places pictured by Hiroshige. While many places have changed radically and bear no resemblance to Hiroshige&#8217;s images, Allchurch photographed details of the urban landscapes she encountered through various angles and focuses.
Following Hiroshige&#8217;s compositional arrangements, dramatic cropping, and color gradations, Allchurch also manipulated details of the photographic data to create views that are at once familiar and strangely fresh. This exhibition connects the past and the present by featuring Hiroshige’s captivating sceneries along with Allchurch’s modern adaptations.

Print of a Japanese temple covered in snow with people walking around

Hiroshige&#8217;s 100 Views of Edo x Emily Allchurch

<blockquote>“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
&nbsp; 

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself, 51,” Leaves of Grass (1855)
</blockquote>
For 250 years, the United States has defined itself in terms of plurality. Its Latin motto, e pluribus unum (out of many, one), notes the interdependence of the multiple and the singular in our national conception.
This exhibition explores the diversity of American experience that photographs can hold, and the manner in which photographers have sought to “contain multitudes,” in the words of the 19th-century writer Walt Whitman, by maintaining an expansive ecosystem of images celebrating the contradictions of American life, culture, and history.

young woman wearing a turquoise tank top, turquoise and black skirt, white shoes and white beaded headdress, seated bareback on a white speckled horse, standing in front of a backdrop painted with blue sky and white clouds

Containing Multitudes

This exhibition brings together paintings and photographs from the collection of Dan Shogren and Susan Meyer that explore the rich and complex meanings of industrial art during the first half of the 20th century. Spanning the late 1920s to the early 1940s, these works illuminate the importance of artistic creativity during a period shaped by economic hardship, social unrest, and the dominance of industrial manufacturing. Paintings by Harry Gottlieb, Edmund Lewandowski, Ben Shahn, and others appear alongside photographs by prominent figures such as Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange, offering a unique cross-section of artistic life during a tumultuous era.

Black-and-white photograph of a cemetery with brick rowhouses and steel mills in the background

Built to Last: The Shogren-Meyer Collection of American Art

Derived from a Nahuatl word, a huipil is a traditional blouse worn by women throughout Mesoamerica, particularly among the Maya, since before the 16th century when the Spanish arrived in the region. The garment remains especially prevalent in Guatemala’s highland regions, where a majority of Maya descendants reside today.
Huipiles are traditionally handwoven on a backstrap loom in two or three rectangular panels, later sewn together. Decoration, motifs, and color choices serve as a visual language that uniquely identifies the wearer’s village and social standing.
The selection presented in this exhibition comes from a significant donation of textiles made to the museum by Richard Simmons and his wife. Their contribution has greatly enhanced representation of Latin American culture in the museum’s collection.

Guatemala woman's ceremonial blouse, or huipil, featuring white, red and orange colors

An Indigenous Art: Huipiles from Mia&#8217;s Collection

&#8220;Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time&#8221; celebrates the enduring power, beauty, and symbolism of horses in Chinese art and culture. Across millennia, the horse has galloped through China’s imagination—as chariot puller, zodiac sign, loyal companion, and poetic metaphor.
This exhibition explores the horse as both a real creature and a cultural emblem—embodying strength, status, virtue, and aspiration. From ritual bronzes to scholar’s miniatures, imperial scrolls to popular expressions, the horse reveals a rich interplay of mythology, mobility, and meaning. As we welcome a new Year of the Horse, these timeless images invite reflection on what it means to move, strive, and endure.

Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time

In the first half of the 20th century, Germany experienced the last years of the German Empire, World War I and the revolution that followed, the liberal Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Modern art played an important role in the discourse of the period, and politics influenced the arts.
This exhibition features more than 70 paintings and sculptures from the collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie (New National Gallery), the distinguished modern art museum of the Berlin State Museums. It traces the German experience in the visual arts over four decades.
Beginning with the Expressionist reaction and opposition to the conservative artistic regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the exhibition moves on to the New Objectivity movement, the modern style of the 1920s. Between the wars, German artists participated in international experiments with abstraction. Painters and sculptors critiqued social currents, but most were silenced under the Nazis. This exhibition concludes with an epilogue that examines the ambiguous aftermath of World War II.
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Mia offers free admission to ticketed exhibitions for veterans and active-duty military and families, Minnesota WIC, MCAD students and staff, Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board staff, and museum professionals. You can reserve free admission tickets by calling Visitor Experience at 612-870-3000.
Use our <a href="https://guides.bloombergconnects.org/en-US/guide/minneapolisInstituteOfArt/exhibition/6883a787-6181-449a-a25c-da42110a78e4" target="_blank" rel="noopener">free audio guide</a> to explore the exhibition wherever you are or to enhance your visit to the museum. For the best listening experience during your visit, bring your own headsets to listen to the audio guide on your personal device.
Note: This exhibition includes depictions of nudity, scenes of war and violence, and Nazi and Holocaust imagery.
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Mia members at all levels can see the exhibition for free on Member Days: Thursday, March 12; Tuesday, March 31; Thursday, April 9; Saturday, April 18; Friday, May 15; Sunday, June 7; Thursday, June 18; and Wednesday, July 8, 2026.
Not a member yet? Learn more and join today.
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Enhance your visit with a free audio guide that uncovers the bold, urgent art of a nation in upheaval. Hear how artists challenged power, endured persecution, and redefined modern art in a time of revolution and war.
<a href="https://guides.bloombergconnects.org/en-US/guide/minneapolisInstituteOfArt/exhibition/6883a787-6181-449a-a25c-da42110a78e4" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><button class="black-background">Listen Now</button></a>

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Join us for a free public tour of the exhibition and gain deeper insight into the pieces in the exhibition. Note: The tour is free, but you need a ticket to enter the exhibition.
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Learn about the exhibition’s main themes and artworks, and prepare your students for a visit.
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Highlighting the influences and antipathies among art, politics, identity, and censorship, this book brings together more than 70 painting and sculptures from the distinguished modern art collections of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
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Experience the special exhibition through the artist’s lens. In this five-part series, Mia teaching artists will help you explore the creative periods reflected in the exhibition.
Saturday, March 14, 10 a.m.; Saturday, April 11, 10 a.m.; Saturday, May 9, 10 a.m.; Saturday, June 13, 10 a.m.; and Saturday, July 11, 10 a.m.
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Vision and Voice, Mia’s event for young adults, is your stop for chill vibes, good food, and amazing art. Plus enjoy free access to “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945.”
Thursday, April 9 
6–9 p.m.
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Join Mia and The National WWII Museum for a free educator workshop exploring the powerful connections between art, history, and culture.
Saturday, March 14 
10 a.m.–3 p.m.
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Educator Workshop: Art, Politics, and the History of Germany in Turbulent Times

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Join us for an evening designed just for educators, featuring free admission to the special exhibition, new classroom-ready learning resources, light refreshments, and time to connect with colleagues.
Thursday, March 12 
4:30–7 p.m
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Mia welcomes experts from the University of Minnesota for a lively talk about the intertwined nature of politics and aesthetics, the relationship of painting to other art forms, ambiguity in art, and the idea of the New Woman.
Sunday, June 7, 2 p.m.
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Panel Discussion: Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945

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Join Emily Evans of the Neue Nationalgalerie for a closer look at specific works in the exhibition and stories about what happened to them between creation and joining the Neue Nationalgalerie&#8217;s collection.
Thursday, April 30, 6:30 p.m.
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Emily Evans: Case Studies from “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945”

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Join Irina Hiebert Grun, a curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (NNg), as she discusses the history and collections of the NNg and how both reflect the turbulent history of Germany in the 20th century.
Saturday, March 7, 2 p.m.
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The Neue Nationalgalerie: Modern Art and Politics in Berlin

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Painting of a woman with black-brown bobbed hair and curls falling over her forehead wearing a black dress and holding a cigarette seated at a table in a nightclub setting with two men behind her and a champagne chiller holding an opened bottle of champagne

Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945: Masterworks from the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Through bewitching stop motion animation and dense, campy soundscapes, “The Milkman” shows a family keeping secrets from each other in strange and startling ways. Drawing from both enduring American mythologies and personal family lore, Nerburn uses the disarming whimsy of puppetry and dollhouses to reveal a domestic life coming undone.
Nerburn’s cross-disciplinary projects reflect his passion for people’s histories and places that are “off the map.” He&#8217;s a 2024–2025 Minneapolis College of Art and Design–Jerome Foundation Fellow and has received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board, ArtPlace America, and Springboard for the Arts.
This exhibition is part of the <a href="https://new.artsmia.org/exhibitions/maep/">Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program</a>.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

The image shows a pair of hands intricately carving a piece of wood. In the foreground, there's a pile of wood shavings scattered across the surface. The setting appears to be a small room or a miniature scene with a decorative wall featuring two framed ornaments and a small clock on a shelf. To the right, a mounted deer head decorates the wall. Curtains hang on the back wall, adding to the decor.

Still from Nik Nerburn's "Going Out For Cigarettes."

Nik Nerburn: The Milkman

Contemplative, humorous, inventive, and surreal. These are just a few of many apt descriptions of the artworks of the Japanese artist Kenji Nakahashi. His active imagination, curiosity for his immediate environment, and embrace of the mundane provided endless inspiration and subjects for his art, inviting questions and reflections about life and everyday objects.
Born and educated in Japan, Nakahashi moved to New York City in 1973 at the age of 26, finding in the bustling metropolis the creative stimuli that would sustain his practice for the rest of his life. Best known for his concept-driven photography, Nakahashi actively experimented with a diverse range of mediums, including drawing, painting, collage, and printmaking. Relying on absurdity, visual and textual puns, and unusual juxtapositions, Nakahashi’s enigmatic images encourage viewers to contemplate both the strange and captivating aspects of everyday life.
Blending playfulness and intellectual vigor, Nakahashi often toyed with viewer’s expectations, depicting such mundane objects as street signs, drinking glasses, a hot-water bottle, and analog clocks in unfamiliar or even surreal contexts. Other subjects include storefronts, subway platforms, soaring skyscrapers, and mysterious fictional landscapes. He routinely flattened and fragmented the built environment of the city and its inhabitants into abstract geometric and kaleidoscopic forms, resulting in images that surprise, challenge, and delight.
Celebrating a recent anonymous gift of Nakahashi’s work to Mia’s collection, this exhibition showcases more than 60 photographs, prints, drawings, watercolors, collages, and one painting, representing the artist’s career from the 1970s through the early 1990s.

Two identical round clocks placed on opposite trays of a metal balance scale. Both clocks have white faces with black numbers and hands. The clock on the left shows the time at 12:04, while the clock on the right displays 12:15.

Kenji Nakahashi: A Confident Life

For as long as there have been cameras, photographers have trained their lenses upon the human form: our heads, shoulders, knees, toes, and much more. The body is an expressive instrument, able to convey meaning through the smallest of gestures: a flick of the wrist, a purse of the lips, a bow from the waist.
Drawn from Mia’s permanent collection, all of the print photography in this show invites us to revel in the wonder of our corporeal nature—our vast capacities for communication, even in stillness, to manifest joy, playfulness, sorrow, alienation, and many other emotions through bodily signs and signatures.

Two separate photographic images forming one large image; large black-and-white image of three clasped hands at bottom center; smaller color images surrounding image of hands and handwritten notes

Calendar

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

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Featured Events

“Modern Art and Politics” Public Tour

Doors Open Minneapolis: Purcell-Cutts House

Meet at Mia

Modern Art and Politics Member Days

Art & Wine and Art & Spirits

Studio Sessions

Art & Dining After Dark

Meet at Mia: Summer Series 2026

Guest Talk: John Cameron Mitchell

Calendar

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

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Ongoing Exhibitions

Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

Kenji Nakahashi: A Confident Life

Nik Nerburn: The Milkman