Growing up in London with parents in the art world—his father had the poetic title of Keeper of Word and Image at the V&A Museum, his mother is an art historian—Max Bryant spent a good chunk of childhood in museums and cathedrals, sometimes spending hours with a single artwork. (For the  ...

Pierre Ware was selected for Mia’s first Visual Resources DEI Fellowship in the fall of 2023. Over the next twelve months, Ware immersed himself in the museum, shooting everything from art objects to ad campaigns. Dan Dennehy, Mia’s longtime Head of Visual Resources, initiated the fellowship in partnership with Mia’s DEI Division, and says the  ...

Staff art shows have become a feature of many museums now, and for good reason: many museum staffers are artists, professionally or otherwise, putting their creativity to work and being inspired in return. Mia’s annual staff art show, “Artists at Work,” is up through April 13 in the museum’s Community Commons. Here we present a  ...

When I was 14, I was invited to a sleepover birthday party. The birthday girl decided we should watch Moulin Rouge!, the Baz Luhrman movie musical from 2001, starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Settled on the floor in our pajamas, we entered a world of campy decadence—Paris in 1899—set to  ...

As Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Virajita Singh put it, “The Minneapolis Institute of Art Impact Report celebrates fostering connections: from the global to the local, the past to the present, across generations and identities. We are the ‘people’s museum’, where everyone is welcome, always.” The 2024 Impact Report offers an overview of how we  ...

We’ve got our favorites, our visitors have theirs—here’s that Venn diagram of unique holiday gifts we can all agree on, at all price points, for all kinds of people, from The Store at Mia. Use it to plan your gifting, or share it with others as your wishlist. Come by on November 29 for Black  ...

Esther Parada’s trip to Bolivia in the 1960s as a Peace Corps volunteer marked the beginning of her artistic career as a photographer. While teaching art at the university in Sucre, she captured the expressive faces, richly patterned textiles, and harsh light of the altiplano as a way to retain and memorize the experience of  ...

As part of the ceremonies leading up to the opening of the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection on September 14, 2024, the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) will host several Buddhist nuns from the Jangchub Choeling Nunnery in India. During their visit, the nuns will create a  ...

In her chic apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, Alice Kandell likes to retreat to a room where flickering candles softly illuminate gilded sculptures inlaid with coral, turquoise, and other semiprecious stones. The walls are hung with exquisitely painted images of serene deities and ferocious guardians. A fine silk canopy floats above an altar  ...

In June 1886, Santiago Rusiñol is on his honeymoon in Paris. He’s 25 years old, Spanish from Barcelona, and in love. In a letter to a friend, he writes that he has never felt so stimulated, so alive and full of pleasure. But he is not referring to his wife, or  ...