Why do we care so much about the wildfires that ravaged Australia? Most of us have never been to the continent, let alone describe the ecologies impacted by the natural disaster, beyond “cute, cuddly” kangaroos and koalas. In contrast to natural disasters closer to home, we care about Australia because we feel like we know  ...

The hamlet of Gee’s Bend is in the Black Belt of Alabama, a reference to the rich dark soil that enabled the region’s cotton plantations and to the thousands of enslaved African Americans who worked them. After emancipation, Gee’s Bend fell into a cycle of sharecropping, debt, and poverty. A dam built in 1962 flooded  ...

By Tamira Amin, Learning Innovation Fellow at Mia Forced migration and its horrors are never too far from my mind. My extended family is strung out across four continents. Couples have married and elders have been laid to rest without reunion. My parents fled violence in Ethiopia over 30 years ago and I have yet  ...

A few years ago, a curator at Mia asked the museum’s library to find a specific edition of an out-of-print book from 1902. He was preparing an exhibition on anti-Semitism and was intrigued by the illustrations in the book, called The Spirit of the Ghetto, about the Lower East Side of Manhattan when it was the  ...

Artist Martha Rosler wanted to bring the war home. As the Vietnam War escalated half a world away, she wanted Americans to recognize their proximity to it, and perhaps even their complicity with it. She did just that in the work that appears in “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975,” an exhibition  ...

On a Saturday morning in late October, about a dozen kids and their families gathered at Mia for a discussion of civic engagement. What is it? Why is it important? And, perhaps most curiously, why are we talking about it in a museum? It’s a program called Family Conversations — a collaboration between Mia Family  ...

By Anniessa Antar Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay was 3 years old in the early 1980s when she and her family emigrated from a refugee camp in Thailand to Minnesota. Now, she amplifies refugee voices through her writing, including experimental plays that have been presented by the Smithsonian APAC, Theater Mu, and other organizations. She also serves  ...

In 1990, Cy Thao decided to paint the history of Hmong involvement in the Vietnam War, the secret war in northern Laos that killed tens of thousands of his people. He was at the University of Minnesota–Morris then, studying art in a small rural college town, and the timing seemed right. “The war stuff was  ...

By Stephanie Mann In 1699, the celebrated French artist Nicolas de Largillière was commissioned to paint the portraits of the Marquis de Castelnau (Charles-Léonor Aubrey), who was a legal adviser to the French parliament, and his spouse, Catherine Coustard, who was depicted with their eldest son. Then, in the 1800s, the paintings went their separate ways. Catherine’s  ...

Graciela Iturbide didn’t grow up wanting to be a photographer. She was born into a wealthy Catholic family, married young, and had three children. But in her late 20s, seeking distance from domestic life, she divorced and enrolled in film school. There, she met Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, with whom she began her first  ...