In just a few months, “Hearts of our People” will open at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the first major exhibition of art by Native American women. In selecting the artworks for the show, we chose pieces by named makers as often as possible, rather than designate an item as anonymous from a particular culture. But  ...

On the morning of March 4, when designer Stella McCartney showed her Fall 2019 Ready-to-Wear collection at Paris Fashion Week, several looks that walked the runway were draped with long, thick cords of fabric—“wrapped and twisted adornments,” according to the program notes. They were made by artist Sheila Hicks, and several of them looked like  ...

After 11 years of directing the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Kaywin Feldman is leaving soon, to become the director of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C. The staff and budget and scrutiny will be much greater, the snow much less. It’s the culmination of 27 years of leading art museums across the country,  ...

In 2016, when the Guerrilla Girls staged a self-described “intervention” at Mia, the advocates for artistic diversity found some things to lament: relatively few works by women artists in the galleries, few works by people of color. They styled their review as a kind of gotcha moment, as though they were holding up a mirror  ...

Last week, Mia’s Community Commons was buzzing with student artists eager to show their family and friends what they have spent the year creating. Now in its sixth year, Mia’s Creativity Academy program launched its annual exhibition, up through the middle of April. It features artwork from nearly 500 fourth-grade students, drawn from six different  ...

Junauda Petrus has a film coming out this spring: Sweetness of Wild, a love letter to blackness in Minneapolis, produced with Erin Sharkey and their Free Black Dirt company. She has a novel coming out in the fall:  The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, about two black queer teenage girls in Minneapolis. And that’s just  ...

In late 2017, Leon Tazel III called Mia’s department of student and teacher learning to “see what we can make happen.” A partnership of some kind. He set the stage for his request with a story. The true story of the day in 2013 when he accompanied his teenage daughter to an urban juvenile detention  ...

Richard Holzschuh is the classic case of a forgotten artist rediscovered. Several years ago, I received an unusual telephone call from someone then unknown to me, James Hogan. He told me that his late stepfather liked to draw and that he was looking for a museum that might want his drawings. Hmmm, I thought, “is  ...

When he was 18, Bob Thompson thought he would go to medical school, become a doctor. Because his mother, who was a teacher, wanted this for her son. And because his father had died, and he was depressed and living in Boston with his sister and didn’t have any better ideas for moving forward. So  ...

On February 7, Dawoud Bey will speak at Mia about the evolution of his photographic practice and engagement with communities, in conversation with Casey Riley, Mia’s curator of Photography and New Media. In 1969, when Dawoud Bey was almost 16 and living with his family in New York, he took the subway by himself to  ...