Taweret has the body of a hippo, the legs of a lion, and the face of a crocodile, as though the ancient Egyptian gods were experimenting with cloning when they got into a little barley beer. She looks like the goddess who carried the hero’s luggage, made sure his spear was sharp and his beard  ...

Even by the standards of myth, Osiris’ penis went through some epic travails. One day it was there, along with the rest of Osiris’ godly self, as he ruled over Egypt. The next it was gone, as Osiris was murdered by his brother and literally dismembered—chopped into 14 pieces and scattered across the country. His  ...

By Katie Sisneros, a content analyst and Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at Mia When you think of an art museum, what sort of actions spring to mind? Walking, for sure. Lots of walking happens in art museums. Looking, thinking, feeling, laughing, crying…all of these are very personal actions we perform when we inhabit an art museum’s  ...

By Juline Chevalier, head of Interpretation and Participatory Experiences at Mia One thing I love about working for a museum is having a lot of variety in the tasks and projects I work on. No two days are ever the same: There are always new exhibitions, new visitors, and new volunteers to engage. Don’t get  ...

Most of us don’t think about holiday gifts until the day—or the hour—that we allot to buy them. So we went looking for ideas from the staff at the Store at Mia, who have had plenty of time to think about it and check things out—and are often customers themselves. Here’s what they would pick  ...

Most Americans couldn’t name the current president of Egypt and many would be hard-pressed to name anything that’s happened in Egypt in the last 30 years—or maybe 3,000 years. (It’s Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, and plenty has happened.) But they know about mummies and pyramids and King Tut, and probably even hieroglyphs—an obsolete form of writing from  ...

What do you notice when you look at a painting? Perhaps the composition strikes you first—the shapes, the colors, the lines. You might notice the depth created by thick or thin brush strokes. Then your field of vision zooms out and you notice the painting’s frame. Is it simple and unadorned, drawing attention not to  ...

Owariya Yonejiro was born in 1839 in old Edo, now Tokyo, into a way of life on its way out. His father, a wealthy merchant, had essentially purchased samurai status, becoming part of the ruling class in its waning decades of power. At 11, he was apprenticed to one of the last great masters of  ...

Since publishing his “Six Habits of Highly Empathetic People” in 2012, and elaborating on them soon after in Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It, Roman Krznaric has become a kind of empathy whisperer. The social philosopher, a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London, has been an empathy advisor  ...

This week, Mia hosts a convening of museums. Some will come from across the river, others from across the ocean. It will be the third meeting of an initiative called MASS Action (Museums as Site for Social Action), a movement that intends to reshape the model of what a 21st-century museum can be. But what  ...