Elizabeth Olds would have liked that I own her 1941 screenprint The Lighthouse. She was determined to make art that was affordable to everyday people, and the damage on this print (note the missing lower left corner in the image above) made it affordable to me. I also have Wanda Gág’s 1925 Spinning Wheel on my  ...

In the hundreds of painted portraits in Mia’s collection, almost no one is smiling. And we don’t know why. We really don’t. People didn’t smile in old photographs either. It may be because of bad teeth or because big smiles were uncouth—a sign of craziness or drunkenness, the so-called “grinning idiot” (this is apparently still true outside the United  ...

The best gift for Mother’s Day is simple: a card. We have plenty of them, an ever-changing selection in-store. We’ll even mail your card for you, so there are no excuses! If you want to show your appreciation beyond a card, here are five ideas we’re loving right now, available in-store and online. Of course we’re  ...

It’s that time of year again, when Art In Bloom brings Mia’s collection to life through floral artistry. For four days every April, we enjoy blossoms from all over the world in the museum’s galleries, paying little regard to their bloom cycles, and it all seems quite “natural.” But the flowers are only here, in  ...

My favorite room in “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson” is the ninth room—technically Gallery 274, though I more affectionately refer to it as the Mountain Room. The theme of this gallery is the love of mountains shared by Chinese emperors and court officials, an almost romanticized view of mountainscapes as a  ...

Al Naylor grew up in Miles City, a former cattle town on the high plains of Montana, and became an executive atop what is now U.S. Bank in Minneapolis. He had always liked museums but disliked the hierarchies and pretensions that seemed to govern them. And so, in the mid-1980s, when he struck up a relationship with the Minneapolis  ...

Last fall, the courtyard between Mia and MCAD was a battlefield, at once ancient and futuristic. Kids with bows and arrows moved in a kind of martial dance, then donned cardboard costumes in the rectangular, early-digital style of Minecraft, the popular world-building computer game. They fought zombies. They were filmed by drones. They declared victory. Rory Wakemup calls it “Ledger  ...

Five minutes of silence. On a warm August morning in the Hamptons, outside New York City, I was sitting on the floor at The Watermill Center, meditating. This time of year, the Center is abuzz with small teams of people working with the center’s founder—renowned theater director and artist Robert Wilson—to shape their project, be it opera,  ...

Did your response include any women artists of color? These are the questions leading the charge for the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ international Women’s History Month social media campaign, #5womenartists. Mia is one of more than 300 organizations around the world participating in this effort to increase gender parity in the arts by sharing  ...

On January 1, 1912, the empress dowager of China signed the abdication papers that ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule—including the Qing Dynasty that encompassed her own family, so evocatively depicted in Mia’s current exhibition “Power and Beauty in China’s Last Dynasty: Concept and Design by Robert Wilson.” China became a republic. And the last  ...