You don’t get to 1oo years old without a good sense of humor. So at our #BDayMIA Third Thursday last night, we asked visitors for captions to four historic images of the museum from our archives. And they delivered. Here are the winning captions, along with the photos that inspired them. And for (slightly) more serious discussions  ...

It wasn’t long after gunmen slaughtered the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, and supporters of free speech around the world rose to support the French satirical magazine, that an uneasiness seeped into the discussion. Those cartoons of the prophet Muhammad: goggle-eyed, beak-nosed, stereotypically turbaned. Charlie may be many things—irreverent, irrepressible—but it is certainly not subtle.  ...

He was photographing the MIA galleries, but he was almost certainly the best subject in them that day. This was 1937, and the young man—looking like he walked off the Hollywood set of a Yukon musical—was an early adopter of small, handheld cameras, what were then called “candid cameras.” Today, the MIA allows photography in most  ...

At 3 p.m. on the afternoon of January 7, 1915, the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in downtown Minneapolis sent up a prayer: “Accept now, we beseech thee, our father in heaven, under thy gracious favor, the fair temple which we today dedicate to thy name for the ennobling purposes of art.” May God, he  ...

The MIA began with two letters. One proferred the land, the other the starter money. And within four years, the whole thing was built. On January 3, 1911, Clinton Morrison wrote a letter to the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, explaining his ideas for how the proposed art museum should be situated in the city.  ...

Merope, one of the seven sisters known as the Pleiades, is depicted in a statue at the MIA as a woman searching, casting about for the family that deserted her for the act of marrying a mortal, Sisyphus. One can only imagine the trauma of that separation. Thus: Merope Calls Home to Sort Out Her  ...

His sweater, torn to shreds, gives him away. An urchin, a ragamuffin, a child of the Great Depression. He is William Moloney from northeast Minneapolis, according to the caption, age 11. What could he relate to in the marble temple to the arts? In 2015, as the MIA celebrates a century of art and wonder,  ...

His sweater, torn to shreds, gives him away. An urchin, a ragamuffin, a child of the Great Depression. He is William Moloney from northeast Minneapolis, according to the caption, age 11. What could he relate to in the marble temple to the arts? In 2015, as the MIA celebrates a century of art and wonder,  ...

Midway through the exhibition “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” up through January 4 at the MIA, the gallery called Hollywood on the Tiber spotlights the role of films and celebrities in popularizing Italian fashion worldwide in the 1950s and ’60s. Many of the objects in this section boast high-profile provenances, having been worn by Audrey  ...

Midway through the exhibition “Italian Style: Fashion Since 1945,” up through January 4 at the MIA, the gallery called Hollywood on the Tiber spotlights the role of films and celebrities in popularizing Italian fashion worldwide in the 1950s and ’60s. Many of the objects in this section boast high-profile provenances, having been worn by Audrey  ...