Exhibitions

Upcoming Exhibitions

“Gatsby at 100” explores how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby shaped—and was shaped by—the visual art of his time. This exhibition brings together works from Mia’s collection that embody the decadence, excess, and social upheaval of Fitzgerald’s most famous novel, highlighting paintings, books, and works on paper that are rarely on view. Like Fitzgerald, artists such as Oskar Kokoschka, Fernand Léger, and Henri Matisse, as well as regional artists like Wanda Gág and Clement Haupers, endeavored to capture the contradictions of the Jazz Age, a term coined by Fitzgerald himself.

Lithograph of a woman in a black dress reclining on a sofa set against a yellow background

Gatsby at 100

For her exhibition, Hend Al-Mansour features four installation portraits of Arab women from Minnesota. Each work explores the women’s relationships with their heritage, as interpreted by the artist. By blending traditional motifs and architectural elements with portraiture, the artist creates unique portrayals of Arab American women and their involvement in our communities. Alongside her installations, Al-Mansour is also debuting a new animation.
Al-Mansour is a Saudi American artist who also studied and practiced medicine in Cairo, Egypt, where she gained a reputation among her colleagues for the artwork she drew in doctor’s rooms. Today, her art practice reflects her experiences while amplifying historical and contemporary Muslim women. In addition to her medical degree, Al-Mansour holds an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an M.A. in art history from St. Thomas University. She&#8217;s exhibited internationally and received numerous awards, including the Minnesota State Art Board&#8217;s Creative Support in 2022, the Artist Initiative grant in 2019, the McKnight Fellowship in 2018, the Jerome Fellowship of Printmaking in 2013/14, and the Juror&#8217;s Award of the Contemporary Islamic Art in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 2012. Al-Mansour is a member of Rosalux Gallery; the Interfaith Artists group; and The Habibties, a group of multiethnic women artists that promotes cultural diversity in the United States.
This exhibition is part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, celebrating 50 years in 2025.
Support provided by RBC Wealth Management.

Photo of a room constructed of fabric with an arched entry

Hend Al Mansour:Mihrab: Portraits of Arab American Women

Hend Al-Mansour: Mihrabs: Portraits of Arab American Women

Photography’s mechanical origins have sometimes relegated the medium to that of a tool. The impulse to alter, embellish, and add soon became standard photographic practice. Photographers added colored pigment to the metal surfaces of early daguerreotypes, painted paper photographs, and wrote text directly on their prints and negatives. In sum, they annotated their photographs.
Drawing mostly from Mia’s collection, “Annotations” considers an array of hand-applied interventions on and within photographs, across the medium’s history and through different processes. The photographers’ additive gestures bring viewers closer to a photograph’s role as an object made at a specific time and by a particular individual.

mottled and patchy aerial view of a colorful cityscape that is intersected by a river, and is rendered in blue, white, yellow, and pink pigments with a white sky

Annotations

In the early days of the Renaissance, artists emphasized order. Inspired by ancient Roman architecture and sculpture, they created structured compositions and statuesque figures that evoked lofty, rational thought. However, new ideas began to emerge. In 1506, the excavation of the ancient Laocoön sculpture, depicting the Trojan priest and his sons writhing as they&#8217;re attacked by sea serpents, released Renaissance figures from static poses. Artists began to manipulate the science of perspective and often dropped the idea of images representing the world as seen through a window. Earthy and outlandish thought flourished. Many images became just plain weird. With their creativity unleashed, artists left to us the joy of strangeness.
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Pencil sketch of four muscular naked men on top of each others shoulders against a beige background

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The Weirdening of the Renaissance

Rajput paintings evoke many moods and senses. They tell stories about the beliefs, desires, myths, poetry, and power that shaped the royal Rajput courts of northern India during the 16th to 19th centuries. Rajput artists chose subject matter that was meant to engage all of our senses (taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight) and elicit emotional responses—an aesthetic experience known as rasa. Love, laughter, fury, compassion, disgust, horror, heroism, wonder, and tranquility are the nine rasas of Indian aesthetics and offer one way to interpret Rajput paintings.

Related Events

A watercolor painting of over 10 people watching a thunderstorm approach. Some people are inside and some are on a balcony.

Painted Poetry: Art of the Rajput Courts

This exhibition features paintings, drawings, prints, and more by local high school student artists who participated in a program reflecting on the last five years in Minneapolis. Taking inspiration from the exhibition &#8220;Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,&#8221; students were encouraged to see themselves as giants. Artists Kprecia Ambers, Leslie Barlow, Graci Horne, Lissa Karpeh, and Akiko Ostlund, whose work is also on view, worked with students during multiple visits to create this powerful exhibition.
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Photograph of the backs of three young people who are standing in front of an artwork in a Mia gallery

Teen Perspectives: Minneapolis as Monument

“Remnants” brings together artworks by South African artists who focus on the invisible and visible structures of colonization and apartheid (1948–1994)—and their historical impacts. In some instances, artists directly critique the destructive forces of apartheid on South Africans of color. By centering the everyday lives of people living under the regime of apartheid, these works reveal the individual humanity of their subjects while illuminating the forces of their oppression. In response to South Africa’s democratization in 1994, artists in this show devise fresh visual language for a newly expressive era. Drawn mostly from Mia’s collection, the works within this show reveal the breadth of artistic practice that flourished during and after the apartheid regime.

Black-and-white photograph of overgrown hedges that have become so thick they look like a wall

Remnants

Artists at Work: The Mia Staff Art Show

Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection

A Little Fun at My Work: Women in Design and Craft

Catch of the Day: Humans and Marine Animals in Japan

Not all of the artistry at Mia comes from outside the museum—many employees are artists as well, and this exhibition spotlights their work.
The Staff Art Show was organized and curated by Team Mia, a group of museum staff devoted to cultivating a positive work environment, encouraging generosity and relationship-building among staff, providing accessible opportunities for connection and growth, and recognizing and celebrating museum employees. We are pleased to showcase the immense talent among us.

Colorful scene of mountains in blue, green, teal, purple, and orange with a bright pink sky

&#8220;Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room: The Alice S. Kandell Collection&#8221; includes more than two hundred gilt-bronze sculptures, paintings, silk hangings, and carpets that were created in Tibet between the 1300s and early 1900s. Buddhist ritual objects are displayed in the context of an elaborate private household shrine, a space used for offerings, devotional prayer, rituals, and contemplation. With its flickering candlelight, sonorous chanting, and the subtle smell of incense, the glittering room provides an oasis for peaceful contemplation within the galleries at Mia.
Tour a selection of objects in this guide. 
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Prepare your students for a visit with this guide. 
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Step Inside the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room &#8211; 3D Virtual Tour 
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The exuberant 20-century ceramic artist Clarice Cliff famously said, in response to critics, “Having a little fun at my work does not make me any less of an artist, and people who appreciate truly beautiful and original creations in pottery are not frightened by innocent tomfoolery.&#8221;
Drawing from the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, along with promised gifts from the Tamara and Michael Root collection of studio ceramics, this exhibition at the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis showcases the delights and talents of women in the fields of modern and contemporary industrial design and craft. The exhibition features examples of design from Cliff as well as British silver designer Kate Harris, American inventor Marion Weeber, and prolific designer Eva Zeisel. Studio ceramics include works from important American ceramic educator Laura Andreson, Finnish contemporary artist Kirsi Kivivirta, and clay sculptor Karen Karnes, among others. The exhibition is on view in twenty cases in the ground-floor concourse and skyway levels of the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Minneapolis.
Wells Fargo Center Hours: Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. &#8211; 5 p.m. 
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Living on an archipelago, surrounded by water on all sides, the Japanese have always had a close relationship with the sea. The marine life depicted in Japanese art, however, is often more symbolic than real, meant to convey literary, visual, or seasonal associations. Sometimes, even the connections to the sea are abstract, such as geometric patterns meant to evoke fishnets or scales on dishes and clothing. This exhibition explores the sea creatures that permeate Japanese art and culture, and dives into their deeper meaning.
<h2>Name That Fish</h2>
In October, Mia held an online contest to give Imai Sadamasa’s Napoleon Fish a nickname. After combing through hundreds of great visitor submissions, the artist chose Edmund Fishgerald.

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Current Exhibitions

A Generous Outlook: Gifts from Fay Gallus and Richard Sweet

Cassatt on Paper

At the Moulin Rouge

Latin American Art at Mia II

Collectors Fay Gallus and Richard Sweet recently gave Mia an exceptional group of photographs: works by Eugene Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Irving Penn, Alec Soth, Weegee, and other celebrated photographers of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. This show honors the generosity of these collectors in supporting Mia’s mission of collecting, preserving, and making accessible outstanding works of art. At the same time, it underscores the strength of Mia’s photography collection, which continues to grow from important donations like this one, enriching the communities the museum serves.

One of the leading peintres-graveurs, or painter-printmakers, of late nineteenth-century Paris, Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) applied her painterly skill to a variety of print techniques. Balancing color, line, and texture, she breathed life into intimate scenes of domestic labor and leisure. &#8220;Cassatt on Paper&#8221; presents highlights from Mia’s collection of prints by Cassatt, offering a rare view into the life and art of this important woman artist.

image of a woman with dark hair pulled back, wearing a green dress; holding a standing child in her arms; child is wearing a pale green smock; blue background

An aristocratic transplant to the bohemian haunts of Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec captured the nightclubs and cabarets of Montmartre in the 1880s and ’90s, setting to canvas and paper their glittering lights and dazzling entertainments. Among his favorite spots were Le Chat Noir, Le Mirliton, and, above all others, the Moulin Rouge. One of his most remarkable paintings, At the Moulin Rouge, captures a night at the legendary nightclub with a band of regulars, including several of its most famous performers and Toulouse-Lautrec himself.
On loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, At the Moulin Rouge is at the center of this exhibition about Toulouse-Lautrec, his circle of fellow artists, and how they depicted the transformation of Parisian nightlife at the turn of the century. The exhibition features a dozen rarely seen works from Mia’s collection, including French posters and drawings from the era.
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Upcoming Events

Image of At the Moulin Rouge, a painting by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Art from Latin America and the Caribbean has been collected by Mia since the 1940s, particularly in the form of ceramics, objects in gold, and textiles produced by artmakers of the ancient civilizations that populated Central and South America. The collection has significantly increased over the years largely because of donations and purchases of works by historical and contemporary artists. These artworks constitute today the foundation in which the museum plans to build a more consistent and inclusive collection, one that can better represent the diversity and creativity of Latin American artists.