Blog
Fresh perspectives on art, life, and current events. From deep dives to quick takes to insightful interviews, it’s the museum in conversation. Beyond the walls. Outside the frame. Around the world.
The Latest
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Dog days: A brief, fur-filled history of canines in the collection
By Tim Gihring
The dog days of summer are upon us, officially the twenty days before and after the Dog Star, otherwise known as Sirius, rises and falls with the sun. Unofficially, of course, it’s that hot, humid time in Minnesota when all you want to do is laze around and hope someone else ...
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When art was an Olympic “sport”
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Mia goes to Paris: Olympic sports (or things that should be) in art
By Tim Gihring
The 2024 Summer Olympics opens in Paris on July 26 with thirty-two sports, including some newish events like surfing, skateboarding, and breaking (aka breakdancing). The Games evolve. When Paris hosted in 1900, poodle clipping was a trial event (of course)—groom the most poodles in two hours. (It didn’t catch on, c’est ...
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Mia seeks volunteers for revamped guide program
For many years, Mia’s volunteer guides—known as docents then—underwent two years of training, a kind of master’s in Mia’s collection and facilitating tours. Much has changed. For the next cohort of guides, starting in September, the training period will be thirteen weeks—a mix of online and in-person classes. And the volunteering options have been simplified ...
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Pictures of health: Teen artists on how racism affects wellness
Ella Alden Pope moved a lot when she was younger, from one part of the Twin Cities to another. The housing varied along with the neighborhoods, from well-maintained to well-worn. And she could tell the difference, physically as well as mentally. “It’s hard to focus and do your best when you’re not feeling healthy day ...
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An exhilarating preview of Mia’s fall Toulouse-Lautrec show
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s images of Parisian nightlife in the 1880s and ’90s are as emblematic as they are engaging, windows into a vanished world that feels strangely familiar. You’ve seen them, even if you weren’t sure what you were looking at or who the artist was. This fall, you’ll have the chance to see and ...
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About that viral video “Let’s do National Gymnastics!” from “The Shape of Time”
In the final gallery of “The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989,” the special exhibition on view at Mia through June 23, is a 10-minute video of people exercising. Called Let’s do National Gymnastics!—the exclamation point largely ironic—it’s a stylized edit of a highly regimented routine: arm swinging, neck twisting, and leg lunging to ...
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That time Robert Rauschenberg came to Mia
By Tim Gihring
Robert Rauschenberg is having a moment. Again. For the first time in thirty years, his 1980s series based on his travels to Chile, Japan, the Soviet Union, and half a dozen other countries—called the Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, or ROCI—is on view, in a London gallery. And as the 60th Venice ...
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Mia mourns the passing of Frank Stella
Frank Stella, a giant of the art world who helped shift its center of gravity to the United States in the post-war era, died on May 4 in New York. He was 87. Stella has long had an outsize presence at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His monumental painting Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II has held a ...
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The shape of self: A Korean adoptee reflects on Mia’s show of contemporary Korean art
By Taylor Bye
I was 23 before I fully embraced my identity as a Korean American woman. Until then, I had never truly considered my ethnicity or race to be something central to my identity. This denial was founded in the micro-aggressions I faced from an early age: classmates asking “where my real parents ...