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
Outside in: Linnea Oliver explains how nature inspires her jewelry in the Store at Mia
Linnea Oliver, who makes jewelry under the studio name Bird of Virtue, has a reliable way of jumpstarting her creative process: She heads to the beach. “The beach is so linear, so austere, that there doesn’t appear to be a lot going on there,” she says, “but in that sense it’s also a blank canvas.” She ...
Counting sheep: Helena Hernmarck and the revival of Sweden’s signature wool
By Nicole LaBouff
If you haven’t been to the Fountain Court at Mia to see the Blue Wash tapestries by Helena Hernmarck, now is the time. The four, 20-foot-long tapestries are due to come down in late July, and it could be years before they are on view again. During the year that these ...
Once at Mia: Fooled by Chac Mool
He seems so innocent, even naive, though there is a good explanation for this. Mia acquired Chac Mool in 1947 from a respected art dealer, believing he was a masterpiece of ancient mesoamerican sculpture, in the manner of other Chac Mool sculptures found in the Chichen Itza ruins in Mexico. He became a prominent fixture at the ...
Anthony Marchetti traced five of our American period rooms back to their origin. Here’s what he found and what he made in response.
Mia’s period rooms may seem like time capsules, settings preserved in a museum as though their owners have simply stepped away. But in reality they are illusions, a mix of old and new, fact and fiction. As part of our Living Rooms project, Mia commissioned Anthony Marchetti, a Minneapolis-based photographer, to visit the original sites ...
Once at Mia: A masterwork at home
Sam Maslon grew up on the north side of Minneapolis in the early 1900s, when the neighborhood was a Jewish enclave. His family was poor, but he managed to go to Harvard Law School on a scholarship. He rented a room in the home of law professor Felix Frankfurter, a future justice of the U.S. ...
Once at Mia: The lost world of plaster casts
A hundred years ago, they were a numerous if unusual species. Starkly beautiful, strangely familiar. Of this world and yet not completely; they seemed to inhabit a parallel universe. They were, as Mia’s first director, Joseph Breck, put it in a 1914 speech, “pale ghosts of reality.” They were everywhere in Mia in the museum’s early decades, from the ...
The lightHouse, a showcase of living large on a small footprint, debuts at Mia’s Third Thursday: Art of Sustainability
In 2003, Geoffrey Warner created his first weeHouse, a prefabricated, 336-square-foot retreat for a violinist, delivered by semi to an off-the-grid site near Pepin, Wisconsin. A Dwell reader’s dream, it quickly became an icon of stripped-down modern living. He and his team at Alchemy Architects, based in St. Paul, have since built some three dozen ...
Art Inspires: Frank Bures on the lobster coffin of Ghana
The first dead person I ever saw in daylight was a young boy lying next to a road in Tanzania. It was early morning and we were driving south on the country’s main highway when I saw the crows fly up out of a ditch. I craned my neck to see what they’d been eating. ...
Once at Mia: When art was always in bloom
This week, the Friends of the Institute will host the 33rd annual Art in Bloom festival at Mia. It may well be 75 degrees outside. But the first AIB, back in 1983, introduced flowers into the museum after a spate of particularly long, snowy winters at a time when winter was much colder and longer in ...
Girls Design the World goes to Africa
The Kenyan moonlight—serious moonlight—revealed a zebra. Then another. And another. A herd had congregated along the perimeter of Nairobi National Park. This was just the beginning of a cultural exchange between a group from Mia and our Nairobi partners in “Girls Design the World: Supporting Green Communities with STEAM,” and we were already inspired. Since ...