The god arrived in 1917 with unusual restraint. Boxed, braced, on a bed of what looks like shavings or straw. The Minneapolis Institute of Art had been open only a couple of years. The ancient black marble statue, representing the popular incarnation of Buddha variously known as Guanyin, Kuan-yin, or Avalokitesvara, was one of the museum’s first  ...

It wasn’t a promising call: “My stepfather liked to draw and I’m looking for a museum to house his work.” Rarely has Tom Rassieur, Mia’s John E. Andrus III Curator of Prints and Drawings, taken such a call and the artwork waiting at the other end of the line. Never, in fact. Not until Jim Hogan drove to the  ...

“State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” opened February 18 at Mia and features dozens of living artists from across America. Three are from Minnesota: Andy DuCett, Chris Larson, and Cameron Gainer. A small fraction, the exhibition’s curators acknowledge, of the art being made all around us. “There likely have never been more artists at work,” they note  ...

It was early November in 1936 when Elizabeth Carney, the young woman on the right, gave a lecture at Mia on the Spanish Civil War. She was a student at the Minneapolis School of Art, then housed on the museum campus—she’s talking to the wife of the school director. She had been studying in Spain that  ...

The painting landed in Minneapolis like a pope: Titian’s The Temptation of Christ, purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Art in late 1925. A Titian. There were less than a dozen Titians in America at the time. Now we—a 10-year-old museum in a part of the country that was a forested frontier just a couple  ...

Sonya Clark didn’t plan to be ubiquitous in Minnesota. It just happened, one invitation after another, such that she will have artworks in three Twin Cities exhibitions this winter, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, at All My Relations gallery, and in Mia’s upcoming “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” survey of  ...

Édouard Manet’s Le Fumeur (The Smoker) was unveiled at Mia in 1968 by Anthony Clark, then director of the museum. A solitary person with a pipe was sort of a 19th-century meme, and  Manet made various drawings and etchings of his subject, a  comfortably bewhiskered man believed to be his neighbor, that have circulated widely—they’re in the collections of  ...

They were among the first works to enter Mia’s collection, four large-scale female allegories of the Four Elements (from left to right): Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Mrs. C. J. (Ella) Martin had spotted the cartoons, that is, designs drawn to scale, at the gallery of Edmund Brooks, a Minneapolis dealer specializing in rare books, and she bought the set expressly to give  ...

It’s hard to know what these schoolchildren—boys standing, girls on the floor—thought of the Charleston Drawing Room and the adjacent dining room, moved to Mia from one of the finest colonial mansions in Charleston, South Carolina. The period rooms opened in 1931 as a memorial from the Bell family. Judging from the setup and the clothing, this photo was  ...

As part of Mia’s Living Rooms initiative, a reanimating of its period rooms, the Queen Anne space has been transformed into a Jane Austen Reading Room. There are chairs, tables, and shelves full of books by Austen and her contemporaries for visitors to sit and read, like Austen famously did in her brother’s Chawton House library.  ...