Her handbag can talk. It’s a kind of proto-Walkman, a portable record player called Solocast. And it played some of the first audio guides that Mia rented to visitors. Actually, it’s not clear that the arrangement ever got that far. Solocast solicited the museum’s director, who seemed eager to buy. And there’s some correspondence about placing orders.  ...

Lucretia was lost almost as soon as Rembrandt painted her, in 1666. Her portrait wasn’t in the inventory of works remaining in Rembrandt’s house after his death, and if it went to a buyer it wasn’t noted. By the time that Herschel V. Jones came across the painting, in the mid-1920s, it was in the  ...

Hers was not the most familiar name on the guest list (that would be Stephen King or Sally Field or even Meredith Monk). But when Ann Hamilton received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama at the White House on Thursday, no one who knows her work would have been surprised. In her four-decade career as  ...

They called them rap sessions. Free-form conversations. Just you and me, man. No shoes, no problem. This was the late 1960s or early 1970s, in the Print Study room of the museum. And Barbara Kaerwer, coordinator of Mia’s Student Volunteer program, appears perfectly comfortable meeting the teens where they’re at, tucked sideways in a chair,  ...

He holds the bronze owl in a curiously darkened room, posing for a newspaper photographer as though the incredible bird has just hatched before the flash bulbs. Umehara Sueji was a professor of archaeology and a historian of Far East cultures at the University of Kyoto when he came to Mia in January 1954 to  ...

You know all the superlatives about the Minnesota State Fair, or you should: Highest attendance outside of the Texas state fair, which is far longer; held every year since 1859, a year after statehood (except on five occasions, due to various wars, epidemics, etc.); a corn dog you could wear as a belt. I hated it.  ...

You know all the superlatives about the Minnesota State Fair, or you should: Highest attendance outside of the Texas state fair, which is far longer; held every year since 1859, a year after statehood (except on five occasions, due to various wars, epidemics, etc.); a corn dog you could wear as a belt. I hated it.  ...

Ink paintings of common household furniture overtake one of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program gallery walls at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The ghostly remains of ordinary tables and chairs entice me to take a closer look. As I imagine sitting in those chairs and dining at those tables, this alluring overture gives way to  ...

In 1998, Mia hosted a special exhibition of paintings by Jacob Lawrence and his wife, Gwendolyn Knight. Diane Levy, who supervised the museum’s tours at the time, and Josie Johnson, a trustee, saw an opportunity. It had been clear for several years that the long and demanding process of becoming a docent, to lead tours  ...

They were poets, artists, and teachers and would go on to become architects, arts administrators, and management consultants. But at this moment, in the early 1970s, they were educators, charged with illuminating the mysteries of fine art. It’s a tradition of talks, classes, and school visits that has been around as long as Mia itself. The first bridge between  ...