On July 18, 1610, Caravaggio died in Porto Ercole, a tiny port town 100 miles north of Rome. He was just 38 years old. His dramatic, intensely realistic works—like Judith and Holofernes, currently on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art—made him one of the most famous artists of his day. But Caravaggio was violent and  ...

Christopher Selleck’s “Body // Weight” exhibition, on view at Mia as part of the Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program, uses video and sculptural works to animate the ritualistic practices of gym culture. Primarily portraiture, it’s a tender invitation to reconsider the archetype of American masculinity and the constraints it imposes on our dominant  ...

Fifteen years ago, Andreas Marks had never heard of Fukuda Kodōjin. Hardly anyone had. Kodōjin, who was born in rural Japan in 1865, was among the last of the literati painters, a tradition of scholarship, poetry, and art that died with him in the wake of World War II. By the  ...

For the month of June, Mia is highlighting  2SLGBTQIA+ artists and themes through artworks spanning centuries and social epochs. Many of these works have been made by queer artists, others depict queer themes throughout history. Explore the works in the galleries or virtually in this self-guided tour. Harriet Goodhue Hosmer, Medusa, 1854 Gallery 323 At a  ...

For eight weeks, a cohort of older adults—many living with HIV—have come to Mia to turn their life experiences into story and song. The workshop “Expressions of Joy” is a collaboration between Mia’s Vitality Arts program, Rainbow Health, and Theatre 55, and the resulting pieces with be performed  ...

“It’s the only decapitation painting I did.” Not many living artists can claim that—paintings of beheadings not being, perhaps, as popular as they once were. Then again, not many living artists have a painting in the same gallery as Judith and Holofernes (1599) by Baroque master Caravaggio (Italian, 1571–1610), on view  ...

When Tim Yip was conceiving the look of “Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes,” Mia’s multimedia show of delicately inscribed vessels made for archaic ceremonies, he suggested including fragments of objects at the outset of the exhibition. He didn’t suggest why. Yang Liu, Mia’s curator of Chinese art and chair of its Asian  ...

As one of Minnesota’s largest companies, 3M has long supported Mia. But recently one of 3M’s employee groups came together to support an exhibition on its own: Teo Nguyen’s “Việt Nam Peace Project,” a series of photorealistic paintings depicting the kind of lush landscapes that often serve as the backdrop to  ...

More than a thousand years ago, in the early 11th century, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, a book often called the world’s first novel. The name was a nom-de-plume. The author was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court, and she and a few other noblewomen—notably Sei Shonagon, the author  ...

In 2019, the Art Gallery of Ontario purchased some 3,500 photographs of Jamaica, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the Caribbean, taken between 1840 and 1940. They had been collected by Patrick Montgomery, an archivist in New York, and capture the changing lives, landscapes, and labor conditions in the century between  ...