In 1942, Richard S. Davis was in Michigan, fresh out of Harvard. The Cranbrook Academy of Art had just opened and Davis (shown above in his office) had become its first curator. As he would later do at the MIA, Davis pushed Cranbrook to collect modern and contemporary art. And then, a little more than  ...

Love was in the air on February 13 and 14 when the Minneapolis Institute of Art once again transformed into the Minneapolis Institute of Hearts. In a nod to Valentine’s Day, museum-goers are offered paper hearts to leave with their favorite works of art. It’s become my favorite event at the museum, as this simple, sweet  ...

Henri Matisse, the modern master whose colorful, game-changing art goes on view at the MIA on Sunday in Matisse: Masterworks from the Baltimore Museum of Art, is no longer taking commissions. Luckily for the MIA, Shawn McCann is close at hand. By day, he works in facilities maintenance at the museum, clearing snow, fixing leaks,  ...

Cori Wegener is the rare curator who can break down a rifle as well as the Prairie School’s influence on architecture. She was in the Army Reserves and an assistant curator at the MIA when she was sent to Baghdad after the National Museum of Iraq was looted in 2003 and to Haiti after the  ...

He had noticed it for years. And then, after a January visit, for reasons unclear even to him, he was finally moved to say something. “I’m a tournament chess player,” he wrote in an email to the MIA, “and I noticed that the chess set in the Charleston Drawing Room has an unlikely position on  ...

The Monuments Men were given an impossible, well, monumental job—which of course is why their story makes for a great book and a great movie. If not set up to fail, exactly, they were certainly looking for needles in haystacks. In fact it’s hard to imagine a more sparsely staffed unit of the Allied war  ...

In honor of Joan Mondale’s life, and in admiration for the many ways she championed the arts—and artists—of Japan, the United States, and Minnesota, we salute her: her passion, generosity, and contributions as an educator and docent at the MIA. Here, we reprint her words, published in Arts magazine, about one of her favorite places  ...

Sun Yung Shin, a Minneapolis-based poet and teacher, was inspired by Ksitigarbha and the Ten Kings of Hell, a silk painting on display in gallery 206. 명 부 쩐 – 冥 府 殿 Myeongbujeon, the Hall of the Underworld “The day that makes one an orphan.” —Myung Mi Kim, Works On the day that makes  ...

In The Monuments Men, opening February 7, George Clooney is his usual charming self in a dapper mustache and Army officer’s garb, cracking wise in Art Deco cafes and backslapping buddies Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and John Goodman as they race through Europe in the wake of D-Day. Billed as “the greatest treasure hunt in  ...

In the new movie Her, a lonely introvert played by Joaquin Phoenix begins a relationship with the talking operating system of his computer. Set in the familiar future, it’s been described as a “science fiction romantic-comedy drama,” another way of saying it’s a film by Spike Jonze, who likes to mess with genres not to  ...