Art in Bloom, the MIA’s preeminent event for patrons, pairing fresh floral displays with art in the galleries, runs May 1 to 4. But there are thousands of floral-related artworks in the MIA collection, the great majority of which are not currently on view. So here’s a quick tour, an armchair Art in Bloom of images you won’t be seeing this week.
The MIA has a couple dozen of these birch-bark flowers, attributed to Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) women like “Mrs. Paul Cyrette,” who made this spray.
This wicked flower design for wallpaper or a textile, attributed to Winold Reiss, combines an Arts and Crafts sensibility with “Little Shop of Horrors.”
Cy DeCosse captured this night-blooming cactus in the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum during the one evening all year that it burst open, shooting it against a hand-painted backdrop.
“A Flower Gardener, from Des Manouvriers habilles,” by Martin Engelbrecht, is a hand-colored engraving from 1735 which suggests that French gardeners plucked one bloom for themselves for every three they cut.
Utagawa Hiroshige’s woodblock print of “Gotenyama Hill in Bloom” captures the annual ritual of walking among the cherry blossoms in the Shinagawa district of Tokyo.
The aptly titled “Flowers in a Vase on a Ledge” is a classic Dutch Golden Age still life from the 17th century by Abraham Beyeren.
Richard Holzschuh’s untitled silhouette of a girl holding a small bouquet while looking at a bird in a tree is, like many of Holzschuh’s drawings, achingly laden with nostalgia.