Why Botticelli still matters (maybe more than ever) — By Tim Gihring A few weeks ago, as the long hot summer in Minnesota began to cool, I called up Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi Galleries, in Florence, Italy. For six years, Schmidt had been the head of Decorative Arts, Textiles, and Sculpture at Mia. He is tall…

Reviving the long-lost salon music of the French Revolution — By Peter Sheppard Skærved The Minneapolis Institute of Art is one of my favourite museums on either side of the Atlantic. I live in London, which is not short of galleries, but if Mia were there I would visit regularly. I have come to know and love the museum, over…

How Marcia Resnick captured the spirit of Downtown New York, and lived to tell — By Frank H. Goodyear III, Lisa Hostetler, and Casey Riley The exhibition Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be is on view at Mia from August 13 to December 11, 2022. The following introduction has been excerpted from the exhibition catalogue, Marcia Resnick: As It Is or Could Be…

And what he might think of that — By Tim Gihring For the current exhibition on Vincent van Gogh’s paintings of olive groves at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the museum collaborated with local jewelers Jac & Violet to create earrings inspired by the artist. …

Cleaned and repaired, fish-skin coats from Siberia reveal indigenous knowledge — By Alex Bortolot Visitors to “Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan,” on view at Mia through September 11, will be continuously astonished by the diversity of materials that makers across the Japanese archipelago have fashioned into garments. Some materials make a lot of sense: a linen-like textile woven from banana…

The making of an extraordinary robe — By Diane Richard If you were an Ainu robe maker, how would your design process begin? Would you draw swirls and biomorphic shapes on your precious trade cottons? Or would you just start cutting? Would you opt for embroidery floss with POP!, thinking “That red thread really works, especially if…

What a newly discovered fingerprint tells us about a masterwork — By Diane Richard One-hundred thirty-three years ago, on a day in late November, Vincent van Gogh reached for his freshly painted canvas. It was during his self-imposed stay at a psychiatric hospital in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France, where his windows overlooked a grove of craggy olive trees with…

Ensuring the reckoning, in works like “The Nazi Drawings,” would be as shocking as it was overdue — By Tim Gihring On July 15, 1944, a few weeks after her 15th birthday, Anne Frank wrote in her diary, “It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people…

The uncompromising art and life of Louise Catherine Breslau — By Tim Gihring Among the earnest images of farmers, weavers, and other redoubtable peasants in “Reflections on Reality: Drawings and Paintings from the Weisberg Collection,” a quietly alluring showcase of Realism at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, is a bored-looking boy in a blue shirt: Yves Österlund, age 9. Österlund…