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. …

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 and 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…

They spent 30 years hunting forgotten artworks. Now a museum exhibition shares their treasures. — By Michaela Baltasar-Feyen In 1966, Gabriel Weisberg and Yvonne Herzog met over a game of ping-pong on a transatlantic crossing. Gabriel was an American art-history student, on his way to France to work on his PhD dissertation; Yvonne was a Swiss social worker, heading home to Geneva after a year…

How to talk to the dead, Wisconsin style — By Tim Gihring Among the ghosts and the UFOs, the seers and the somnambulists, the Ouija Boards and something called a Spiritoscope, now on view at Mia in the exhibition “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art,” the séance dress of Louise Parke is strikingly personal. Here is a handmade…

Following Indigenous modes of curation, a museum upends the usual narrative of Native art — By Juan Lucero and Jill Ahlberg Yohe It was time for a change. We knew it. The museum knew it. The world knew it. Recently, we changed the Native Art galleries at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In our hearts and minds, as curators during this time of reckoning for…

A photographer reflects on portraits of Ukraine — By Tim Gihring In 1997, Katherine Turczan began showing a series of photographs she had made in Ukraine. …