In a city that goes out of its way to present a modern face to the world, it's only fitting that one of Minneapolis' finest and oldest buildings is a museum. The Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) ranges across a 3.2-hectare site, just south of the city centre, in one of the city's plusher neighbourhoods. It was built in 1915 and is widely praised for its Beaux-Arts beauty on the outside. Inside, that beauty is magnified tenfold. The MIA has a diverse and wide-ranging collection of paintings, sculptures, prints and artefacts.
You could say the MIA has bought the artistic wonders of the whole wide world to this corner of the Midwest. With its newly built Target Wing, it can now display 5,000 of 100,000 collected items. It owes many of these fine works of art to donations in the 19th and early 20th-centuries by the rich industrial barons of the area. The wonderful French Romantic and Realist collections, including Eugène Delacroix’s “The Fanatics of Tangier”, owe their presence to such generosity. Van Gogh, Degas and Goya are also all represented here.
More recently, the museum has built up an excellent collection of Asian Art, including Chinese bronzes, furniture and ceramics, and Japanese prints and silks. Two fabulous 16th-century Japanese reconstructions – of a tearoom and an audience hall – were introduced in 2007, and are now one of the highlights of the museum. There are also many displays from India, the Himalayas, Southeast Asia and Korea.
Native American culture also features strongly in the museum, covering everything from a 3,000-year-old Olmec mask from Mexico, to a 19th-century Sun Mask from the Pacific Northwest coast of the US. And it's not just the permanent exhibitions that stretch across time and cultures. The MIA arranges a sizeable programme, with 12 or more visiting exhibitions on show at any one time. If you're up for a “nourishing of the imagination”, then it seems the MIA will be welcoming you with open arms.
