The Minneapolis Institute of Arts owns ten tapestries from a series illustrating the history of Artemisia, queen of ancient Halicarnassus in Asian Minor. Her story was well known in the Sixteenth Century because it was the subject of poems that were read as allegories of the life of Catherine d'Medici. "The Colossus of Rhodes" shows Artemisia capturing the city. The Artemisia tapestries have been in the institute's collection since 1948.

 

New and Improved

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts Reopens

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. - The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has reopened, highlighting the completion of an expansion that includes 33 new galleries and increases exhibition space by more than 65 percent. The reopening is the culmination of a ten-year program to revitalize the century-old institution.

Expansions of the 1915 Neo-classical McKim, Mead & White building enable 4,000 works to be on view, more than three times the number exhibited ten years ago. Through unprecedented support from the Twin Cities community, totaling more than $150 million in contributions, the museum has significantly broadened its art collections and programs.

The reinstallation of the permanent collection focuses on the presentation of the museum's expanded Asian and African art collections, which rank among the top in the country; the extensive decorative arts collection; the collection of European and American paintings; as well as expanded installations of photography, prints and drawings, and textiles.

Highlights include four new period rooms, including two of the very few residential Chinese period rooms on display in the United States Ï an original Eighteenth Century scholar's study and rock garden from the Ch-ing Dynasty (1797) and a grand scale Ming Dynasty reception hall (circa 1600).

In addition to its strong collections of world art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts also is a leader in developing new technology and innovative education programs.

One of the earliest successes of this ten-year project was the 1989 elimination of the general admissions fee, a cornerstone of director Evan Maurer's program to eliminate barriers to community access. Since the implementation of this policy, the museum has nearly doubled its membership to more than 26,000 and increased attendance by 100 percent and remains today one of the few museums in the country offering free admission.

Collection Highlights

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts' permanent collection of fine and decorative arts from around the world spans more than 5,000 years and includes nearly 100,000 objects.

Renowned for its collection of Western classics, in recent years the museum has strengthened its commitment to collection and displaying the art of Eastern cultures. It now boasts one of the finest and most comprehensive Asian art collections in the country.

A focal point of the reopening is the completion of 22 new Asian art galleries featuring an additional 1,500 Asian objects on view. They include Chinese painting, sculpture, furniture, jades, bronzes, textiles, ceramics and precious metals, Japanese paintings, prints, screens, sculpture, ceramics, Buddhist art, and Southeast Asian ceramics and sculpture. Individual galleries are also devoted to Himalayan art, Indian art and the arts of the Islamic tradition.

New installations will prominently feature highlights from the collection such as the Walker jade mountain (Chinese, 1784), the stone Kuan Yin (Chinese, late Sixth Century), a round back folding chair (Chinese, Sixteenth Century), and a wooden Jizo Bosatsu (Japanese, Thirteenth Century). In addition to the Chinese rooms, two Japanese period rooms - a Tea House and a Seventeenth Century reception hall - will be added in 1999.

The museum's decorative arts collection encompasses Western decorative arts from the Renaissance to the modern periods, including glass, furniture, silver and ceramics, as well as original period rooms, including a section of Frank Lloyd Wright's Francis W. Little residence from Deephaven, Minn., (1914) will be installed.

Also on view are the re-installed European and American paintings from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Century including Rembrandt's "Lucretia" (1666), Nicholas Poussin's "The Death of Germanicus" (1627), and Claude Monet's "Grainstack, Sun in the Mist" (1891). The collection also includes some important Twentieth Century sculptures, such as Brancusi's "Yellow Bird" (circa 1912), Modigliani's "Head of a Woman" (circa 1910-14), and masterpieces by Matisse, Manet, Picasso, Bonnard and Moore.

During the ten-year revitalization program, the museum has taken a new approach to the re-installation of its Africa, Oceania and the Americas collection, focusing on the geographic and cultural distinctions of each of these areas rather than grouping them as primitive art. The museum's collection of African art is one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States, and the new African galleries accommodate more than 300 works of art spanning nearly 4,500 years of culture from across the continent. Twenty-five percent of these objects have never before been displayed in the museum. The new galleries - divided into areas for Egyptian, North Africa and Sub-Saharan art - feature rare and ancient works from Africa. Another new gallery features ceremonial sculptures from the Pacific such as a pan-pipe player and a delicate bird frieze from New Ireland.

The museum's collection of art representing the indigenous cultures of North, Central and South America is displayed in four recently completed galleries for the Arts of the Americas. Part of a national pilot program on museum accessibility funded by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, institute curators worked in collaboration with a Native American community advisory committee to conceive the gallery.

Other permanent collection works on view include selections of photographs spanning 1836 to the present; prints and drawings ranging from illuminated pages to contemporary works; textiles from early Coptic weavings to contemporary fiber art, including important Renaissance and late period European tapestries; and the Harold and Mickey Smith Gallery of Jewish Arts and Culture that will provide a permanent space for displaying the ritual objects and other works that represent Jewish artistic and religious traditions.

In addition to an ongoing program of exhibitions drawn from its permanent collection, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts actively loans works from its collection to other museums throughout the world, broadening the exposure of works from the museum's collection to a national and international audience.

The institute has earned national distinction as a leader in developing new technology to enhance the visitor experience and to broaden its audience beyond the museum's physical walls. Twenty interactive touchscreen video kiosks, developed by the museum's own technology department and installed throughout the galleries, allow visitors to custom-design their tours. The system combines photography, film, music, and biographic and geographic information that provides an extensive context for the objects on view.

The museum has won numerous awards for media and technology including the American Association of Museums Muse Award (1998) and the New York Festivals World Medal (1996) and has become a national model for other institutions. The museum was also the first in its region to make its collection and education programs accessible on the World Wide Web through its site www.artsMIA.org. A full program for visitor interactive audio guides also is being developed for introduction in spring 1999.

Museum History

In 1883, The Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, the city's first public arts institution, presented its inaugural exhibition in the upper rooms of an unfinished commercial building. By 1889, the society began exhibiting works in a one-room gallery in the Minneapolis Public Library at Hennepin and 10th Street, where it remained until financier Clinton Morrison donated his ten-acre family homestead, Villa Rosa, on Third Avenue South and East 24th Street, as a site for a new art museum building. The architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White was retained to design the building, which opened on January 7, 1915. The building expanded to include a new south wing, housing the Pillsbury Auditorium, in 1926.

In 1974, the institute opened its expanded facility, part of a master plan by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange for an arts complex that includes an adjoining building for the Children's Theatre Company and a new building for the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

The current renovation and expansion by RSP Architects of Minneapolis and Witcher Construction Company has increased the museum's space from 279,063 square feet to 342,669 square feet, adding galleries and public rooms behind the original building, as well as state-of-the-art storage facilities, while leaving the building's distinctive original facade intact.

A highlight of the expansion and renovation is the restoration of the original Beaux Arts ceiling and skylight in the central gallery on the third floor, which had been hidden by a 14-foot drop ceiling installed during a 1930s renovation project. Artificial skylights have also been installed in the European and American galleries that flank the central gallery.

As part of the expansion and renovation efforts, the museum has completed an extensive landscape plan enhancing the institute's grounds that features a Chinese rock garden with extraordinary stones from various gardens in central China, inspired by the Ch'ing Dynasty (Eighteenth-Nineteenth Century) style. In addition, two Chinese guardian lions recently acquired by the museum now flank the museum's original entrance, heralding a new era of art presentation.