Locals call the Minneapolis Institute of Art simply Mia, and it holds one of the finest encyclopedic art collections in the country, covering 5,000 years of human creativity across 90,000 objects. Admission is free. The building opened in 1915 in a Beaux-Arts design by McKim, Mead and White, the firm that designed Penn Station and the Boston Public Library, and the main hall with its coffered barrel vault announces immediately that this institution takes art seriously.
Later additions by Kenzo Tange in 1974 and Michael Graves in 2006 expanded the building awkwardly, but the collection inside is extraordinary regardless. The Japanese decorative arts collection is one of the finest in the world. The period rooms recreate domestic interiors from seventeenth-century England, eighteenth-century France, and nineteenth-century America.
The Impressionist collection is satisfying without being overwhelming. Mia sits in the Whittier neighborhood, a dense South Minneapolis grid that is today one of the most diverse zip codes in Minnesota, with families from East Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America living within a few blocks of this world-class museum.