Minneapolis Institute of Art, Fine arts museum in Minneapolis, United States
The Minneapolis Institute of Art is an art museum in Minneapolis holding more than 100,000 works spanning 5,000 years, organized into five curatorial areas: Arts of Global Africa, Global Contemporary Art, Asian Art, European Art, and Arts of the Americas. Its 1915 Beaux-Arts building by McKim, Mead and White has a central pediment above tall Ionic columns, with two stone lions flanking the steps.
The museum opened after a fundraising effort by the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, which gathered land donations and money for construction. Doors opened to visitors in the early twentieth century.
European paintings hang in galleries with high ceilings and wooden floors, while African sculptures stand in rooms lit by natural light from skylights. Visitors move through halls where Asian ceramics and American decorative pieces show how people across millennia worked with form, color and material.
General admission to the permanent collection is free, and photography of the permanent collection is allowed. The building sits in the Washburn-Fair Oaks area, and the entrance is reached by low stone steps between two lion statues, with metal handrails up the center and sides. The Purcell-Cutts House, east of Lake of the Isles, opens for tours on the second weekend of each month.
The museum also maintains the Purcell-Cutts House, a Prairie School residence that opens for guided tours each second weekend of the month. This house sits away from the main site and shows architectural details from the early modern period.
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