MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) has acquired eight works that reflect the museum’s ongoing commitment to building a collection that is both art-historically significant and global in scope. The acquisitions strengthen Mia’s holdings in Latin American colonial art, European painting and works on paper, contemporary American art, and Asian decorative arts. Among the highlights are a silver gilt salt cellar recovered from the wreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha—the first work of early Latin American silversmithing to enter the collection and the only work from this ship in an American museum collection; an 18th-century Guatemalan polychrome wood sculpture that is the only known example of its Marian subject in an American museum; and a major new painting by artist Titus Kaphar titled Do You Remember Douglas Street, that relates to his acclaimed debut feature film.

“These acquisitions reflect who we are as a museum and the ways in which we serve and engage our communities through art,” said Katie Luber, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “Each of these works fills a genuine gap, whether in our collection, in our scholarship, or in what we are able to offer our visitors. Together, they allow us to tell more connected and engaging stories across cultures and across time, from the workshops of colonial Guatemala to the Arctic light of the Lofoten Islands, to an artist’s memory of the street of their childhood home. That range, and that depth, is part of what makes Mia’s collection distinctive.”

Salt cellar, Peru (c. 1620)

This silver gilt salt cellar is a product of the extraordinary convergence of resources and skill that defined early colonial Peru. The massive silver deposits of Cerro Rico de Potosí—discovered in 1545 in what is now Bolivia—supplied an estimated 80 percent of the world’s silver during the 16th through 18th centuries. The longstanding metallurgical expertise of pre-Columbian Andean civilizations made it possible to transform that material into finely crafted luxury objects almost immediately. The salt cellar dates to the first decades of the 17th century, less than eighty years after the establishment of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and its design reflects lingering Mannerist influences: geometric clarity and architectural structure derived from the Renaissance, combined with richly articulated scrollwork and ornamental detail.

The object carries a provenance directly relevant to its historical significance: it was part of the treasure recovered from the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon that sank in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622, carrying an extraordinary cargo of gold, silver, emeralds, and other goods bound for Spain. Artifacts from the Atocha are now largely held in private collections—no major U.S. museum owns one—making this acquisition exceptionally rare.

Maker’s marks on the object correspond to punch marks associated with works from the Potosí region during the reigns of Philip III and Philip IV. The salt cellar is the first work of early Latin American silversmithing to enter Mia’s collection.

Our Lady of the Apocalypse, Guatemala (18th century)

Colonial Latin America was shaped profoundly by the Catholic Church’s role in converting Indigenous populations, a mission that required the broad dissemination of religious imagery throughout the region. Guatemala emerged as one of the most important centers of sculptural production in the colonial period, its tradition strongly influenced by models and techniques from Seville, Spain. Guatemalan religious sculpture is distinguished by its exquisite carving, luminous flesh tones achieved through layered oil paint and varnish, and vibrant polychromy enhanced with gold leaf. The small scale of this polychrome wood figure—just 14 inches tall—suggests it was made for domestic devotion, and its fully three-dimensional modeling indicates it was not designed for an altarpiece.

The sculpture represents the Virgin Mary as the Woman of the Apocalypse, described in the Book of Revelation as a woman clothed with the sun, crowned with twelve stars. Here, Mary stands upon a celestial orb rather than the moon, her foot pressing on the head of a serpent, symbols of her triumph over sin through the birth of Christ. The invocation of the Virgin of the Apocalypse is rare in U.S. museum collections, and this work is the only known sculptural example of this Marian subject in an American museum. It is also the first example of Spanish colonial religious sculpture to enter Mia’s collection, and pairs meaningfully with a recently acquired painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as the Apocalypse iconography is among the key theological sources behind the Guadalupe image.

Do You Remember Douglas Street? (2023–24), Titus Kaphar (1976—)

Titus Kaphar is known for paintings, sculptures, and installations that examine the history of Black American representation. In his practice, he cuts, crumples, shrouds, and physically transforms canvases to reveal unspoken truths about history and memory, exposing stretcher bars, creating active absences, and laying bare what is typically hidden inside or beneath the painted surface. Do You Remember Douglas Street? belongs to a series of fifteen paintings created for the artist’s debut feature film, Exhibiting Forgiveness, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2024 and received critical acclaim upon its wider release that fall.

The painting depicts the childhood home of the film’s protagonist, Tarrell, at nightfall, with its walls and roofline rendered in colors that evoke a bruise. To the right of the main canvas, a smaller canvas replicating the house juts out, its edge supported by a preteen figure whose right sneaker is soaked red with his own blood, from an injury sustained while being forced to work alongside his father. The work distills generational trauma into that single red shoe, heightening the emotional power of Kaphar’s narrative painting.

Three-barreled revolving matchlock gun decorated with wave pattern (c. 1750–1850), Japan, Edo period (1603–1868)

Firearms were introduced to Japan in 1543, when a Portuguese merchant ship ran aground during a storm, and their adoption was swift, driven by ongoing warfare in Japan at the time. Weapons-makers rapidly developed their own production of matchlock muzzleloaders known as hinawajū. Throughout the Edo period, Japanese gunsmiths remained faithful to the matchlock mechanism even as the newer and more reliable flintlock technology became known through trade with the Dutch.
Instead, Japanese makers focused their innovations on barrel length, bore, and decoration. Multi-barreled guns were among the rarest and most prized products of this tradition. This three-barreled revolving matchlock is exceptionally rare. The gun is elaborately decorated with gilded waves and florals—costly embellishment befitting objects that were as much status symbols as weapons—and will be an important addition to Mia’s existing collection of Japanese weapons and samurai-related objects.

Thirty-two Manifestations of Guanyin and Heart Sutra (1757), Mingzhong, Chinese (active 1733–1767)

This handscroll presents the Heart Sutra—one of the most widely recited Buddhist scriptures in East Asia—followed by a pictorial cycle depicting the Thirty-Two Manifestations of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. The text and images are rendered in gold line on indigo-dyed silk, a technique rooted in a long East Asian Buddhist tradition of producing luxury manuscripts as devotional offerings. The tradition of writing scriptures in gold or silver on dark-colored paper or silk dates to the Tang dynasty, the preciousness of the materials intended to honor the teachings and transform the manuscript itself into a sacred object.

The shimmering gold lines against the deep indigo produce a luminous effect that heightens both the visual impact and the spiritual authority of the work.

The scroll is attributed to the Buddhist monk Mingzhong, whose signature and seals appear near the end, alongside a date corresponding to 1757, during the Qianlong period. The iconographic program derives from the Universal Gateway chapter of the Lotus Sutra, which describes how Guanyin appears in different forms—as a monk, a ruler, a woman, a supernatural being—to aid sentient beings. Each scene is accompanied by a brief inscription, and the sequence culminates in a depiction of Guanyin enclosed within a radiant mandorla. Handscrolls combining the Heart Sutra with a complete visual cycle of the Thirty-Two Manifestations rendered in gold on indigo silk are uncommon, and this work adds a rare example of a devotional manuscript integrating scripture, calligraphy, and religious imagery to Mia’s holdings of Qing-dynasty Buddhist art.

Harbour Scene from Lofoten (c. 1901–07), Anna Boberg, Swedish (1864–1935)

Anna Boberg is the most important Swedish woman landscape painter of the early twentieth century, and this painting is the first Nordic landscape by a woman artist to enter Mia’s collection. Born in Stockholm in 1864, Boberg was largely self-taught, working outdoors with watercolors and oil sketches. She exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, traveled extensively through Europe and the Middle East, and became internationally recognized for work that critics admired for its attention to atmosphere and light. Her first visit to the Lofoten Islands, off the northwest coast of Norway, came in 1901—a trip that would define the rest of her career. She returned there annually for over thirty years, describing herself in her autobiography as a “polar researcher” and upending male-centric narratives of Arctic exploration.

Harbour Scene from Lofoten is distinguished among Boberg’s many works depicting the harbor by its unusual vantage point, showing the fishing boats from slightly below, with an extraordinary progression from a shadowed foreground to a brilliantly sunlit midground.

Boberg regarded this painting as among her best work and sent it to be exhibited at the 1907 Venice Biennale. It depicts the lofotfisket, the Lofoten fishing industry, with details that reward close looking: frozen ropes, a dock buried under heavy snow, and water that shimmers like fish scales. This painting continues Mia’s work to build its Nordic painting collection, bridging early Norwegian landscapes with the later work of Scandinavian modernists.

After the Storm (1844) and Preparatory Study for After the Storm (1841), Knud Baade (1808–1879)

Norwegian artist Knud Baade spent his formative years studying in Dresden alongside Johan Christian Dahl—the father of Norwegian landscape painting—and working in close proximity to noted German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. From Dahl, Baade developed a rigorous commitment to direct observation of nature, and from Friedrich, he embraced an increasingly spiritual approach to landscape as a meditation on the human relationship with the sublime.

After the Storm, painted in the final year of Baade’s second Dresden stay, is a direct engagement with Friedrich’s Wreck in the Moonlight (1835). Where Friedrich placed his wreck on a rocky shore bathed in moonlight, Baade set his adrift at sea under a sky streaked with violet, pink, and gold — a single figure marooned on the wreckage. The accompanying preparatory drawing dates to 1841, the year after Friedrich’s death, and makes the homage explicit: Baade began the composition in direct response to losing his mentor, who died in 1840. Together, the painting and drawing bridge Mia’s early Norwegian work by Dahl with its later nineteenth-century Scandinavian landscapes, and and introduces its connections to German Romantic painting.

Corfu: A View from Above the Village of Ascension (1856), Edward Lear, (1812–1888)

Edward Lear is widely known as a writer of nonsense verse—the author of A Book of Nonsense (1846) and the poem “The Owl and the Pussy-cat”—but he was also a serious landscape painter whose travels through Italy, Greece, and the Mediterranean produced an important body of work. He had close ties to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, painting en plein air with William Holman Hunt in 1852 and meeting both John Everett Millais and William Michael Rossetti around the same time. From 1855 to 1858, he lived on the island of Corfu, then a British protectorate, where the landscape inspired some of the finest paintings of his career. He wrote to his sister, Ann, that no place in the world had struck him as so beautiful, describing a view of water, citadel, and distant Albanian mountains that presented itself wherever he looked.

Corfu: A View from Above the Village of Ascension was painted in the summer of 1856; Lear wrote to friends about having found an ideal landscape subject, the perfect balance of trees, coastal scenery, and distant peaks, including what he called “the olives in their half-wild and uncared for semi-culture.” The painting is executed on millboard with thinned oils built up in nearly vaporous glazes, a technique that gave him the fluidity of his habitual watercolor practice, and the white ground of the millboard lends the work a luminosity that has not faded. Lear gave this painting as a gift to his sister Sarah, and it remained in her family’s possession for over 150 years before appearing on the private market. Mia already holds two drawings by Lear and a group of bird lithographs; this is the first painting by the artist to enter the collection, and adds to Mia’s collection of British landscape paintings.