Some hotels will hand you a museum map. We can do you one better: the man who built this house helped build the museum.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art — Mia to everyone who lives here — sits barely a mile south of our front door, and this August and September it opens one of its busiest exhibition seasons of the year. General admission is free, every day. That combination makes for one of the easiest, loveliest weekends in Minneapolis: coffee in the garden, an afternoon among five thousand years of art, and a soak under the stars back at the mansion.
The museum a Loring Park neighbor helped build
Eugene and Merrette Carpenter bought this house in 1905 and hired a young architect named Edwin Hawley Hewitt to turn a Queen Anne pile into the Georgian Revival mansion you’ll sleep in tonight. The interiors were the work of John S. Bradstreet, the most fashionable designer in the city.
That trio — Carpenter, Hewitt, Bradstreet — became friends over this renovation, and then went and did something rather larger together. Bradstreet, who was then leading the struggling Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, brought Carpenter aboard. In 1911 Carpenter took over as president, invited four hundred businessmen to a private viewing, and turned an idea into a funded, publicly minded art museum. The building opened in 1915, with Hewitt as its president and Carpenter as vice president. You can read the account in the Eugene J. Carpenter House record, and Mia’s own story is told well by the Minnesota Historical Society.
What’s opening at Mia this August and September
Mia’s exhibition calendar turns over almost entirely between now and the end of September. Here is what to plan a stay around.
Opening in August
- “Immigrants”: A Gift from Morelos to Mia — opens August 15 and stays up through February 28, 2027.
- Take the Picture! — opens August 22, also running through February 28, 2027.
Opening in September
- María Berrío: Songlines — September 12 through January 10, 2027, in Galleries 275 and 276, and it is a free exhibition. The Colombian artist builds monumental scenes from hand-cut Japanese paper layered onto canvas: roughly twenty works from the past decade, co-organized with the San José Museum of Art. Two related events are worth building a weekend around — an artist talk with Berrío on Thursday, September 17 at 6 p.m., and a collage-portrait workshop with the artist on Sunday, September 20 at 10 a.m.
- Exhibiting Forgiveness — September 12 through January 3, 2027.
- Cream of the Crop: The Second Harvest — September 19 through November 29.
See these before they close
If you are coming sooner, three shows are on the clock: Year of the Horse: Hoofbeats through Time closes August 9, Hiroshige’s 100 Views of Edo x Emily Allchurch closes August 23, and Teen Perspectives: Yesterday and Today closes August 30. Longer runs — the restored Dante tapestry, Ziba Rajabi’s Belly Laugh at a Funeral, and the Latin American paintings in Meeting Point — will still be waiting for you in the fall.
Planning the visit
Mia is at 2400 Third Avenue South, in the Whittier neighborhood just south of downtown. Per the museum’s visitor page, it is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with late hours until 9 p.m. on Thursdays, and closed Mondays. General admission is always free and needs no ticket; only some special exhibitions and events are ticketed. From 300 Clifton it is a five-minute drive, a short rideshare, or a pleasant walk down past Eat Street if the weather is behaving.
Coming home to the art you can sleep in
The nice thing about an art weekend here is that the looking does not stop when the museum closes. Hand-painted ceilings, carved fireplaces and Bradstreet’s Arts and Crafts touches are all still in place, and the English gardens out back are their own kind of composition in late summer.
Book the Grand Edwardian for the full period drama, or one of our Estate rooms for something quieter. Then end the evening in the four-season garden hot tub under the stars, or slip downstairs to Gertrude’s Cistern, our speakeasy and haunted video lounge, heated reclining seats and all. If ghost stories are more your idea of a nightcap, our haunted mansion page has more than a few.
Make it a full Minneapolis art weekend
Mia pairs naturally with the Walker Art Center, which is a stroll across Loring Park from our porch — two very different museums, one very walkable weekend. For the story behind the neighborhood’s other great houses, Minneapolis Trolley Tours runs a Gilded Age Mansions route, and their Best Minneapolis Museums list ranks the rest of the city’s collections. Tours depart from the Pillsbury Club, the haunted Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion, which is worth an evening on its own. Staying longer than a weekend? Oakland’s on 9th has furnished studios downtown by the month.
And if you would like the whole history of this place before you go see what its owner built, we wrote it up in Inside the Eugene J. Carpenter Mansion.
Ready to plan your art weekend? Check our specials and packages and book your stay at 300 Clifton. The museum is free. The mansion is the splurge — and it comes with the better story.
Keep reading: Where to Stay for Mamma Mia! at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis (September 15–20, 2026) — showtimes, ticket details, and a walk to the theater district from the mansion door.