Mia's Honorary Guides: Our 2025 Tours

We had a fascinating season of tours for honorary guides during 2025.  Organized by our Honorary Guide Planning Team, members arranged monthly tours from May through October, most of them at Mia.  We have been fortunate to view special exhibitions and parts of the collection with tours led by exhibition curators.  While honorary guides are retired from giving tours, we still hold dear our continuing education at Mia.

Our dramatic season opener began in May with a tour of “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swiss Beats and Alicia Keys” led by Casey Riley, Chair of Global Contemporary Art and Curator of Photography and New Media. She shared her knowledge of this groundbreaking and extraordinary exhibition, and the story of the Deans, their passion for collecting art, and their important role in supporting Black artists.

In June we visited The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) and enjoyed another tour with Margo Squire, a guide at both TMORA and Mia.  We toured the exhibition “Monumental Soviet Paintings” and appreciated her deep insight and knowledge of Russian history. 

We enjoyed two tours in July because of some rescheduling issues.  Our tour of the exhibition “Transcendent Clay: The Kondō Family’s Path of Porcelain Innovations,” was given by Andreas Marks, Mary Griggs Burke Curator of Japanese and Korean Art and Director of the Clark Center for Japanese Art.  His inspiring tour revealed the phenomenal creativity of the generations of this family of ceramicists from Kyoto, Japan.   

Our tour with Mia’s Sheila McGuire, Head of Student and Teacher Learning, focused on several of the new and compelling acquisitions in Mia’s collection. This tour is an annual favorite, since many of the guides trained with Sheila over the years.

In August we visited the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum in Shoreview, and we were delighted with the exhibition “Echoes of Life: Paintings from the Collection.” Many of us were visiting this museum for the first time and were impressed with the inviting ambiance of the museum and the quality of the art.  

Our September event was a tour of “Mary Sully: Native Modern” at Mia with Valéria Piccoli, Ken and Linda Cutler Chair of the Arts of the Americas and Curator of Latin American Art.  It was fascinating to learn about this Dakota artist’s innovative and unique approach to modernism in the early twentieth century. Learning about her background as the great-granddaughter of the 19th-century portraitist Thomas Sully, whose painting of George Washington is in Mia’s collection, evoked fond memories for many of us.

In October we visited the beautiful exhibition “José María Velasco: A View of Mexico” at Mia, with another inspiring tour with Valéria Piccoli, who co-curated this exhibition.  She shed light on the life of this major 19th-century painter and his exquisitely detailed landscape paintings depicting the natural beauty of Mexico as it underwent rapid modernization in the late 19th century.

We look forward to reconvening in the spring and planning the tours for next year.  We are grateful to Christine Fleming for all her support and assistance to our group.

Bonnie Gainsley

Chair, Honorary Guide Planning Team