Peggy Grieve scanned the room at a recent dinner party, looking for faces she recognized. There were her dining companions, of course — her son and his fiancée, sitting across from her. But just beyond the long, candlelit table, she spotted a man she thought she knew. He was wearing a blue bodysuit and a red cape. "St. Michael, I think," said the Sunfish Lake resident.
She spun in her chair and saw another figure behind her, with unmistakable curly locks flowing toward his shoulders. "Christ," she said, "I recognize."
"And there's Judith," pointed out Matthew Welch, who was sitting next to Grieve at the table, "holding the head of Holofernes."
This dinner party didn't have a time-traveling guest list, but it did have an extraordinary setting — in a rotunda of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, surrounded by towering oil paintings from the European Renaissance.
Grieve attended a first-of-its-kind public dinner in one of Mia's galleries for a multicourse meal designed by two top local chefs and inspired by two stunning new exhibitions. (Welch, seated beside her, is Mia's deputy director and chief curator.)
The Kaiseki Art and Dining Experience pairs the artwork from "Dressed by Nature: Textiles of Japan" and "Van Gogh and the Olive Groves," special exhibitions with seemingly little in common. But after tours through the galleries with the curators, guests sat down for a meticulous meal from chefs Shigeyuki Furukawa and Jamie Malone that explored the surprising intersections between hand-stitched Japanese robes and the thickly applied brushstrokes depicting the view of Provence from Van Gogh's hospital window.
"I'm always telling people, 'I'm working at the crossing point of food and art,'" said Furukawa, founder and co-owner of Kaiseki Furukawa restaurant in Minneapolis. "Finally, it became concrete."
While the museum has hosted donor receptions or rented out areas of its classical 1915 building for private parties, this is one of the rare times the public can buy tickets to a meal among the art, said Mia director and president Katie Luber. Even more unusual is that the food is inspired by the pieces themselves.