American artist Gertrude Abercrombie’s oil on canvas work “Search for Rest,” 1951, was on display in “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art” at the Minneapolis Institute of Art earlier this year. (Courtesy of Sandra and Bram Dijk/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

1. "Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art." Minneapolis Institute of Art hosted the country's first major museum exhibition to examine artists' relationship to the supernatural through 150 works of art from the early 1800s to the present day.

2. "A Pound of Pictures." International photographer Alec Soth's project about photography revealed itself one picture at a time. The show opened in January at Weinstein Hammons Gallery, and in New York and San Francisco.

3. "We Are Working All the Time!" Polish-born, U.S.-based multimedia artist Piotr Szyhalski's survey exhibition at the Weisman Art Museum, delayed two years by the pandemic, reflected on questions of communication, human agency, labor and propaganda.

4. "Sweet Dreams." Beloved international Ojibwe artist Jim Denomie's solo exhibition opened March 31 at ArtReach St. Croix, about a month after his sudden death at age 66 from cancer. The artist curated the show, which included 26 two-dimensional works that use humor to confront America's troubled past from a Native perspective.

5. "Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks From the Uffizi." This fall, 45 loaned works from Renaissance Italy landed at Mia. The magnificent exhibition, on view through Jan. 8, includes paintings, drawings, prints and decorative arts by Sandro Botticelli, his teacher Fra Filippo Lippi and many others.

6. "Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts." The Greek-born, Italian-based pioneer of the Arte Povera ("poor art") movement got his second-ever U.S. museum exhibition, which was also the first since his death in 2017.

7. "A Picture Gallery of the Soul." Co-curators Herman Milligan and Howard Oransky created a comprehensive group exhibition illuminating the Black American experience through photography. Work by 111 artists, including 15 from Minnesota, were on view at the University of Minnesota's Katherine E. Nash Gallery.

8. "Vortex." The Porch Gallery worked with Texas-based Art Blocks, a generative art collection, to display a series of 1,000 psychedelic designed animation NFTs by artist Jen Stark and shed some light on the NFT trend.

9. "Van Gogh and the Olive Groves" at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, an intimate peek into six artworks that the great artist made toward the end of his life, almost made up for the horror of "Immersive Van Gogh." Almost.

10. "Breathers." Hong Kong-born, Omaha-raised artist/activist Paul Chan came back to the art world for his first museum show since 2009, when he took a "breather" and started an experimental art publishing house, Badlands Unlimited. Chan said he returned because he found a way to make animations without screens, creating fan-powered sculptures that bob and wave about the gallery.