Evan Maurer’s impending departure from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Twin Cities’ most visible mainstream museum finds itself at a crossroads. Maurer’s reaction to a city famous for its embrace of modern art was a “populism-with-panache approach to shows and collecting” for the formerly staid and decidedly unsexy MIA. “He led the nation in collecting American Indian artifacts as art, helped set up an important French-American museum collaboration, oversaw two expansions of the Minneapolis museum’s building and was, at his peak, a money-raising powerhouse.”