Special Exhibits
The former packing floor of the mill, now Mill Commons, now features the museum store, cafe, changing exhibits, and visitor information. The exhibits are free to the public during regular museum hours and change two to three times per year.
Current exhibits
We Always Find Each Other: Histories of LGBTQ Community Building in Minnesota, from the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota
May 22 - June 22, 2025 (unavailable after 2:00 pm on May 29, June 7, 12, 13, 22)
We Always Find Each Other features 30 panels with over 400 images of flyers, publications, photographs, letters, t-shirts, and buttons related to local LGBTQ history! The exhibit showcases the ways in which our local queer and trans communities work, play, perform, protest, organize, create spaces, and much more. It was created by the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Going Out, Coming In: LGBTQ+ Spaces in Downtown Minneapolis
May 15, 2025 - July 6, 2025
Going Out, Coming In brings to life the sights, heart, and energy of Downtown Minneapolis’s LGBTQ+ community spaces in their first decades.The exhibit details queer resistance, love, and identity formation amid the evolution of the neighborhood through the 20th century. The exhibit features sites where queer people found or created community while addressing the systemic challenges of legal and extralegal discrimination, urban renewal, and HIV/AIDS. This was previously on view at MCM in 2023 and 2024.
Upcoming exhibit
My City Was a Sparkling Jewel: Voices of Newcomer Youth from Afghanistan
July 19, 2025 - September 21, 2025
This exhibit was inspired by the book “My City Was a Sparkling Jewel: Voices of Newcomer Youth from Afghanistan.” Using a trauma-informed approach to storytelling, Green Card Voices and its Afghan partners carefully collected first-person accounts of the diverse journeys of 30 storytellers, ages sixteen to twenty-one, who come from various ethnic groups: Pashtun, Hazara, Pashai, and Tajik. Their stories share the challenges faced, opportunities grasped, and dreams these youth had, and still have, for themselves, and for the families and friends they left behind. This work was produced in collaboration between Edison High School, South High School, LEAP High School, Green Card Voices, funders and many community partners.
Green Card Voices is a Minneapolis-based, nationally growing nonprofit that connects immigrants and their communities through multimedia storytelling. We record the first person narratives of immigrants and publish them in books, online, and in traveling exhibits.
Opening event: July 19