Walker Art Center


The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the U.S.: together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Cowles Conservatory, it has an annual attendance of around 700,000 visitors. The museum's permanent collection includes over 13,000 modern and contemporary art pieces, including books, costumes, drawings, media works, paintings, photography, prints, and sculpture.
The Walker Art Center began in 1879 as an art gallery in the home of lumber baron Thomas Barlow Walker. Walker formally established his collection as the Walker Art Gallery in 1927. With the support of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, the Walker Art Gallery became the Walker Art Center in January 1940. The Walker celebrated its 75th anniversary as a public art center in 2015.
The Walker's new building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and opened in 1971, saw a major expansion in 2005. Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron's addition included an additional gallery space, a theater, restaurant, shop, and a special events space.

Programs

Visual arts

The visual arts program has been a part of the Walker Art Center since its founding. The program includes an ongoing cycle of exhibitions in the galleries as well as a permanent collection of acquired, donated, and commissioned works. Since the 1960s, the Visual Arts program has commissioned works from artists to exhibit and held residencies for artists including Robert Irwin, Glenn Ligon, Barry McGee, Catherine Opie, Lorna Simpson, Nari Ward, and Nairy Baghramian.
The Walker's collection represents works of modern and contemporary art, especially focused after 1960. Its holdings include more than 13,000 pieces, including books, costumes, drawings, media works, paintings, photography, prints, and sculpture. In 2015, the Walker celebrated the 75th anniversary of its founding as a public art center with a yearlong exhibition Art at the Center: 75 Years of Walker Collections. Some collection highlights include:
Live performance art is a major part of the Walker's programming and it is seen as a leader in exhibiting the medium. In 1940, the Walker began presenting local dance, poetry, and concerts, largely organized by volunteers. By 1963, this group had become Center Opera, the Walker's performing arts program focused on exhibiting new works emphasizing visual design. In 1970, Center Opera disbanded from the Walker and became the Minnesota Opera. The same year, Performing Arts was officially designated as a department of the Walker Art Center.
Since the 1960s, Performing Arts at the Walker has commissioned 265 performance works. Notable coordinators of the performing arts programs include John Ludwig, Suzanne Weil, Nigel Redden, and Robert Stearns. In addition, the department programs a 25-show season every year that includes performance art, theater, dance, spoken word, and music. It is one of the nation's largest performing arts programs of its kind found in a museum. A number of artists have long histories working with and performing at the Walker, most notably choreographers Bill T. Jones, Meredith Monk, and Merce Cunningham, for whom the Walker staged the retrospective Life Performs Art in 1998. As a longtime associate of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the Walker was able to acquire 150 art objects central to the company's history from the Cunningham Foundation in 2011. The agreement included sculptures, sets, costumes and other works by artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

Moving image

The Walker's film and video programs feature both contemporary and historical works. In the 1940s, the Walker identified moving images as integral to contemporary life. Artists of that time were experimenting with film's formal properties, such as light, motion, and sound, while also separating film art from conventional narrative cinema.
In 1973, the Film/Video Department was officially formed and the Edmond R. Ruben Film and Video Study Collection was established, along with an endowment to fund the development of the archive. Ruben, a leading figure in film exhibition in the Upper Midwest, and his wife, Evelyn, believed in collecting films as a way of preserving the art form. Today, with more than 850 titles, the Ruben Collection brings together classic and contemporary cinema as well as documentaries, avant-garde films, and video works by artists. It holds works by visual artists ranging from Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger to extensive contemporary work by William Klein, Derek Jarman, Bruce Conner, Marcel Broodthaers, Matthew Barney, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, and experimental artists such as Paul Sharits and Stan Brakhage.

Design

The Walker maintains a professional, in-house design and editorial department to fulfill its various communication needs. The department is responsible for the design and editing of all printed materials, including the creation and planning of publications such as exhibition catalogues, bimonthly magazines, and books, as well as exhibition and event graphics, signage programs, and promotional campaigns.
The department also organizes design-related projects and programs, such as lectures, exhibitions, and special commissions. Over the course of its 60-plus-year history, the department has organized many important exhibitions on architecture and design and has served as a forum for contemporary design issues, bringing hundreds of architects, designers, and critics to the Twin Cities through programs such as the Insights design lecture series, which celebrated its 30th year in 2016. During the 1940s, the Walker built two "idea houses" exhibiting the latest in building materials, furnishings and architectural design trends.
From the late 1960s until the early '90s, the museum's design curator, Mildred Friedman, helped conceive and stage exhibitions on, among other topics, the Dutch avant-garde movement De Stijl, the design process at the Modernist furniture company Herman Miller, the history of graphic design, and traditional and contemporary Japanese arts, crafts and culture. For more than 30 years, the Walker has also offered the Mildred S. Friedman Design Fellowship, a yearlong program for young designers.

Digital media

The Walker's New Media Initiatives group oversees mnartists.org, an online database of Minnesota artists and organizations that provides a digital gathering place for the local arts community. Through a partnership with the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Walker manages ArtsConnectEd, an online resource for arts educators that draws from both institutions' permanent collection resources.
In 1998, the Walker acquired äda'web, an early net art website curated by Benjamin Weil and designed by Vivian Selbo. The first official project of äda'web went up in May 1995, although it had been informally active since February of the same year.
In 2011, the Walker website was relaunched as a news-style website, featuring essays, interviews, and videos by both Walker staff and guest writers, as well as curated news links about global art and culture. The relaunch was met with positive reviews around the art world.

Education and public programs

Learning is emphasized as a core experience at the Walker through a mix of education programs, community building efforts, and interpretive projects. The department conducts community, family, interpretive, public, school, teen, and tour programs, as well as mnartists.org. Each division offers programs and activities in visual art, performing arts, film/video, new media, design, and architecture. To inform these undertakings, the staff work with Walker curators and partners from local organizations, artists, schools, and community groups. Advisory groups such as the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council, Tour Guide Council, and the Parent Advisory Group are also implemented in the department for the Walker to further build relationships with its audience.

Publishing

The Walker's long history of publishing includes the production of exhibition catalogues, books, and periodicals as well as digital publishing. From 1946 to 1954, it published the Everyday Art Quarterly; in 1954, the publication changed its name to Design Quarterly and "shifted its emphasis away from consuming design to understanding design's impact on society and its processes and methods of practice and inquiry." It was discontinued in 1993. The Walker's in-house design studio has created countless exhibition catalogues dedicated to the art of Marcel Broodthaers, Trisha Brown, Huang Yong Ping, Kiki Smith, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, among many others, as well as books on design, architecture, social practice, and other topics in contemporary art. In 2011, the Walker redesigned its homepage as an "idea hub," a news-magazine format that presents original interviews, videos, commissioned essays, scholarly writings, and newslinks. The publishing-forward homepage was hailed as a "game-changer, the website that every art museum will have to consider from this point forward" and "a model for other institutions of all kinds". The site won Best of the Web awards at the 2012 Museums and the Web conference, including "Best Overall Site" and "Best Innovative/Experimental Site." It also won a gold MUSE Award for "Online Presence, Media & Technology" from the American Alliance of Museums. In 2017, the homepage was redesigned, and the Walker's digital publishing was rebranded under the title Walker Reader, a magazine landing page that aggregates original content from the Walker's five verticals.
In April 2020, The New York Times said the Walker website was one of the best museum sites during the COVID pandemic, stating the "Walker Reader" was "an editorial arm of the museum that features debates on Indigenous art, or on how museums respond to the #MeToo movement. Treating the digital museum as coequal to the physical museum means you can be nimble when disaster strikes.” In August 2020, the Walker Reader ceased publication.