Walker Art Center

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Telling Time: Renée Green’s ED/HF

By Mason Leaver-Yap June 15, 2017

The title of Renée Green’s new Moving Image Commission is an abbreviation of “Extraterritorial Durations/Harun Farocki,” a reference to both the late German filmmaker and the work’s themes of migration and displacement. Bentson Scholar Mason Leaver-Yap writes that the work could be viewed as double portrait of Green and Farocki, who have both worked as artist, filmmaker, teacher, and writer. More

Part of the second season of Moving Image Commissions, Renée Green’s ED/HF (2017) will screen online June 15–September 10, 2017.

A Demonstration for a Demonstration

By Mason Leaver-Yap June 15, 2017

“Close your eyes and send an action.” Like other contributors to the Moving Image Commissions series, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s new work responds to the influence of German filmmaker Harun Farocki. But Telepathic Improvisation (2017) also pays deep homage to another artist: the late composer and Deep Listening theorist Pauline Oliveros. More

Part of the second season of Moving Image Commissions, Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz’s Telepathic Improvisation (2017) will screen online June 15–September 10, 2017.

Help Build an Immersive Digital Ecosystem

June 6, 2017

Pushing the capabilities of interactive technologies to create compelling digital artworks, Graffiti Nature–Still Mountains and Movable Lakes, the first solo museum exhibition by the Tokyo-based collective teamLab, invites you to immerse yourself in the art. The more animals and flowers you color in, the more the natural world expands around you. Here, an introduction to this engrossing project.  More

The interactive exhibition Graffiti Nature–Still Mountains and Movable Lakes is on view May 20–September 10, 2017.

Agreement Reached on Scaffold

May 31, 2017

Following a mediation process involving Dakota Spiritual and Traditional Elders, representatives from the four federally recognized Dakota tribes, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, and artist Sam Durant, an agreement has been reached on Durant’s Scaffold sculpture: the work will be dismantled and its wood transported to Fort Snelling, where it will be ceremonially burned. More

Avoiding the Cosmic Side-Eye from Prince

By Chris Cloud May 17, 2017

“What would Prince think of what I’m doing/thinking/feeling right now?” For TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, the question is a good barometer for a life well lived. In Minneapolis to premiere his music/animation examination of grief, mortality, and the afterlife, A Warm Weather Ghost, he discusses his music and art practices, as well as his efforts to evade the “cosmic side-eye” from the late, great Prince. More

Tunde Adebimpe’s A Warm Weather Ghost makes its world premieres May 18–20, 2017.

Beth Gill: A Quiet Kind of Boldness

By Kaya Lovestrand May 1, 2017

Choreographer Beth Gill’s work doesn’t elicit the kind of response other radical new ideas tend to: there’s no booing from the crowd or scathing reviews. It’s a subtler form of risk-taking: her “abstract storytelling,” evidenced in a new Walker-commissioned dance work, Brand New Sidewalk, questions the dichotomy of meaning versus abstraction by reclaiming the pursuit of meaning within abstraction. More

Beth Gill’s Brand New Sidewalk premiers in the McGuire Theater May 5–6, 2017.

Transforming Sonic Weaponry to Spirituality

By Louise Erdrich April 18, 2017

“For 100 days in Aristotle’s Lyceum, ghosts are speaking to ghosts. Restless contemporary spirits are interrogating the dead.” Novelist Louise Erdrich (LaRose, The Round House) considers a sound installation by the indigenous art collective Postcommodity at documenta that transforms military-grade audio weaponry—recently used against water protectors at Standing Rock—to serve more spiritual ends. More

Read “2043: No Es Un Sueño,” Postcommodity’s recent contribution to the ongoing Artist Op-Ed series.

Larger than Life: James Rosenquist (1933–2017)

By Misa Jeffereis April 4, 2017

“The reason for bigness isn’t largeness. It’s to be engulfed by peripheral vision; it questions the self and questions self-consciousness,” said Pop artist James Rosenquist, who passed away March 31 at age 83. Misa Jeffereis looks at his background and legacy, from his midwestern roots to the development of his iconic painting style, which rendered movie stars, automobiles, and food in vivid detail. More

Art News from Elsewhere More

via artnet.com

Museum of Capitalism (External)

If capitalism is on its way out, its “ideology, history, and legacy” must be documented. Created by the artist duo FICTILIS, the Museum of Capitalism opens its inaugural show in Oakland this month with works by Dread Scott, Futurefarmers, Fran Ilich, and others.

via nytimes.com

Art for Justice (External)

Using $100 million of the proceeds from selling Roy Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece (1962), art collector and patron Agnes Gund is launching the Art for Justice Fund, a criminal justice organization that aims to end mass incarceration.

via artnet.com

documenta Standouts (External)

Crowd favorites at documenta 14 include Marta Minujín’s colossal The Parthenon of Books (constructed using an array of government-banned books) and a performance by Maria Hassabi that “transpires at a snail’s pace, and it’s making visitors stand still.”


Via indiewire.com

Bronx Gothic (External)

“We have been acculturated to watching black bodies in pain”: Okwui Okpokwasili in the trailer for Bronx Gothic, the new documentary on her performance work. Opening at Film Forum July 12, it’s directed by Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times).

Via startribune.com

How the Garden Grew (External)

An interactive look at the reconstructed Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, from Mark Manders’s “ginormous Sphinx-like sculpture” to Aaron Spangler’s “mystical, towering” Bog Walker to Katharina Fritsch’s ultramarine blue giant rooster.

Via theartnewspaper.com

Plutocracy on Exhibit (External)

For a new book, artist Andrea Fraser is mapping the relationship between the White House and patrons and trustees at major museums. The US is governed by the wealthy, she says, and “museums, in their origins, are a product of plutocracy.”


Minnesota Art News

Via mnartists.org

Reservation Pop

Despite key similarities between Warhol’s art and that of Wendy Red Star, there are clear differences: where Warhol created his images from a place of privilege, Red Star celebrates the lived material reality of some of the least-celebrated communities in the US. More

Via mnartists.org

Minnesota Goes Pop

With two Warhol print as a jumping-off point, the Rochester Art Center’s current show features Minnesota artists—including Frank Gaard, Rory Wakemup, and Ziyang Wu—putting a fresh, distinctively regional spin on 20th-century Pop ideas. More

Artspeaks

Commentary

Zigzagging Between Public and Private: Tom Burr on Philip Johnson, Sexuality and Architecture

Tom Burr’s sculpture Zog (a series of setbacks), on view in the exhibition Question the Wall Itself, takes its name and inspiration from a feature of Minneapolis’s… More

Commentary

Ericka Beckman’s You The Better

Visiting a casino in the early 1980s, Ericka Beckman was struck by the “use of human value” on display: white gamblers in elevated seats placing bets on a jai-alai game played by Mexicans in a pit below. In a new interview Beckman… More

Commentary

Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Attendance

“I think that when you feel connected and you are not distracted, there is a greater possibility that you will feel joy.” As we present Thank You For Coming: Play, the second part of choreographer/director Faye Driscoll’s trilogy of… More

Walker Channel

Films by Artists

Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz’s Telepathic Improvisation

In their new film Telepathic Improvisation, Boudry/Lorenz invite the viewer to telepathically communicate with elements depicted onscreen: humans and non-humans, movements, speeches, gestures, music… More

Films by Artists

Renée Green’s ED/HF

Following the path of not-knowing, Renée Green’s new film is a cinematic meditation on lived experience, writing, film and mourning. Conceived as a “film as a conversation,” Green’s ED/HF is a palimpsestic work that touches on the many thresholds opened while… More

Trailer

Rediscover the Garden

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is one of the crown jewels of the city’s park system, uniting two of Minnesota’s most cherished resources—its greenspace and its cultural life. Celebrate the reopening of the Garden, a project of the Walker Art Center and the… More

Quoted

Ongoing Series

Artist Op-Eds

A series of commissioned opinion pieces featuring provocative reactions to the headlines by artists Ron Athey, Ana Tijoux, Dread Scott, and others.

Superscript Reader

Five artists have been commissioned to create a new work that will premiere online. These works respond to the inspirations, inquiry, and influence of key artists in the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection: Derek Jarman, Bruce Conner, and Marcel Broodthaers.

Art (re)Collecting

In celebration of the Walker’s 75th anniversary, Martin Friedman—Walker director from 1961 to 1990—shares his reflections on encountering artists from Duchamp to Cage.

Superscript Reader

An editorial supplement to Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, an international conference held at the Walker Art Center May 28–30, 2015.

Lowercase P

An election-year series on personal politics and the way artists contribute to the conversation on making a better society.

From the Archives

Susan Rosenberg

Accumulated Vision: Trisha Brown and the Visual Arts

In commemoration of Trisha Brown’s passing on March 18, 2017, we look to art historian Susan Rosenberg’s 2014 reflection of the unique appeal of Brown’s thinking and dance to visual artists.  More

Chance Conversations

In conjunction with the exhibition Merce Cunningham: Common Time (Feb. 8–Jul. 30, 2017), we revisit this 1981 Walker interview between Cunningham and frequent collaborator, John Cage, on their approaches to chance operations. More

By Jack Whitten

Art in Times of Unspeakable Violence

In celebration of Jack Whitten being honored with a National Medal of Arts on September 22, 2016, we revisit the painter’s 2015 Artist Op-Ed, a powerful personal essay on the potential for art in times of violence and injustice. More