For over a decade, the Walker Art Center’s experimental digital publishing platform, the Walker Reader, has explored new horizons for writing about the arts and culture. Through original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, artist interviews, and unruly permutations, the Walker Reader delves into the ideas that reshape us and our world.
Each year, we present a surprising slate of ongoing series that illuminate the ideas behind today’s most compelling art, design, and culture.
Current Series
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Over the past decade, the term “content” has proliferated throughout the public lexicon. But what exactly is content? Media theorists, meme historians, artists, and others explore what content is and who controls the containers.
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A collection of conversations among practitioners, scholars, and thinkers that explores the current landscape and lasting legacy of Black American Dance.
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Examining how artists practice, engage with, and foster care while recognizing the creative labor it takes to nurture themselves and others.
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Examining nonbinary design through print, objects, fashion, identity, and more, this series highlights the historic innovations and contemporary impact of these forms of queer design.
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Exploring the use of humor as a form of resistance across today's art and design practices.
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A behind-the-scenes glimpse that celebrates the staff, volunteers, artists, and others whose work forms the life and character of the Walker Art Center.
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On the heels of a global pandemic, racial reckoning, climate crisis, and the threats to democracy, this series considers the various ways today’s performing artists create work that serves artistic and therapeutic goals.
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Gathering various creative perspectives, Radical Play considers play as an act of rebellion—a joyous method for learning, expressing oneself, forming empathetic connections, pushing boundaries, and reshaping our world.
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How can an artwork make its politics legible or illegible? This series explores how art and politics often intertwine, examining dimensions of political engagement as contemporary artists respond to pressing matters of their time.
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Inviting various voices from both inside and outside of traditional design practices, You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover offers new perspectives on too-often overlooked aspects of book covers.
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Over the past decade, the term “content” has proliferated throughout the public lexicon. But what exactly is content? Media theorists, meme historians, artists, and others explore what content is and who controls the containers.
A collection of conversations among practitioners, scholars, and thinkers that explores the current landscape and lasting legacy of Black American Dance.
)
Examining how artists practice, engage with, and foster care while recognizing the creative labor it takes to nurture themselves and others.
)
Examining nonbinary design through print, objects, fashion, identity, and more, this series highlights the historic innovations and contemporary impact of these forms of queer design.
)
Exploring the use of humor as a form of resistance across today's art and design practices.
)
A behind-the-scenes glimpse that celebrates the staff, volunteers, artists, and others whose work forms the life and character of the Walker Art Center.
)
On the heels of a global pandemic, racial reckoning, climate crisis, and the threats to democracy, this series considers the various ways today’s performing artists create work that serves artistic and therapeutic goals.
)
Gathering various creative perspectives, Radical Play considers play as an act of rebellion—a joyous method for learning, expressing oneself, forming empathetic connections, pushing boundaries, and reshaping our world.
)
How can an artwork make its politics legible or illegible? This series explores how art and politics often intertwine, examining dimensions of political engagement as contemporary artists respond to pressing matters of their time.
)
Inviting various voices from both inside and outside of traditional design practices, You Can Judge a Book by Its Cover offers new perspectives on too-often overlooked aspects of book covers.
Series 2023
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Explore the exuberant and wide-ranging work and life of artist Pacita Abad through this series of articles that dives into her materials, techniques, and experiences.
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To celebrate Zorn’s seventh decade, the Walker presents a series of well-wishes from over 70 collaborators, colleagues, and friends who weigh in on the many facets of this versatile artist’s life and work.
Series 2020-2022
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Through short interactive narratives, this ongoing series presents behind-the-scenes tours of your favorite outdoor sculptures.
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Explore the Walker Dialogues and Film Retrospectives archive some of the most innovative and influential filmmakers of our time.
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Living Collections Catalogues offer media-rich essays on broader themes as well as in-depth investigations of specific works of art.
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A series of essays, translations, interviews, and excerpts examining the past, present, and future of art education, presented by the Walker Education and Public Programs staff.
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Responses to the the question of what is truth in times of "alternative facts" and "fake news" by Werner Herzog, critic Ben Davis, filmmaker Sabaah Folayan, artist RaMell Ross, and investigative journalist Eric Schlosser.
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A series of commissioned opinion pieces featuring provocative reactions to the headlines by Ron Athey, Gordon Hall, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Postcommodity, Ana Tijoux, Jack Whitten, and others.
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Offering perspectives from those closest to the art, this recurring video series gives voice-of-the-artist perspectives on work on view.
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A number of exhibition catalogue texts as well as supplemental lectures and projects, exploring the ways in which designers create, critique, and question possible futures, big and small.
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A collection of fictional letters, memos and visual artifacts created by a group of futurists, speculative designers, authors and artists.
Series 2010-2019
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A series featuring contemporary designers commenting on how countercultural artists and designers of the 1960s and ’70s have have influenced their work and thinking today.
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On September 28 and 29, 2015 the Walker Art Center hosted an invitational curatorial research convening focused on pressing areas of inquiry facing the field of curating contemporary performance.
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UNLICENSED investigates contemporary culture’s obsession with bootlegging by turning to designers and artists who exploit this phenomenon in their practices.
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A program of commissioned moving image works by artists—including James Marwa Arsanios, Yto Barrada, Renée Green, and Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz—who respond to work in the Ruben/Bentson Collection.
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An editorial supplement to the conference Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age, featuring commissioned essays by Kimberly Drew, Alexandra Lange, An Xiao Mina, and others.
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In serial form, a 10-part curatorial essay from the 2014 exhibition 9 Artists, which featured Yael Bartana, Liam Gillick, Hito Steyerl, Danh Vo, and others.
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Avant Museology is a two-day symposium exploring the practices and sociopolitical implications of contemporary museology.
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UNCOVERED focuses on the relationship between music and design.
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Through a single interface, an array of voices are invited to respond to pressing questions that surround the work of making, presenting, understanding, and living with art today.
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A memoir series by the late Walker director Martin Friedman, recounting his encounters with artists including Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage.
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We check in with some of our favorite publication designers, including Eric Wrenn, Paul Chan, Sandra Kassenaar, and Adam Michaels.
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Straight from the mind of polymath musician/artist Jason Moran comes a new kind of music publication.
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Experimental Jetset, Lucky Dragons, Tomás Saraceno, and others share how 1960s artists featured in the exhibition Hippie Modernism have influenced their work and thinking today.
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In interviews with Laurie Anderson, Paul Chan, Trevor Paglen, JoAnn Verburg, and others, this series examines artists' approaches to small-p politics—issues of power, inequality, and participation.
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Year end lists that highlighted the standout moments, projects, readings, and ideas of the year, by designers, as selected by the Walker's design department. Warning: rabbit holes ahead.
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The most noteworthy ideas, events, and objects of 2018 as witnessed by 24 artists from around the globe.