What does being in community feel like? Connect, collaborate, and celebrate summer as we build community together on this Free First Saturday at the Walker.
Free First Saturday features free gallery admission on the first Saturday of every month. Gallery admission tickets are available online in advance and on-site on the event day from the Main Lobby desk. Free admission 10 am–5 pm; activities 10 am–3 pm.
To help us promote future events and programs, this event will be documented with photography. By attending, you consent to appear in this documentation and its future use by the museum.
Activity Information
Community Visions, 10 am–3 pm
Decorate a wooden sun cutout with your visions of community. What does community look like to you? How can you bring that vision to life?
Twin Cities Community Collaborative Skyline, 10 am–3 pm
Work together to create a beautiful skyline of the Twin Cities! Decorate strips of paper with vibrant colors and then add it to the collaborative mural.
RONDO Double Dutch Workshop, 10:30 am–12 noon and 1–2:30 pm
Located on the Rooftop Terrace (Access on the 8th Floor)
RONDO Double Dutch is a community-based double dutch team founded to spread love, peace, and unity through the joy of jump rope. Rooted in the historic Rondo neighborhood, the team empowers youth and families by promoting physical fitness, teamwork, and cultural pride. Led by Mizz Mercedez and Da Twist Mastr, RONDO Double Dutch brings generations together, inspiring movement and connection one jump at a time.
Fantastic Dwellings and Dens, 10 am–3 pm
Located in the Garden Terrace Room (8th Floor)
Using dens and dwellings as inspiration, help us build a giant, connected play structure! Join our friends with Now.Make.Art as we explore different materials and let your imagination take over!
Short Film: Little Wild, 10 am–3 pm
This sweet animated film directed by Caleb Wood follows some creatures as they explore the wild, develop new friendships, and make discoveries. The film is approximately 3 minutes long and plays on a loop.
Tour for Families, 11:30 am
Tour for General Audiences in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, 1 pm
Recorrido público en español, 3 pm
Join a Walker educator for a family friendly guided tour of artworks on view in the galleries at 11:30 am (40 min.), take a guided tour of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at 1 pm (weather dependent, 60 min.), or a tour for general audiences in Spanish at 3 pm (60 min.). Tours explore a selection of artworks across current exhibitions and include interactive discussion. Gallery tours meet at the Main Lobby desk and Garden tours meet outside the main entrance five minutes before the tour starts.
Accessibility, Content, and Sensory Notes
The short film will be captioned in English.
The accessible lift to Gallery 2 is currently out of order. To access Gallery 5, take the accessible lift down one level from floor 6.
Content notes: The exhibition Kandis Williams: A Surface engages mature themes and some works contain nudity. The exhibition Ways of Knowing engages mature themes, including violence.
Sensory notes: The exhibition This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection includes two video rooms with reduced light levels, and a 16mm film projection that features both a soundtrack and the sound of the projector running. Some videos include flashing, flickering, or disorienting visual effects and sound that changes in volume, pitch, and tone.
The exhibition Ways of Knowing contains includes three video rooms with reduced light levels. Some videos include flickering effects and sounds that change in volume or pitch.
Videos on view in the exhibition Kandis Williams: A Surface contain flickering effects and sounds that change in volume, pitch, and tone.
For more information or to request additional accommodations, call 612-375-7564 or email access@walkerart.org.
For more information about accessibility at the Walker, visit our Access page.
Bios
Mercedes Yarbrough, also known as Mizz Mercedez and affectionately called #YoKidzFavoriteTeacher, is an award-winning educator, artist, and community leader based in St. Paul. A proud fourth-generation Rondo native and mother of four, she has dedicated more than a decade to transforming education through culturally relevant, creative, and empowering content for youth. Yarbrough is the visionary behind RONDO Double Dutch, a movement focused on building community, promoting wellness, and celebrating Black culture through the art of double dutch. She currently serves as the Community Engagement Director at 825 ARTS, a historic community space in the heart of Rondo-Frogtown, where she leads programming rooted in love, creativity, and cultural pride. She is the recipient of the 2024 Planting People Growing Justice Black History Book Award, the 2023 Rondo Education Achievement honoree, and was named the 2023 Women’s Press Changemaker of the Year. In addition to her education and arts leadership, she played a key role in securing a city proclamation recognizing July 13 as Central Village Park Day, honoring community resilience and legacy. Yarbrough continues to inspire and empower the next generation by uplifting Black history, protecting cultural spaces, and turning creative vision into meaningful impact.
Redefining playful art in public spaces is Now.Make.Art. (NMA)’s jam. Visual, community-focused, and youth-centric, their engagement style is their magic sauce. NMA focuses on power-sharing with young people via a curiosity-infused, collective art-making process. Their events are welcoming spaces that aren’t fussy and require no previous experience. Working together, they invite the community to envision a brighter future. The St. Paul-based group works with festivals, libraries, recreation centers, schools, nonprofits, and organizations all around Minnesota to bring process-based arts events to young people and their communities. NMA was founded in 2021 by Megan Flød Johnson and Kiersten Birondo.
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