Interdisciplinary Initiative at the Walker, 2016–2020

What do we mean by the term interdisciplinary? At the Walker, an art center committed to showcasing the art of our time, this term describes our mission to follow the artists and to allow our program to embrace ways that many contemporary practitioners work, which since the 1960s has often meant loosening boundaries between artistic labels—painting, film, dance, performance—in favor of a more open and flexible view toward the art experience itself.

Building on this approach, the Walker’s multiyear Interdisciplinary Initiative, made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, specifically supports the institution’s commitment to artists working at the intersection of the performing and visual arts, both making work and presenting it across gallery, stage, and public space. The initiative has also supported the Walker’s exploration of new approaches to the documentation, conservation, and acquisition of interdisciplinary artworks. As part of the initiative and evidenced on this website, the Walker has advanced scholarship and research; worked toward modeling new directions for curating, commissioning, developing, and presenting the work of interdisciplinary artists; continued efforts to strengthen the interpretation of interdisciplinary works in the museum’s collections; and charted new approaches to audience interface and engagement across platforms. Highlights of the program (2016–2020) include eight newly commissioned artworks or productions by a diverse range of artists, several of which were subsequently acquired for the Walker’s collection; a series of dynamic online publishing projects, including two new volumes of the Living Collections Catalogue and the production of a series of new video documents showcasing key interviews with participating artists.

The Walker’s world-renowned collections feature generations of artists whose works expand the possibilities of art through the merging of disciplines, while its program has continued to redefine genres through the commissioning and presentation of new projects. The Walker’s long history with such innovators as Joseph Beuys, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Cynthia Hopkins, Ralph Lemon, Sarah Michelson, and Adrian Piper, among many others, make it an ideal institution to forge new platforms and build a shared vocabulary and responsibility in response to the evolving practices of today’s artists.

Three crucial and interrelated areas of work, focusing specifically on the intersection of performing and visual arts, are included in Interdisciplinary Initiative:

The Walker Art Center’s Living Collections Catalogue is a series of publications that presents unique archival materials, original interpretation, and scholarly essays on a variety of focused topics. These dynamic online volumes come alive with rich media resources about Walker presentations, artworks, and artists. With each new installment the Walker aims to create a publishing platform that will be of service to academics, arts professionals, artists, and art enthusiasts alike. Implicit in the concept of a “living catalogue” is the rich and layered nature of such a digital publication, and the design encourages a reader experience that blends the best qualities of the book, magazine, and online forms. With the release of each new volume of the Living Collections Catalogue, a project initiated in 2009 under the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative, the Walker continues to experiment with the evolution of this hybrid form.

As part of the Walker’s Interdisciplinary Initiative, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, two new volumes of the Living Collections Catalogue will be published. Each features new scholarship, commissioned writings and contributions, and extensive documentation from the archives, including images and video/audio recordings made available to the public for the first time. Volume III, available now, focuses on a range of performance-based artist collectives from the 1960s and 1970s, tracing a rich period of experimentation by artists with forms of radical collectivity and political mobilization. Volume IV will be released in June 2020 and centers on innovators of black avant-garde and experimental jazz production from the 1960s to the present.