Earlier this week, Walker assistant curator Bartholomew Ryan wrote a thoughtful piece for MPR’s State of the Arts blog about how 9/11 has influenced art making. Responding to a question posed there — “What art resonates most with you when thinking about the events of 9/11?” — Walker colleagues Dean Otto (film/video curator) and Siri Engberg and Betsy Carpenter (visual arts curators) and I selected works from our collections that speak to our shared desire for peace, reconciliation, humility, grace, tolerance and gratitude. Some do this quite concretely; others, more poetically. We leave you with these images as you head into this weekend of remembrance.
Ellsworth Kelly, Ground Zero, Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Film still from Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor, directed by Richard Linklater, on view through October 30 in the Walker’s Lecture Room
Raymond Pettibon, Sunday Night and Saturday Morning, 2005
Vija Celmins, Untitled [Clouds], 1975
Alec Soth, Enchanted Forest, 2010
Gabriel Orozco, Isla en la Isla (Island within an Island), 1993
JoAnn Verburg,WTC, 2003
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Last Light), 1993
Paul Thek, 2 Birds, 1975
Robert Irwin, Untitled, 1971
Yoko Ono and John Lennon, War is Over!, 1969
Pierre Huyghe, Wind Chime (after “Dream”), 1997/2009, currently on view in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden
A note on my selection: Last summer, artists from the Red76 collective spent three weeks at the Walker’s Open Field working with visitors to build a collective space for learning, the Anywhere/Anyplace Academy. Several children expressed the need for humans to better understand and have more empathy towards dragons and created the “Human and Dragon School for Peace and Reconciliation through Story and Song,” pictured here:
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