Gwyneth Shanks

“I think we get stuck in these models of only being very referential or reverential. I feel like you can either be hagiographic or you can kill your idols, and there’s no middle ground.” Artist Patrick Staff discusses queer archives, visibility, and his work—including The Foundation (2015)—with Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, the just-closed exhibit in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture.

A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, a research exhibit recently presented in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture, drew upon the history of radical and queer performance programed at the Walker Art Center to explore various ways artists responded to the AIDS pandemic, conservative censor, and homophobia. Exhibit curator Gwyneth Shanks argues that when confronted with AIDS’s mounting death toll, the “liveness” of performance took on newfound urgency and meaning for artists. To be in embodied co-presence was a means of asserting the political imperative of proclaiming one’s life—one’s liveness—as valid.

“To me the lesbian tradition of performing against censorship is key.” In conjunction with the exhibit A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, activist and queer scholar Lisa Sloan discusses the role of feminist and lesbian artists in the arts ecosystem during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, from various artists’ roles as caregivers and educators, to performance actions against censorship.

In the wake of the culture wars and the AIDS pandemic that ripped its way through the US in the 1980s and ’90s, artists took action. The stage became a space to reflect on the political and collective imperatives of asserting one’s identity, to rail against homophobic press and policies, and to present acts of love and intimacy. Here, civic-minded, anti-racist artist and organizer Eleanor Savage discusses the era and its impact on performance and activism with Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995.

First documented by the CDC in 1981, it took nearly five years for the Reagan administration to publicly acknowledge the AIDS pandemic, which by then had killed more than 5,000 people, the vast majority of them gay men. By 1995, over half a million people had been diagnosed with AIDS in the US; 62 percent of them had died. As queer theorist and performance scholar Sean Metzger discusses in this new interview, AIDS indelibly marked queer and artistic communities across the country, producing a deep urgency to affirm life, presence, and the importance of community in the face of the disease’s devastation and the federal government’s inaction.

This wide-ranging conversation between Patrick Scully and Gwyneth Shanks, curator of A Different Kind of Intimacy: Radical Performance at the Walker, 1990–1995, a new installation in the Walker’s Best Buy Aperture. Shanks recently sat down with Scully, a longtime performer, presenter, curator, and activist in Minneapolis, to discuss his collaborative 1995 performance piece Unsafe, Unsuited, his role as the founder of Patrick’s Cabaret, and the broader aesthetic and political landscape of the US in the early 1990s, as the cultural wars and the HIV/AIDS epidemic raged.

In this third piece on interdisciplinary art, a look at how to display and exhibit performance-related materials from video to costumes, sound to paintings to sculptural objects. What are those strategies curators marshal to draw immaterial artworks—or time—into visitors’ experiences of an exhibition?

In the second of her four-part series on interdisciplinarity in the contemporary art center, Gwyneth Shanks focuses on how the curation and presentation of interdisciplinary projects re-choreographs the ways in which Walker employees work.

The term “interdisciplinary” is a slippery one, defining as it does scholarly pursuits or aesthetic practice that fall in between established disciplines or genres. The Walker’s Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellow introduces a series examining the notion.

“Hers was a dance practice that sought to reveal itself; her simple never lacked.” With a 1973 letter between Trisha Brown and curator Suzanne Weil as her guide, Gwyneth Shanks reflects on the legacy and passing of a choreographer with deep Walker ties.