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Joan Rothfuss

Joan Rothfuss is an independent writer and curator based in Minneapolis. From 1988 to 2006 she was a curator at the Walker Art Center, where she organized exhibitions on Joseph Beuys, Bruce Conner, Jasper Johns, and Fluxus, among others. Her many publications include the books Time Is Not Even, Space Is Not Empty: Eiko & Koma (Walker Art Center, 2011) and Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman (MIT, 2014). She holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and an MA from the University of Minnesota.

How the Walker Art Center Acquired Every Print Jasper Johns Ever Made

In 1987, a New York gallery contacted the Walker with an extraordinary offer: an opportunity to purchase 317 prints by Jasper Johns—everything the artist had produced up to that point. No public institution in the world owned a complete collection of graphic work by Johns—who, it turns out, was the unnamed seller behind the collection. As we open An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018, curator Joan Rothfuss looks at this distinctive body of work by an American icon.  

The Western Man in the Midwest: Joseph Beuys in America

All of German Joseph Beuys’s artworks were aimed at remaking Western culture into a more peaceful, democratic, and spiritually attuned system. But, as curator Joan Rothfuss recounts, it wasn’t art objects he wanted to show during his first trip to the United States in 1974. He intended to just speak, embarking on a lecture tour to New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis dubbed the Energy Plan for the Western Man