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Paul Schmelzer

Paul Schmelzer is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor. From 1998 to 2007, he was associate director of marketing at the Walker, and from 2011 to 2020, he was editor of Walker Reader.

Focused on the intersection of art, media, and social change, he's written for publications including Adbusters (where he was associate editor from 2003 to 2005), Artforum.com, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, The Progressive, Raw Vision, and Utne Reader, among others. His interviews with Cameron Sinclair, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Winona La Duke appear in the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook (Royal Society of Arts). As founding editor of Walker Reader, he conceived of key publishing efforts including Artist Op-Eds, Soundboard, and The Year According To. He was lead organizer and co-emcee of the 2015 Walker conference Superscript: Arts Journalism and Criticism in a Digital Age.

Former editor of the Minnesota Independent (2008–2011) and managing editor of its DC-based nonprofit parent, the American Independent News Network (2009–2011), he's the first online journalist in state history to win either a Frank Premack Award for Public Affairs Journalism (2008) or a Society of Professional Journalists Page One Award (2007). He was a member of the 2019 cohort of the Wilder Foundation's James P. Shannon Leadership Institute and, with writer/curator Nicole J. Caruth, won a 2019 arts writers grant from Creative Capital and the Andy Warhol Foundation. With Caruth, he runs The Ostracon.

In his spare time, he's been known to ask celebrities, from Yoko Ono and Noam Chomsky to Rep. John Lewis and Kim Gordon, to sign his autograph.

No Holds Barred: A Look at Piotr Szyhalski’s Daily COVID-19 Reports

On Mar. 23, Donald Trump announced, “America will, again, and soon, be open for business.” Data from Johns Hopkins gave healthcare experts reason to object: the US was nearing 43,000 coronavirus cases and 600 deaths. The next day, Piotr Szyhalski grabbed a brush and some ink and started drawing, setting in motion a daily practice of artmaking in response to the politics and pain surrounding COVID-19. Here, updated as each artwork is completed, a look at his practice and process. 

The Best of Walker Reader 2019

“Where did we see innovation in how we approach online discourse about art today? Where were we brave, or creative, or unexpected in our publishing? What just felt right?” Walker Reader’s editor shares the magazine’s top moments of 2019—from a reconsideration of a 1940 Edward Hopper masterpiece to incisive discussion of topics from museum neutrality to queer design pedagogy to Indigenous fashion.

How Whistleblower Reality Winner’s FBI Interrogation Became Powerful Theater

When Tina Satter read the transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of Reality Winner—the whistleblower who leaked to the press a secret NSA report about Russian election hacking—she was enthralled. “This is like a thriller,” she recalls. “This is a character study of a person trying to hold their ground in this moment when you know that in 45 minutes, oh my God, their life is going to be so different.” In conversation with Winner’s mother, Satter discusses the issues surrounding the case and how her company turned a verbatim transcript into a powerful theatrical performance.

Interventionist Typography: Erik Brandt on Five Years of Ficciones Typografika

From 2013 to 2018, a humble alley in Minneapolis’s Powderhorn Park neighborhood was transformed into an unlikely showcase of global design innovation. On a 72 x 36-inch garage-side panel, Erik Brandt hosted typographic experiments by the likes of Eike König, Sarah Boris, Bráulio Amado, and Walker designers Jasio Stefanski and Aryn Beitz—1,641 in total. In a Walker Reader exclusive, we share a conversation with Brandt from Ficciones Typografika: 1642, a new monograph chronicling the project.

Newspapers as Portals to the Political

“The personal and the political are intertwined and inseparable.” JoAnn Verburg discusses her use of  newspapers—usually printed at life-size and read by her husband—in photographs that are both intimate and incisive, including WTC (2003), which is featured in the exhibition Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection.

The Art of Response-ability

“For us the potential of art is to insert something into a situation to stir things up, cause a catalytic change, or detonate a chain of events.” To commemorate the opening of their installation Chalk—in which visitors can draw with human-sized chalk sticks—we revisit this 2004 interview with Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, in which they discuss key works in their practice, including Chalk (1998), Land Mark (Vieques) (2001–2002), and Charcoal Dance Floor (2001).

identity for Museum resolution Soundboard

Soundboard 4:
Museum Resolutions

A new year affords us all—including cultural institutions—a chance to reflect on our values and resolve to live in better harmony with them. As museums continue to be called upon to change—from transparency around the ways philanthropists and trustees amassed their wealth to issues around race, representation, and decolonization—we invited Seb Chan, Nicole Ivy, Laura Raicovich, and Anthony Romero to share their suggested New Year’s resolutions for art museums in 2019.

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The Best of Walker Reader 2018

“What kinds of institutions could be better positioned to gather diverse groups of people around complex dialogue?” Deborah Cullinan, CEO of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, surfaced this question—in reference to art centers—in the inaugural edition of Soundboard, the new multi-author tool we launched in March 2018. It seems a fitting way to launch a recap of the best moment of the year at Walker Reader.

Introducing LOOP: A New Kind of Jazz Magazine from Jason Moran

“If the music was changing, why wasn’t the format of the jazz magazine shifting around?” From the mind of polymath musician/artist Jason Moran comes a new kind of music publication. Looking at jazz culture from an African American perspective, LOOP features the voices of Moran, his friends, family, and collaborators, including Matana Roberts, Kendrick Scott, Jamaaladeen Tacuma, Greg Tate, and Cassandra Wilson, among others. Read issue one now.

Defend the Vote: Laverne Berry and Anne de Mare on Capturing the Flag

“In the United States of America, it’s ‘one man, one vote,’” says voting-rights advocate Laverne Berry in Anne de Mare’s documentary, Capturing the Flag. “If that’s our definition of democracy, and then we don’t give the one man the vote, it’s a big fat lie.” On the eve of Election Day 2018, de Mare and Berry discuss the role of art in tackling thorny issues around voter suppression, race, and democracy in times of political polarization.

Repeat Cycles: Meredith Monk on Voice, #MeToo, and Recurring History

Born in the late years of the WWII, Meredith Monk has seen it all—14 presidents; six major US wars; the birth of the modern Civil Rights, anti-war, and environmental movements; 9/11; Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Trump. Through it all, the multifaceted artist says she has been responding through art to events in the world—but rarely through words. Here, she discusses how she responds to these times of polarization, fear, and compression.

Soundboard 3:
Art & Journalism

One of the things recent events at the border reminds us is the power of documentation: audio, video, and photos that indelibly show the human impact of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. While the viral response to news of separated families and children held in “tender age facilities” underscores the power of such practices, it also raises questions for those of us in the art world: What can art do that journalism can’t? Natalia Almada, Jackie Amézquita, Dorit Cypis, and Ifrah Mansour weigh in.

How Should Museums Deal with Art by Alleged Harassers?

Soundboard 1:
Museums & #MeToo

As the #MeToo movement hits the art world, we invite five experts to weigh in on what museums must consider when showing or contextualizing work by artists accused of wrongdoing. Sharing perspectives are: artist Rashayla Marie Brown, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts CEO Deborah Cullinan, critic/historian Tyler Green, Hammer Museum educator Theresa Sotto, and journalist/editor Jillian Steinhauer.

The Best of Walker Reader 2017

An indigenous vision for a new New World. A new manifesto from Werner Herzog. A resistance reading list. A decoding of the photography of Bon Iver’s 22, a Million. Artists weigh in on Trump rescinding DACA. A frank discussion about inclusion for Native American voices in contemporary art. Catch up on the year’s best writing at Walker Reader.

10 Artists on Rescinding DACA

Following Donald Trump’s announced plan to rescind DACA, an Obama-era program for undocumented immigrants, we invited an array of artists with close ties to the border—including Natalia Almada, Ken Gonzales-Day, Patrick Martinez, Helado Negro, and Postcommodity—to share responses to the DACA decision and the issues at the heart of our national discourse around immigration.

Getting at “The Truth”

To complement Werner Herzog’s 2017 addendum to his Minnesota Declaration on truth and fact in documentary cinema, we’ve commissioned related essays on “truth” by four thinkers: critic Ben Davis, filmmaker Sabaah Folayan, artist RaMell Ross, and journalist Eric Schlosser.

Wild Man, Iconoclast, Dreamer: 60 on John Zorn at 60 (Part 2)

“One cannot categorize [John] Zorn,” says cellist Fred Sherry, who dubs the New York music icon “a big subject: friend, composer, wild man, confidante, connoisseur, dreamer, idealist.” In a two-part online celebration of Zorn’s 60th birthday, we asked 60 artists, poets, and musicians–including Yoko Ono, Meredith Monk, and Terry Riley–to share their reflections on a music pioneer.

Visionary, Mensch, Dude: 60 on John Zorn at 60 (Part I)

When we asked an array of musicians and artists–including Laurie Anderson, Nels Cline, and Bill Frisell–to share their reflections about John Zorn on the occasion of his 60th birthday, three words kept recurring: “visionary,” “mensch,” “dude.” In a two-part celebration of Zorn’s sixth decade, we share 60 birthday wishes for this celebrated improviser, experimenter, and genre-jumping producer.