Paul Schmelzer

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. 

“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.

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.

Taking its title from the GPS coordinates for Bdote, the birthplace of the Dakota people, Postcommodity’s newest artwork is a codex, a pictographic story, examining the Twin Cities’s past and present in terms of its relationship to migration, violence to the land, and Indigenous sovereignty.

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.

“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.

“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).

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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why isn’t more art by Native Americans collected and presented by major institutions? And why is there so little representation—in both museum staffs and the art press that covers them—of indigenous peoples? Kathleen Ash-Milby, Jeffrey Gibson, Luzene Hill, Dyani White Hawk, and Candessa Tehee discuss.

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.

On the occasion of John Ashbery’s passing on September 3 at age 90, we share audio of the famed poet reading his Walker-commissioned poem, a site-specific meditation on movement, place, and order that since 1988 has graced the 375-foot expanse of Siah Armajani’s graceful bridge over the interstate highway.

As preparation for Bon Iver’s headlining performance at Rock the Garden on July 22, we revisit artist Eric Timothy Carlson’s heavily illustrated interview with Walker design director Emmet Byrne on the symbolism and design for the Grammy-nominated LP 22, a Million.

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.

Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist discuss Postcommodity’s practice of community-engaged land art and themes in “2043: No Es Un Sueño,” a commissioned essay on native self-determination, ethnic and national identity, and the year when whites become a minority in the Americas.

“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.

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.

Meteorologist Paul Douglas—a Republican who believes climate change is real—considers himself an “albino unicorn.” Music-theater artist Cynthia Hopkins decided to make art about the crisis after a 2010 Arctic expedition. Here, the duo discusses global warming and ways that art, science, and spirituality can work together to change minds about a changing planet.