The New Year’s reset moment offered me a chance to stop the treadmill of deadlines, momentarily, to reflect on what we did here at Walker Reader over the past year: what worked (or didn’t) and what efforts show promise as we continue to develop our thinking about the role of digital publishing in the cultural sphere. While we have hard metrics to gauge how we did—we published 175 pieces of original content in 2019, featured 100 commissioned writers from around the globe (55 percent of whom identify as people of color) in addition to our own staff contributors, and earned nearly 640,000 pageviews—it’s the softer considerations I’m most interested in today’s lookback. How did Walker Reader help us live up to our mission of connecting artists and audiences and examining “the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities”? 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? Where was the writing strong? And, what just felt right?
What follows are some of my favorite moments at Walker Reader last year—the cases where we tried to ask tough questions, offer serious content in compelling ways, share stories about topics that deserve more attention, or look at familiar ideas in new ways. While it’s a late addition to New Year observances, it serves as a good reflection for me and, hopefully, a useful primer for new readers on what Walker Reader is, with a few glimpses of what it aspires to be.
We started 2019 with a strong, seasonally appropriate addition to our Soundboard series: a discussion on museum resolutions that remains incredibly relevant one year later. Four thinkers in the art museum world—technologist Seb Chan, inclusion strategist Nicole Ivy, artist-organizer Anthony Romero, and writer and former museum director Laura Raicovich—weighed in with suggested New Year’s resolutions, tackling topics from salary cloaking in museum hiring and doing away with the notion of “museum neutrality” to a shift in focus to community, representation, and equity. This fourth edition of our Soundboard series was the year’s most popular with readers.
Choreographers’ Evening, held annually for 47 years the Saturday after Thanksgiving, affords us a unique opportunity: showcasing Minnesota dance talent, it allowed us to invite participating choreographers into the Walker photo studio this year for a daylong video- and photo-shoot—and to test out a new endlessly modifiable feature story template we’ll be using more and more in the coming months. Instead of a biographical, meet-the-choreographers post like the ones we’ve run in past years, we took a more poetic approach. We asked each choreographer to consider, through motion and text, the source of their movement and their relationship between the body—its power, vulnerabilities, and aliveness—and possibilities for performance. Written by the event’s project manager, Kayva Yang, the rich-media presentation includes still photography by Bobby Rogers, videography by Andy Underwood–Bultmann and Christian Jensen, and design by Jas Stefanski.
In one of the more refreshing stories of the year, Interpretation Fellow Alexandra Nicome reconsiders Edward Hopper’s 1940 classic (on view in our permanent collection show, Five Ways In) in light of both the #MeToo movement and, importantly, intersectional feminism:
The story in Hopper’s painting is always current and contemporary because he places his viewers in the position of a voyeur: a seat for speculation and passive participation. Each viewer/voyeur uses their understanding of history and culture, as well as their own experiences, to fill the narrative.
So I am granting myself permission to be subjective. I believe the secretary. I write a story that is, otherwise, forever unsaid.
Richard Romain in Horace Jenkins’s Cane River, 1982. Photo courtesy IndieCollect
In last summer’s Lost Films & Restorations series, one film epitomized the power of restoration in altering cinema’s canon. Shortly after the premiere of Cane River (1982), director Horace Jenkins passed away, and his film all but disappeared. More than 30 years later, the work—a love story set in one of Louisiana’s first “free communities of color”—was rediscovered, restored, and screened. Amirah Ellison shared the story, but with a gripping twist: the film’s link to her own family.
Jules Gimbrone. Photo: Malanda Jean-Claude for Walker Art Center
Artist Op-Eds, our series of hybrid print/digital essays launched in 2014, published its 13th edition in May with a contribution from musician and installation artist Jules Gimbrone. In “Touching a Third Sound,” Gimbrone proposes what they term “Trans-Sensing” as a model for a more nuanced way of experiencing the world, one that transcends the quantitative binary of real/fake and doesn’t rely on the categorical flattening of complexity that comes with merely seeing. The essay, our first in the series to feature embedded audio, is also available, like all Artist Op-Eds, as a print-on-demand pamphlet.
In 2019, our multi-author tool Soundboard hosted five discussions in which 22 incisive voices addressed questions both related to Walker programs and not—from Indigenous fashion to film restoration’s potential for growing cinema’s canon. In its second year, Soundboard took the mantra “not about us without us” to heart, for the first time inviting guest editors to lead discussions on topics that fall outside my expertise as an editor or experiences as a white, cis, straight man. In addition to our New Year’s edition, we hosted:
How Can Fashion Be Reindigenized?
Guest-edited by Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, with contributions by Jessica Metcalfe, Virgil Ortiz, and Sage Paul
How Can Artists Help Reenvision the Internet?
Guest-edited by Are.na, with contributions by Ruth Catlow, Mimi Onuoha, Bo Ren, Danielle Robinson & Andy Pressman, and Gary Zhexi Zhang
Comparison between A March Issue and the original issue of Vogue. Photo: Menno Van Winden
“What’s left if you take away the fashion from a fashion magazine?” Continuing UNLICENSED, an ongoing investigation on The Gradient of design and bootlegging, graphic designer Line Arngaard and fashion researcher Sonia Oet talk with the Walker’s Marie Hoejlund about A March Issue, their 372-page, spread-for-spread remake of an issue of British Vogue—with all models wearing a “default” wardrobe of blue jeans and a white T-shirt.
How can a Walker fashion show live online not as event documentation but a celebration of a designer’s thinking? Following our Indigenous Spirit: Gender Fluid Fashion event on the Walker’s outdoor terraces, we invited models from the event into the Walker photo studio for portraits by Bobby Rogers, the Walker’s staff photographer and an artist who has experience with fashion photography. The result: borrowing the fashion industry’s conception of a “lookbook,” we presented the latest line by IAmAnishinaabe’s Delina White in an enticing, user-friendly format, Rogers’s lush imagery paired with text by Alya Ansari on the history and significance of White’s choice of imagery, materials, and styles. It’s a rich celebration of both White’s work and the Two-Spirit models who animate it.
Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall, curated by Victoria Sung, felt like a quintessentially Walker show to me: instead of discrete works by the celebrated artist, we illuminated part of his artistic process by transporting sources that inspire him from his studio in Chicago to the Walker galleries. In each of four rooms, the exhibition displayed glass slides formerly used by college art history professors, pottery from Gates’s ceramics studio, ephemera from the offices of the publishing company behind Jet and Ebony magazines, and objects from a collection of racist memorabilia. In a wonderful Walker video, part of our ongoing Artspeaks series, Gates discussed the rooms dedicated to these last two, selections from the Johnson Publishing Company Collection and from the the Ana J. and Edward J. Williams Collection of “negrobilia.”
“These two rooms are almost like bookends of the American imagination,” Gates says, “one imagination working to subjugate people through the creation of really negative images and another trying to uplift people through the creation of edifying images of the Black experience. I hope one day these objects disintegrate, both physically and emotionally, that instead we have this truth of equity, this truth of dignity.”
The Walker began its relationship with Postcommodity in 2017 with the commissioned essay, “2043: No Es Un Sueño,” the first essay in our ongoing Artist Op-Eds series to launch with a public talk with the artists. Since then, we commissioned Louise Erdrich to write about the Indigenous collective’s contribution to documenta 14, and we acquired one of the “scare-eye” balloons from its Repellent Fence (2015) project for the Walker collection (currently featured in the exhibition I am you, you are too). In 2019, to commemorate Postcommodity being named Public Art St. Paul’s 2019 Distinguished Artists, I invited members Cristóbal Martínez and Kade Twist to continue the thinking from their op-ed on the Walker Reader. They decided to respond not in writing but by creating a codex, a pictorial story, investigating local land and history. 44.8968° N, 93.1501° Wgets its title from the GPS coordinates of Bdote, a site of deep spiritual and historic significance to the Dakota people: located at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, Bdote is both the center of the Dakota creation story and the site of the US government’s mass internment of Dakota people following the US/Dakota War of 1862. The codex references that history alongside sites and contemporary issues of Dakota life, land use, and migration. It’s an honor that the seed of a relationship with Postcommodity planted through online publishing is also being grown with it.
Every December for the past eight years, we’ve invited artists from across disciplines and around the globe to share a top-10 list culled from the past year. As our invitations ask, “Wasthere an album, book, orartexperience that moved you? A galvanizing moment relatedtopolitics or an inspiring scientific find? An under-reported news story or cause you feel more people should know about? A catharsis, failure, or personal milestone that gave you insight or hope?” Despite the commonplace format of the listicle, we inevitably end up with substantive and insightful contributions—as this year’s edition of 24 perspectives underscores. Art + Museum Transparency—the anonymous collective behind this year’s viral museum salary transparency Google Doc—highlighted advocacy around quality-of-work issues for museum employees, from paid parental leave to unionization. Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch gave shout-outs to everything from Extinction Rebellion and Billie Eilish to Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite while Taeyoon Choi, cofounder of the School for Poetic Computation, made a call for action that centered around care: “How can I speak a language of care and unlearn the language of apathy? What does interdependence among people with opposing ideas look like? What is the act of transformative social justice in everyday life? It may begin with care, a commitment to others.” Always a fun project to be part of, The Year According to never fails to offer digestible morsels that are also surprisingly nourishing.
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