With schools facing budget cuts, what new approaches can ensure students have access to arts education? La’Kayla Williams explores case studies.

Members of the 2024–25 Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council declare a globally dispersed museum that is nowhere and anywhere—a Heart Gallery—made of treasured belongings that comfort, memorialize, and transport.

Twin Cities based artists Taoheed Bayo and Mark Odumuyiwa reveal their collaborative approach to creating the locally focused Something to Say Magazine.

A conversation between two Walker Art Center educators that explores the intent of using and speaking land acknowledgments into one’s space, particularly that of a public institution.

An exploration into how the handmade is a source of power and radical change.

Through an original playlist and accompanying conversation, DJ Jamal Dixon explores music, dance, and DJ’ing as forms of creative play.

In an area when drag is under attack, Lil Miss Hot Mess explores drag as a creative and imaginative form of play that utilizes dress-up to envision and enact new worlds as well as build community through feelings of camaraderie and commiseration.

Ginger Brooks Takahashi explores pleasure-centered research around foraging, cooking, and their connection to place.

Anna Marie Shogren pulls from interdisciplinary experience as a dance artist, a hospice CNA, and writer to question the capacity of a written score to support or invite care.

How do skating and community gardening form care? MoMA’s Amara Thomas delves into this unexpected relationship.

Explore the unique models for participatory, responsive learning found at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA).

Whether public, private, or for a school group, all tours at the Walker are led by a professional museum Educator. This amazing and energetic group of Walker staff are always here to help translate the sometimes, shall we say complex, artwork jargon into language anyone can understand.

St. Paul native choreographer Leslie Parker explores the potential for change that lies within one’s environment, community, and collaborations.

Kate Quale, illustrator, designer, and member of both the Sensory Friendly Sunday Community Advisory Group and The Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities discusses the importance of making museums accessible to all.

Created as part of Jordan Weber’s two-year residency at the Walker Art Center, Prototype for poetry vs rhetoric (deep roots) is a farm, a sculptural installation, and a community space, addressing the endemic impacts of environmental racism in North Minneapolis with a lasting communal platform.

In fall 2020, the Walker Art Center and Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.) co-presented a residency with artist collective Studio K.O.S. Through workshops and a public event, the project foregrounded the group’s decades-long practice of collaborative pedagogy and its transformative social impact.

If we can’t connect with each other, how do we know who we are? If we don’t gather with each other, how do we know who we could be?

Walter brings me joy. Walter is an embodiment of my wish that, as a disabled person, my differently-experienced world could be centered sometimes.

I wanted to be deeply inclusive in my curation, to reach beyond my own network, to provide a route or two around fixed professional pathways that are not always accessible for people with disabilities, and to spark connections that might last long after 2020.

As a Turkish immigrant to the United States, experimental filmmaker Nazlı Dinçel relates the tedious acts of physically animating words onto each frame of film, or hand processing each roll of film, to the traditional female roles in her Turkish upbringing. Dinçel works primarily in 16mm film, focusing on themes of immigration, desire, and dislocation.

The subject of the “room”—from the artist’s studio to domestic settings to public places—has captured the interest of artists throughout history. As many of us remain quarantined in our homes (or are perhaps are finally venturing outside), curators Siri Engberg and Jadine Collingwood take us on a virtual tour of works in the exhibition Five Ways In to explore how artists convey the routines, pleasures, and complexities of our lives indoors.

Unlike some of the monumental sculptures in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which strike imposing silhouettes on the downtown skyline, Shadows at the Crossroads, by St. Paul–based artists Ta-coumba T. Aiken, Seitu Jones, and Rosemary Soyini Vinelle Guyton, is made on a decidedly human scale, both in its physical form and its concept. Here, a look behind the scenes at the making of this intimate, locally resonant work.

Jasper Johns’s Flags (1967–1968) invites viewers to look at two US flags: one in green, black, and orange, the other in grayscale. After gazing on the upper flag then looking at a dot on the gray flag, viewers should see the time-honored red, white, and blue, but only as an afterimage. “What makes this work so compelling,” writes Walker Interpretation Fellow Alexandra Nicome in a Memorial Day reflection, “is the simultaneous awe and intimacy we get to experience with this shared symbol. In Johns’s print, a commonplace icon only exists in its ‘true’ form when I make it in my mind.”

“If the general shutdown of galleries and museums, studios and parks has taught me anything about my relationship to art, it’s that being in its actual presence is wholly different from experiencing it through the mediation of a screen.” Preparing for that moment, critic Seph Rodney considers four “convictions” for ensuring he never takes art for granted again. 

On Mother’s Day 1987, 430 women over the age of 60 gathered in the Crystal Court of the IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis to be part of a ceremonial performance art work honoring older women. In conjunction with the Walker’s 24-hour streaming of a related documentary on May 10, we share a look at artist and activist Suzanne Lacy’s The Crystal Quilt from Walker archivist Jill Vuchetich.

As a recent guest editor for Mn Artists, choreographer Kristin Van Loon maps a series of articles by local artists and performance makers onto a Venn diagram on the themes of dance, analog/digital, and real-time-ness.

“In the very fast-paced, social-media-driven, body-shaming world we find ourselves, I don’t think it’s very often that the average person puts their phone away for two hours and sits and draws and tries to capture something beautiful about the movement of the human form. It’s a lovely way to slow down.” Artist Leslie Barlow discusses the monthly life drawing workshops she’s leading as part of Target Free Thursday Nights.

“The American landscape imaginary has always been a contradiction. This imagined rurality is meant to be nostalgic but untouched by history, teeming with natural life, while cultivated and economically productive. Nothing crystallizes this aesthetic desire more than the humble hay bale.”  Mn Artists Outreach Associate Nik Nerburn, who lives in Duluth and works throughout greater Minnesota, reframes common assumptions about pastoral and agricultural aesthetics through one ubiquitous feature of rural landscapes, the hay bale.