OPENING EXHIBITIONS
FIVE WAYS IN: THEMES FROM THE COLLECTION, February 14, 2019–September 19, 2021
ALLORA & CALZADILLA: CHALK, February 14–February 2, 2020
THE BODY ELECTRIC, March 30–July 21, 2019
THEASTER GATES, September 7, 2019–January 12, 2020
AN ART OF CHANGES: JASPER JOHNS PRINTS, 1960–2016, February 16–September 20, 2020
THE PARADOX OF STILLNESS, May 15–Aug 8, 2021
JULIE MEHRETU, March 13–July 11, 2021
CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS
I AM YOU, YOU ARE TOO, September 7, 2017–March 1, 2020
MARIO GARCÍA TORRES: ILLUSION BROUGHT ME HERE, October 25, 2018–February 17, 2019
PLATFORMS: COLLECTION AND COMMISSIONS, November 15, 2018–August 25, 2019
ELIZABETH PRICE, December 8, 2018–March 1, 2020
OPENING EXHIBITIONS
FIVE WAYS IN: THEMES FROM THE COLLECTION
February 14, 2019–September 19, 2021
Galleries 4, 5 & 6
Does a portrait need to resemble its subject? Can a landscape help us see the world differently? Can art create questions without answers? The Walker’s newest collection exhibition takes a look at these and other questions through an exciting selection of works from the not-so-distant past and the current moment. The presentation is organized by five familiar themes: portraiture, the interior scene, landscape, still life, and abstraction. Each of these areas features a diverse range of artists whose approaches to their subjects are often unconventional, innovative, and even surprising.
With more than 100 works—painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video installations—the exhibition Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection invites us to become reacquainted with favorites from the collection and to discover new pieces by artists who are reinventing genres we thought we knew.
Self: Long used by artists as way to explore the self, identity, and the body, portraits have a unique capacity to capture the essence of an individual. This section includes both traditional portraits and others made in unexpected ways.
Inside: The indoor space can be a reflection of the artist’s creative environment and a site for observing the complexities or pleasures of life. Highlighted here are various takes on the subject of the interior, from domestic settings to public places to artists’ studios.
Outside:Many artists have reconsidered and expanded the notion of the landscape to include deeper meditations on the natural world—detailed observations of the outdoor environment that range from the specific to the abstract.
Everyday: Considering work by artists who celebrate the ordinary, this section brings together intriguing still lifes, singular takes on everyday language, and works that make the commonplace seem unfamiliar through changes in scale or materials.
Everything: Line, form, color, and shape are key to artists who embrace abstraction. The works here explore pure gesture and the physical properties of materials in compelling and inventive ways.
Curators: Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts; and Alexandra Nicome, interpretation fellow, Education and Public Programs
ALLORA & CALZADILLA: CHALK
February 14, 2019–February 2, 2020
Gallery 7
Human-size sticks of chalk—each 64 inches long and approximately 100 pounds—fill Gallery 7, which has been transformed into an environment open to spontaneous mark-making. With a chalkboard spanning the walls and floor, this interactive art installation by collaborators Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla was previously presented in Lima, Peru; Paris; Boston; and New York. Chalk provides a physical forum for participants to exchange ideas, evolving into a social and political portrait of the community. Express yourself and see what others have added to this ever-changing space for all ages.
Puerto Rico–based Allora & Calzadilla have collaborated since 1995, creating works that reach across sculpture, video, performance, and photography. Through their incisive practice, they engage with questions of history, culture, and geopolitics.
Curator: Victoria Sung, assistant curator, Visual Arts
THE BODY ELECTRIC
March 30–July 21, 2019
Galleries A & B
In an age dominated by digital technology, The Body Electric explores themes of the real and virtual, the organic and artificial, moving from the world to the screen and back again. Today, computer and phone screens are fast becoming the primary places of encountering new information, effectively blurring the boundary between three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional image. The exhibition presents work by an international and intergenerational group of artists who examine ways that photographic, televisual, and digital media change our perceptions of the human body and everyday life.
With pieces ranging from the 1960s to today, The Body Electric brings together artists such as Trisha Baga, Nam June Paik, and Shigeko Kubota, whose work across performance, sculpture, and moving image conflates the physical world and its life on screen. For some artists, including Martine Syms, Andrea Crespo, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, the lens of the camera creates a space to rethink the representation of sociopolitical identities and to question the structures that govern our understanding of race, gender, and sexuality. For others, such as Mark Leckey, Pierre Huyghe, and Bruce Nauman, technology offers opportunities to consider the malleable, fragmented, and impossible body.
Charting the embrace and manipulation of technology across varying generations, The Body Electric examines how the screen has increasingly shifted ways that we picture ourselves and understand our place in the world.
Contains mature content.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
© Theaster Gates. Photo © Tom Harris Courtesy White Cube
THEASTER GATES
September 7, 2019–January 12, 2020
Gallery B
For his first major US exhibition, Theaster Gates will bring together various facets of his practice—which includes performance, installation, and archival interventions—into the space of the gallery. First trained as a ceramicist, Gates is best known for his work on Dorchester Projects, a growing neighborhood of buildings on Chicago’s South Side that the artist rehabilitated to house libraries, archives, and collections, as well as host performances and community gatherings. At the Walker, the galleries will be transformed into a gesamtkunswerk, or total work of art, that transposes the artist’s immersive studio environment into the museum.
In 2017 Gates unveiled his first outdoor commission Black Vessel for a Saint (2017) in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Composed of recycled black bricks, the structure provides a permanent home for a salvaged statue of Saint Laurence, the patron saint of librarians and archivists. During the run of the exhibition Gates will activate both the indoor and outdoor spaces of the Walker.
Curator: Victoria Sung, assistant curator, Visual Arts
Ink, metallic acrylic on paper. 12 3/16 x 8 7/16 in
Private collection
© Marlene Dumas
THE EXPRESSIONIST FIGURE: 100 YEARS OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAWING
November 17, 2019–April 19, 2020
Gallery C
This exhibition features some 100 works on paper that explore the expressive potential of the human body. In this richly varied presentation, viewers will find portraiture, social satire, narrative, fantasy, and erotica in media ranging from crayon, ink, and graphite to watercolor, pastel, and collage. The drawings span more than a century of artistic experimentation, beginning with an exquisite charcoal study of a bather by the French Impressionist Edgar Degas, executed around 1900, to a mordant parody of The Wizard of Oz made in 2015 by the Minnesota-based Anishinabe artist Jim Denomie. Because many of the drawings are part of a bequest to the Walker from an important private collector, the exhibition is not only a presentation of virtuoso artworks but also a testament to the pleasure of building a collection and the rewards of sharing it.
Among the 65 artists in the exhibition are: Chuck Close, Brent Cook-Dizney, Willem de Kooning, Otto Dix, Marlene Dumas, Arshile Gorky, Jasper Johns, William Kentridge, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele, Ben Shahn, Rosemarie Trockel, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol.
Contains mature content.
Curators: Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts
Screenprint on paper
35 1/8 x 27 3/8 inches
Collection Walker Art Center, Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton, 1988
© Jasper Johns/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
AN ART OF CHANGES: JASPER JOHNS PRINTS, 1960–2016
February 16–September 20, 2020
Gallery A
When Jasper Johns’s paintings of flags and targets debuted in 1958, they brought him instant acclaim and established him as a critical link between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. In the ensuing 60 years, Johns has continued to astonish viewers with the beauty and acumen of his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Today, he is today considered one of the 20th century’s greatest American artists.
An Art of Changes surveys six decades of Johns’s work in printmaking through a selection of some 100 works in intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screenprinting, lead relief, and blind embossing —all drawn from the Walker’s complete collection of the artist’s prints. Organized in four thematic, roughly chronological sections, the exhibition follows Johns as he revises and recycles key motifs over time.Viewers will see examples of his familiar flags and targets as well as images that explore artists’ tools, materials, and techniques of mark-making; abstract works based on motifs known as flagstones and hatch marks; and later works that teem with autobiographical and personal imagery. To underscore Johns’s fascination with the changes that occur when an image is reworked in another medium, the prints will be augmented by a small selection of paintings and sculptures. After its presentation at the Walker, the exhibition will travel to three US venues.
Curators: Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts
THE PARADOX OF STILLNESS
May 15–Aug 8, 2021
Galleries 1, 2, 3 & D
The Paradox of Stillness is an interdisciplinary exhibition exploring the intersections of performance and visual art. Presenting works from the early 20th century to today, the exhibition examines the notion of stillness as both a performative and visual gesture, featuring practitioners who have constructed static or near-static experiments that hover somewhere between action and representation as they are experienced in the gallery.
Stillness and permanence are qualities typically seen as inherent to painting and sculpture—consider the frozen gestures of a historical tableau, the timelessness of a still life painting, or the unyielding solidity of a bronze or marble figure. The Paradox of Stillness, however, expands the artwork’s quality of stillness to accommodate uncertain temporalities and physical states. The exhibition rethinks the history of performance, featuring artists whose works include performative elements but also embrace acts, objects, and gestures that refer more to the inert qualities of traditional painting or sculpture than to true staged action. Investigating the interplay between the fixed image and the live body, this major group exhibition showcases some 100 works by approximately 70 artists, including 35 live performances.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and director of programs, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
JULIE MEHRETU
March 13–July 11, 2021
Galleries 1, 2, 3, & D
This exhibition marks the first-ever comprehensive retrospective on the work of Julie Mehretu. Known for her large-scale abstract canvases, Mehretu uses painting techniques that range from precisely drawn lines and layering of various media to brushed, scratched, and rubbed marks to balletic gestures of varying weight and viscosity. Within her superimposed picture planes is imagery that expresses the complexities of our civilization—examining history, colonialism, capitalism, geopolitics, war, diaspora, and displacement—in all of its chaos and beauty.
Julie Mehretucovers the full arc of the artist’s career, from her early work featuring architectural and graphic elements, geographical schema, and plans for public spaces, to her recent bold canvases with figurative elements layered amid pixelated, printed, sprayed, and drawn gestures. The exhibition brings together approximately 35 large-scale paintings with 35 prints and drawings dating from 1996 to the present. Mehretu’s play with scale, from her intricate drawings and prints to her large canvases, will be explored in depth, as will her techniques of combining color, line, and brushstrokes to create her unique surfaces.
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1970, Julie Mehretu was raised in East Lansing, Michigan. Since 1999, she has lived and worked in New York, establishing herself as one of the most exciting painters working in the United States. She is a recipient of the US State Department’s National Medal of Arts (2015) and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant” (2005) among other awards and honors. In 2002–2003, Mehretu participated in a yearlong residency at the Walker Art Center.
Julie Mehretuis co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Walker’s presentation of the exhibition will be the final destination on a national tour, originating at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (November 3, 2019–May 17, 2020) and continuing to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (June 26–September 20, 2020) and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (October 24, 2020–January 31, 2021).
Curators: Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; with Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS
Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1981; © Robert Longo
I AM YOU, YOU ARE TOO
September 7, 2017–March 1, 2020
Galleries 1, 2, 3, & D
At a time of heightened uncertainty, division, and geopolitical tensions, I am you, you are too foregrounds works from the Walker’s collections that explore contemporary life through themes of citizenship and belonging, borders and barriers, and ways in which everyday life informs our understanding of ourselves. Bringing together an international group of artists, the exhibition questions how we memorialize the past and understand the social, geographic, and political structures that shape us.
The show’s title is taken from I M U U R 2(2013), a room-scaled installation by Danh Vo that considers how collected objects, such as knickknacks and souvenirs, can communicate who we are. Monuments and shared public space play a key role for Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, and Robert Longo, whose works examine the relationship between the individual and the state. Chantal Akerman and Julie Mehretu reflect upon shifting geographical borders and changing political systems, while Postcommodity and Wolfgang Tillmans reference debates on the Mexico-US border and Brexit, respectively. While some artists draw on recognizable places and known stories, others turn to abstraction to elicit themes of the place of the home, the city, and national belonging.
In presenting a broad range of artistic approaches, I am you, you are too draws out timely questions of national identity, shifting political borders, and international and intercultural dialogue.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, Curator, Visual Arts; Adrienne Edwards, Curator at Large, Visual Arts; Pavel Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts
35mm slides transferred to video,
Collection Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano, Italy
MARIO GARCÍA TORRES: ILLUSION BROUGHT ME HERE
October 25, 2018–February 17, 2019
Galleries A & B
Appropriation, repetition, reenactment—these are just a few of the strategies Mexico-based artist Mario García Torres (b. 1975) uses to address his chosen subjects. A favorite topic is the history of Conceptual art, which he excavates to uncover compelling narratives: a secret that was never told, a phone number for an imaginary museum, the work of a gifted but unknown filmmaker, or the search for an elusive hotel. He often juxtaposes facts with imagined scenes, blurring truth and fiction along the way. From augmented reality to video, sound installation to painting, sculpture to drawing, García Torres’s works prompt us to consider the subjective nature of historical records, the limitations of memory, and the possibilities of perception.
García Torres’s first US survey, the exhibition Illusion Brought Me Here highlights the artist as both researcher and storyteller, exploring the impulses that produce artistic thought. Encompassing the galleries, the Bentson Mediatheque, and the Walker Cinema, the presentation features 45 works created over the past two decades as well as site-specific installations conceived exclusively for the Walker. A newly commissioned piece made from the soundtracks of García Torres’s media-based art serves as a dynamic audio framework in the gallery. In addition, a trilogy of staged monologues conceived by the artist will be presented live during the run of the show. The exhibition includes García Torres’s new augmented-reality installation, which can only be experienced on-site in the exhibition on a smartphone or iPad available for use in the gallery.
Organized by the Walker and copresented with WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, the exhibition will be accompanied by the first catalogue to survey García Torres’s work, copublished by the two institutions.
Note: Strobe lighting effects and flashing projections are in use in the galleries.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and director of programs, Visual Arts; with Fabián Leyva-Barragan, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
PLATFORMS: COLLECTION AND COMMISSIONS
November 15, 2018–August 25, 2019
Gallery C
Established and emerging artists, historical and contemporary themes: Platforms juxtaposes moving image works from the Walker’s collection with new commissions by 12 international artists. The films and videos on view cover a wide range of political and cultural issues—from atomic bomb testing on Bikini Atoll to telepathic improvisation—all while staying at the forefront of the avant-garde. The new works bridge generations: the contemporary artists each create a piece inspired by the work of a specific predecessor. The dynamic initiative weaves together production, scholarship, distribution, and archival research.
Platforms is divided into six seven-week-long rotations, each presenting a single landmark film from the collection, alongside the commissions it inspired. Viewers are encouraged to visit the exhibition multiple times to experience yet another new perspective.
1. Exchanging Histories, November 15 January 6: Bruce Conner, James Richards, Leslie Thornton
2. Shared Cultures, January 8–February 24: Yto Barrada, Harun Farocki, Renée Green
3. Inhabited Figures, February 26–April 14: Uri Aran, Marcel Broodthaers, Shahryar Nashat
4. Sonic Landscapes, April 16–June 2: Moyra Davey, Derek Jarman, James Richards
5. Political Presence, June 4–July 21: Marwa Arsanios, Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, Harun Farocki
6. Reimagining Life, July 23–August 25: Maya Deren, Kevin Jerome Everson, William Klein, Deborah Stratman
Curators: Sheryl Mousley, senior curator, Moving Image; and Ruth Hodgins, Bentson archivist/assistant curator, Moving Image
FELT TIP (2018)
Two projector video installation
Courtesy the artist. Commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Film and Video Umbrella, and Nottingham Contemporary. Supported by Arts Council England
ELIZABETH PRICE
December 8, 2018–March 1, 2020
Gallery D
London-based artist Elizabeth Price (UK, b. 1966) creates richly layered, moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.
Conceived in response to the architecture and past history of the Walker’s gallery, this solo exhibition features two new moving image works—FELT TIP and KOHL (both 2018)—marking the artist’s first commission for a US museum. Projected floor to ceiling at over 15 feet, FELT TIP focuses on design motifs of men’s neckties from the 1970s and ’80s with patterns that evoke electronic networks and digital systems. Exploring the tie as both a sign of professional distinction and a sexually charged object, the work weaves together narratives of early computer technologies in the workplace and the gendered distinctions of its workforce. Conceived as a ghost story, KOHL describes a vast and unseen underground liquid network that hosts mysterious apparitions called “visitants,” who hint at ways that the mining of coal has underpinned much of our present social reality. Seen together, Price’s new works take motifs of dress and body adornment to reflect upon the relationship between the material and digital, sites of labor, and markers of class.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Elizabeth Price’s FELT TIP(2018) is commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Film and Video Umbrella, and Nottingham Contemporary with support from Arts Council England.
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