Walker Art Center 2020-2021 Exhibition Schedule Highlights

Don’t let this be easy
July 30, 2020–July 4, 2021

Featuring more than 30 artists from the collection, the exhibition showcases work by women and highlights moments in history where women struggled for due recognition in the art world. Alongside the exhibition, the Walker will dedicate funds to increasing the photo documentation and writing about women artists from the collection online. “It seemed insufficient to have an exhibition about an issue like representation, without tangibly impacting the visibility of women artists in the Walker’s collection. Ensuring that an image or writing about a particular work exists online seems like a small thing, but it might be the difference between someone deciding to research that artwork or not. The cumulative impact of this can be very powerful.” said Nisa Mackie, director and curator of the Walker’s Education and Public Programs department and curator of the show.

The initiative is presented in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a nationwide effort involving nearly 100 museums committed to social justice and structural change.

Don’t let this be easy highlights the diverse and experimental practices of women artists spanning some 50 years through a selection of paintings, sculptures, moving image works, artist’s books, and materials from the archives. To this day, these artworks challenge traditional museum categories and collecting practices, calling attention to the limitations inherent in institutional divisions and policies. The title Don’t let this be easy encompasses the issues raised by these artworks: the strictures of commercial and institutional validation, the desire for artistic and intellectual freedom, and unique ways that female artists have critically responded to these issues.

Don’t let this be easy includes work by Ree Morton (1936–1977), whose kitsch aesthetics, literary references, and renaissance of the decorative arts defied the monumentalism of a predominantly male art world; Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019), a pioneer of feminist avant-garde performance known for her staged works that personified women’s sexual liberation; Alexis Smith (b. 1949), whose mixed-media assemblages embody the conflicts between the real and the idealized in US culture; and Howardena Pindell (b. 1943), who pivoted from abstraction in 1980 to more directly address sociopolitical issues around the intersection of race, class, and gender. These artists developed experimental presentations and self-published projects in response to (and in spite of) their exclusion from the art market and gallery representation. In doing so, they expanded definitions of art and the bounds of accepted aesthetics.

Many of the artists featured in the exhibition have been the subject of renewed attention from curators and scholars seeking to resurrect some of art history’s more marginalized events. Their works are shown alongside pieces by younger generations to highlight relationships of kinship, visual rapport, and response. These artists include Andrea Carlson (b. 1979), who uses painting to depict the entanglement between cultural narratives and institutional authority; Christina Quarles (b. 1985), whose abstract paintings confront themes of racial and sexual identities, gender, and queerness; and Kaari Upson (b. 1972), who has dedicated the majority of her career to a quasi-fictional character she developed from discarded personal belongings found at an abandoned property. By presenting these works and examining behind-the-scenes what is required to address structural inequity, Don’t let this be easy explores the complex nature of the feminist enterprise.

Curators: Nisa Mackie, director and curator, Education and Public Programs; and Alexandra Nicome, interpretation fellow, Education and Public Programs

Low Visibility
October 15, 2020–January 23, 2022

What would it mean to disappear in an era of near total surveillance? How do we protect our privacy online? Or how might we make something visible in an oversaturated image sphere? Can we trust the images that we see?  Drawn from the Walker’s collection, the works assembled in this exhibition explore the power of visibility and invisibility.

Today visibility is a matter of global political urgency, catalyzed by developments in military weaponry, advances in surveillance technology, grassroots protest movements, and sophisticated disinformation campaigns. Against this backdrop, the international, multigenerational group of artists in this exhibition has developed strategies to avoid being seen or, conversely, shed light on things typically hidden or overlooked. Works on view question the tactics of camouflage in the digital age by reexamining representations of warfare, systems of mass communication, or the signs and symbols of revolution.

The exhibition includes works by Fiona Banner, Ana Mendieta, Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler, Reynier Leyva Novo, Steven Pippin, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, and Hito Steyerl, along with a number of new acquisitions that will rotate throughout the run of the show.

Curator: Jadine Collingwood, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts

Designs for Different Futures
September 12, 2020–April 11, 2021

 The role of designers in shaping how we think about possible futures is the subject of Designs for Different Futures, a major exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The presentation brings together some 80 dynamic works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

Thinking about our futures has always been part of the human condition. It has also been a perennial field of inquiry for designers and architects whose speculations on this subject—ranging from the concrete to the whimsical—can profoundly affect how we imagine what is to come. Among the questions today’s designers seek to answer are: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? Can intimacy be maintained at a distance? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? How will we feed an ever-growing population?

While no one can precisely predict these futures, the works in the exhibition provide design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne from a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that innovative materials, new technologies, and fresh ideas can afford.

The exhibition is divided into 11 thematic sections—Labors, Cities, Intimacies, Bodies, Powers, Earths, Foods, Materials, Generations, Informations, and Resources—and features an international array of designers from all fields. Among the many forward-looking projects on view, visitors will encounter lab-grown food, textiles made of seaweed, a typeface that thwarts algorithmic surveillance, a series of books that will only be available 100 years from now, an affordable gene-editing toolbox, a shoe grown from sweat, a couture dress made with a 3D printer, and a system that learns from our sewers.

Each of these projects—from small product innovations to large-scale system proposals—asks us to imagine futures different than what we expect, and in doing so, helps us craft a fascinating portrait of our diverse and turbulent present.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication overseen by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, designed by the Walker Art Center, and distributed by Yale University Press. Through new contributions by the show’s curatorial team and a broad range of scholars and designers, the catalogue delves into themes such as human-digital interaction, climate change, political and social inequality, resource scarcity, transportation, and infrastructure.

Curatorial team: Emmet Byrne, Design Director and Associate Curator of Design, Walker Art Center; Kathryn B. Hiesinger, The J. Mahlon Buck, Jr. Family Senior Curator and Michelle Millar Fisher, formerly The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator in the department of European Decorative Arts after 1700, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design, and Zoë Ryan, the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, the Art Institute of Chicago. Consulting curators: Andrew Blauvelt, Director, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and Curator-at-Large, Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Colin Fanning, Independent Scholar, Bard Graduate Center, New York; and Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Emerging Design Practices), University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Philadelphia.

Exhibition Tour:
Philadelphia Museum of Art: October 22, 2019–March 8, 2020
Walker Art Center: September 12, 2020–April 11, 2021

Michaela Eichwald
November 14, 2020–May 16, 2021

Trained in literature and philosophy, Berlin-based artist and writer Michaela Eichwald (Germany, b. 1967) works predominantly as a painter. This exhibition, the artist’s first US solo museum presentation, brings together painting, sculpture, and collage from the past 10 years of her practice.

Bridging abstraction and figuration, Eichwald’s densely layered paintings—often made on unconventional surfaces such as printed canvas or imitation leather—bear an alchemical combination of acrylic, oil, tempera, spray paint, graphite, varnish, lacquer, and other substances. Whether in large- or small-scale formats, her works combine smooth paint strokes and quick smudges, at times revealing figurative forms and snippets of text. While Eichwald’s works are part of a lineage of abstraction, they resist any direct connection to a particular movement or period, instead amalgamating and churning through the history of painterly styles and techniques.

To create her sculptures, Eichwald pours resin into bags, rubber gloves, and plastic bottles, in which she collects—like objects captured in amber—uncommon and dissonant materials, such as chicken bones, erasers, jewelry, mushrooms, fishing tackle, needles, candy, small drawings, and hard-boiled eggs. At once repulsive and alluring, grotesque and seductive, these pieces bring to mind associations ranging from trophies and time capsules to the human digestive system. Filled with humor and wit, Eichwald’s works draw on references to theology, philosophy, and art history, while also reflecting on her own life: her surroundings, thinking, reading, and friends.

Curator: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts

The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance
May 15, 2021–August 8, 2021 

Presenting works from the early 20th century to today, The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance examines the notion of stillness as both a performative and visual gesture. This major Walker-organized exhibition features pieces by an international roster of artists testing the boundaries between stillness and motion, mortality and aliveness, the still life and the living picture.

Stillness and permanence are common qualities of painting and sculpture. Consider, for example, the frozen gestures of a historical tableau, the timelessness of a still life painting, or the unyielding bronze or marble figure. Translating these traditional mediums into actions, artists use performance to investigate the interplay between the fixed image and the live body.

The Paradox of Stillness showcases more than 100 works by some 65 artists, including up to 15 live performances activated in the Walker’s galleries or public spaces at intervals throughout the presentation. Works on view range from object-based art and pictures that subtly come to life or shift outside the frame to actions staged by live performers that slowly unfold or unexpectedly reappear. Across the exhibition, puppets and automatons dance through space, while burning candles and rotting fruit mark time’s passing.

The presentation features works by Marina Abramović, Giovanni Anselmo, Francesco Arena, Vanessa Beecroft, Larry Bell, Robert Breer, Trisha Brown, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Elliot Caplan, Paul Chan, Merce Cunningham, Giorgio de Chirico, Fortunato Depero, VALIE EXPORT, Lara Favaretto, T. Lux Feininger, Urs Fischer, Simone Forti, Gilbert & George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Anthea Hamilton, David Hammons, Philip Haas, Maria Hassabi, Pierre Huyghe, Anne Imhof, Joan Jonas, Yves Klein, Paul Kos, David Lamelas, Fernand Léger, Goshka Macuga, Maruja Mallo, Piero Manzoni, Fabio Mauri, Lucia Moholy, Robert Morris, Dudley Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Senga Nengudi, Paulina Olowska, Roman Ondak, Dennis Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Pope.L, Charles Ray, Pietro Roccasalva, Anri Sala, Xanti Schawinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schmidt, Cindy Sherman, Roman Signer, Laurie Simmons, Avery Singer, Cally Spooner, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Mickalene Thomas, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Franco Vaccari, Franz Erhard Walther, Tom Wesselmann, Franz West, Jordan Wolfson, and Haegue Yang.

The exhibition is accompanied by the most comprehensive publication to date on this subject, with contributions by Vincenzo de Bellis and Jadine Collingwood, Walker Art Center; Manuel Cirauqui, Guggenheim Bilbao; Hendrik Folkerts, Art Institute of Chicago; Emma Lavigne, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and Catherine Wood, Tate Modern, London. Produced by the Walker, the catalogue includes more than 400 illustrations, from spectacular color images to rare archival documentation. Available Spring 2020.

Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and associate director of programs, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts

Rayyane Tabet
June 12, 2021–November 14, 2021

Trained as both an architect and a sculptor, Beirut-based artist Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983) investigates peculiarities of the built environment through multifaceted installations that play with the perception of physical and temporal distance. His research-based practice often culminates in compelling narratives that offer alternative understandings of major sociopolitical events.

The artist’s earlier works have taken as their starting point specific historical developments approached from a personal perspective. Such projects have examined the complexities of contemporary geopolitics, whether by tracing his great grandfather’s contributions to an early 20th-century archaeological dig in Syria or by piecing together the now dispersed fragments of an heirloom passed down over generations. Weaving together familial stories with official accounts, Tabet’s work provides another lens with which to view the past as well as its unexpected connections to the present.

For his first commission at a US museum, Tabet is creating a new installation focused on the intersections of architecture, design, technology, and the relation between identity and objecthood. The artist’s research began with a site visit to a former IBM manufacturing facility designed by architect Eero Saarinen in Rochester, Minnesota. From there, he has unraveled a web of curious connections that include Saarinen, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (who designed the Walker’s 1971 building), designers Charles and Ray Eames, and photographer Balthazar Korab. Informed by this research, the exhibition will include a multipart sculptural installation and site-specific architectural interventions.

Curators: Victoria Sung, assistant curator, Visual Arts; with William Hernández Luege, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts

Candice Lin
August 5, 2021–December 26, 2021

 Los Angeles–based artist Candice Lin (b. 1979) investigates the legacies of colonialism, racism, and sexism by mapping the trade routes and material histories of a range of colonial goods. Often taking shape as DIY apparatuses, or what have been described as “flayed circulatory systems,” her multilayered and sensorial sculptural installations combine commodities such as sugar, cochineal (a natural red dye made from insects), and tea into liquid concoctions that circumnavigate the space of the gallery. Lin’s sculptures manifest as tangible inquiries into histories of exoticism, Western degradation of and desire for the Other, and the logic and legacy of oppressive structures and systems.

For her first US museum solo show, co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts (CCVA), Lin is creating a site-specific installation that responds to the space of the gallery at each institution, allowing the shape of the work to evolve over the course of its presentation. The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue documenting the artist’s research materials and process, copublished by the Walker and CCVA.

Curators: Victoria Sung, assistant curator, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center; and Dan Byers, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University

Julie Mehretu
October 31, 2021–March 6, 2022

Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and based in New York, Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) is best known for abstract paintings layered with a variety of mediums, marks, and meanings. These canvases and works on paper reference the histories of art, architecture, and past civilizations while addressing some of the most immediate conditions of our contemporary moment, including migration, revolution, climate change, global capitalism, and technology.

This midcareer survey features more than 75 drawings, paintings, and prints made from 1996 to the present. It covers a broad arc of Mehretu’s artistic evolution, revealing her early focus on drawing, graphics, and mapping and her more recent introduction of bold gestures, sweeps of saturated color, and figurative elements into her immersive, large-scale works.

Mehretu’s paintings begin with drawing; she then develops the works by incorporating techniques such as printing, digital collage, erasure, and painterly abstraction. She is inspired by a variety of sources, from cave paintings, cartography, Chinese calligraphy, and 17th-century landscape etchings to architectural renderings, graffiti, and news photography. Drawing on this vast archive, Mehretu explores how realities of the past and present can shape human consciousness. As the artist says, her visual language represents how “history is made: one layer on top of another, erasing itself, consuming itself, inventing something else from the same thing.”

Julie Mehretu is co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Curators: Christine Y. Kim, curator of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; with Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The Walker’s presentation is coordinated by Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts.

Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection
February 14, 2019–January 2, 2022

Does a portrait need to resemble its subject? Can a sculpture also be a landscape? This 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 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.

Curator: Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts; and Alexandra Nicome, interpretation fellow, Education and Public Programs

The Expressionist Figure: The Miriam and Erwin Kelen Collection of Drawings
November 17, 2019–October 18, 2020

Celebrating the remarkable collection of drawings recently donated to the Walker by longtime patrons Miriam and Erwin Kelen, this exhibition explores the expressive potential of the human body. Richly varied in theme and style, the works on paper span more than a century of artistic experimentation. Featuring portraiture, social satire, erotica, and fantasy in mediums ranging from crayon, ink, and graphite to watercolor, pastel, and collage, the Kelens’ works are joined by a select group of related drawings and sculpture from the Walker’s current holdings. As a whole, The Expressionist Figure is not only a display of virtuoso artworks but also a testament to the pleasure of building a collection and the rewards of sharing it.

Among the artists in the exhibition are Max Beckmann, Chuck Close, Willem de Kooning, Edgar Degas, Jim Denomie, Otto Dix, Marlene Dumas, Arshile Gorky, George Grosz, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, William Kentridge, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Gustav Klimt, Sherrie Levine, René Magritte, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, Emil Nolde, Claes Oldenburg, Elizabeth Peyton, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Rowan Pope, Egon Schiele, Ben Shahn, Zak Smith, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol.

Contains mature content.

Curator: Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts

An Art of Changes: Jasper Johns Prints, 1960–2018
February 16, 2020–September 20, 2020

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 (US, b. 1930) has continued to astonish viewers with the beauty and complexity of his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and prints. Today, he is considered one of the 20th century’s greatest American artists.

In celebration of the artist’s 90th birthday, An Art of Changes surveys six decades of Johns’s practice in printmaking, highlighting his experiments with familiar, abstract, and personal imagery that play with memory and visual perception in endlessly original ways. The exhibition features some 90 works in intaglio, lithography, woodcut, linoleum cut, screenprinting, and lead relief—all drawn from the Walker’s comprehensive collection of the artist’s prints.

Organized in four thematic sections, the exhibition follows Johns through the years as he revises and recycles key motifs over time, including the American flag, numerals, and the English alphabet, which he describes as “things the mind already knows.” Some works explore artists’ tools, materials, and techniques. Others explore signature aspects of the artist’s distinctive mark-making, including flagstones and hatch marks, while later pieces teem with autobiographical 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.

Curator: Joan Rothfuss, guest curator, Visual Arts

Exhibition Tour:
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh: October 12, 2019–January 20, 2020
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: February 16–September 20, 2020
Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan: October 24, 2020–January 24, 2021
Tampa Art Museum, Florida: April 28–September 6, 2021
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York: May 1–July 31, 2022

Faye Driscoll: Come On In Online Experience
May 26, 2020–December 31, 2021

Listen in as choreographer Faye Driscoll leads you on a shared journey that explores connections between ourselves, our bodies, and the world. This multimedia experience draws from video and audio footage of the gallery installation Faye Driscoll: Come On In and features one of the original six audio tracks spoken by the artist herself. This online experience is offered as a new way for you to access Come On In from the comfort of your home.

Come On In was originally planned to be presented in the Walker galleries February 27–June 14, 2020. The museum’s closure due to the pandemic on March 14 caused the gallery installation to close early. Driscoll then reimagined the work to be experienced virtually.

The original exhibition was developed by Driscoll and her long-term artistic collaborators Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin. Exploring human interdependence and connectivity, the work draws from Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming trilogy, which was co-commissioned and presented by the Walker over the past six years.

Find out more about the in-gallery exhibition here.

Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with Molly Hanse, curatorial assistant, Performing Arts