Walker Art Center Releases 2019-2020 Annual Report

Letter from the Executive Director, Mary Ceruti

As I reflect on the Walker Art Center’s 2019–2020 fiscal year, I am both amazed and humbled by the many ways in which the world has changed since we launched the year in July 2019. There was no way for us to predict the impending intersecting crises—a global pandemic, the associated economic volatility, and a national reckoning on racial injustice—that would present such significant challenges as well as opportunities to adapt, respond, and change. With all that we accomplished and encountered during this unparalleled year, I am continually thankful for and in awe of our devoted staff and Board of Trustees and all they did to care for the museum and respond to the needs of artists, audiences, and our community. I am also deeply grateful for the participation and partnership—as well as the understanding and flexibility when plans were suddenly disrupted—of more than 816 artists and our 732,953 visitors; 97 community, civic, and copresenting partners; and 135 dedicated volunteers. For engaging with and generously supporting the Walker last year, I give my heartfelt thanks to our 5,996 members and donors and 80-plus corporate and foundation partners, including Premier Partners Delta Air Lines and Target, Lead Partner U.S. Bank, and the voters of Minnesota for their support through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. I also want to express my gratitude to the more than 1,300 guests who joined us for Avant Garden in September 2019 and helped us raise more than $1 million to support the Walker’s award-winning educational and artistic programs.

Looking back on the year, I am incredibly proud of the groundbreaking, multidisciplinary programming we presented across our galleries, theater, cinema, and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. During the first 8 months of the fiscal year, we presented more than 526 programs, including 11 (5 new) exhibitions, 55 performance events, 177 moving image screenings, and 74 education and public programs. Our season was filled with innovative artists whose vision and experimentation inspire us to see the world in new ways— from Native filmmakers and storytellers to graphic designers and thinkers, from a survey of iconic artist Jasper Johns’s prints to Theaster Gates’s first major museum show. Touring exhibitions and performance commissions reached audiences across the country and around the world as they traveled to New York, San Francisco, Paris, Dublin, and Beirut. We made significant progress and were on track to meet and exceed numerous goals for attendance, fundraising, and curatorial research when the coronavirus pandemic triggered sudden, mandatory closures in mid-March 2020 and impacted that positive trajectory.

Interim Strategic Plan

While the numbers in our 2019–2020 Annual Report reflect the effect of sheltering in place for the final three-plus months of the fiscal year, we know numbers can only tell part of the story. To help highlight the relevance and impact of our work last year, throughout this report you will see our activities and accomplishments organized by core elements of our work: programs; engagement and impact; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and collections stewardship. These have been guided by our long-standing institutional values— Innovation, Inclusivity, Partnership, Entrepreneurship, and Civic Commitment—which feel all the more relevant and urgent in 2020 and were reaffirmed by the Walker’s staff and Board of Trustees in our 18-month Interim Strategic Plan. Launched in January 2020, the Interim Plan prioritizes programs that offer communities welcoming platforms for creativity, empathy, and curiosity, while continuing to promote and support artistic experimentation and excellence.

To provide leadership for our curatorial work, we were delighted to welcome Henriette Huldisch to the Walker in January 2020 as our new Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Henriette started her career at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she co-curated the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and came to the Walker from the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, where she served as the Director of Exhibitions and Curator since 2014. Among the reasons I found Henriette to be an excellent match for the Walker is her understanding of what it means to follow artists and her experience working with artists across disciplines and platforms. I am thrilled to have her partnership as we develop creative, experimental programming that builds on the Walker’s collection and is responsive to our audiences and communities.

I would also like to offer sincere gratitude to former Senior Curator of Moving Image Sheryl Mousley, who retired from the Walker in March 2020. During her impressive 22-year tenure with the organization, Sheryl created a range of dynamic cinema programs highlighting contemporary feature films, retrospective series, and artist-made cinema. Notably, two of Sheryl’s final programs as senior curator were welcoming Academy Award–winning directors Bong Joon Ho and Julia Reichert as part of the Walker Dialogue series at the beginning of 2020.

Interdisciplinary Initiative

A major accomplishment last year was the completion of our four-year Interdisciplinary Initiative to support artistic practice at the intersection of performance and visual art, generously supported by a $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This initiative was critical in advancing the Walker’s commitment to following artists and embracing ways that many contemporary practitioners work across and between artistic disciplines. In the final year of the initiative, we were thrilled to commission, produce, and present choreographer Faye Driscoll’s first-ever gallery presentation, Faye Driscoll: Come On In, alongside performances of her intimate solo theatrical performance Thank You For Coming: Space. This project also provided the artist the unanticipated opportunity to reimagine the exhibition as an online experience when the Walker’s building closed in March, just two weeks after her gallery presentation opened. Launched on the Walker’s website in May, the virtual adaptation was subsequently named one of “6 of Our Favorite Digital Dance Projects to Come Out of Quarantine” by Dance Magazine.

The Interdisciplinary Initiative’s final year also featured ambitious online publishing efforts, including two new volumes of our digital publishing platform the Living Collections Catalogue. Launched in March 2020, Volume III, Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s, focuses on a range of performance-based artist collectives, tracing a rich period of experimentation by artists with forms of radical collectivity and political mobilization. Launched in June 2020, Volume IV, Creative Black Music at the Walker: Selections from the Archives, highlights innovators of Black avant-garde and experimental jazz, from the 1960s to the present, who have had an indelible impact on US musical culture. Described by critics as “astounding” (City Pages) and “bold and bracing” (Star Tribune) and highlighted in Flash Art, JazzTimes, and the Wire, among other publications, Creative Black Music was also celebrated by several featured artists as “a profound resource and cultural space” (Jason Moran) and “beautiful … with a large textural range of extra elements. Fantastic!” (Wadada Leo Smith). Both volumes feature new scholarship, commissioned writings and interviews, and extensive documentation from the Walker’s archives, including a host of images and video/audio recordings made available to scholars and the public for the first time.

Indigenous Public Art Commission

We were also thrilled to announce last year the selection of St. Paul–based artist Angela Two Stars (Dakota, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) as the finalist for the Walker’s Indigenous Public Art Commission. Her project is simultaneously a sculpture, a gathering place, and an interactive artwork that will engage a broad audience with the Dakota language. We look forward to siting her work in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 2021, where I know visitors will find it welcoming and generous. Her proposal was selected from more than 50 national and international submissions in collaboration with an Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee—a group of seven Native artists, curators, writers, and knowledge keepers based in Minnesota, South Dakota, and New Mexico. I am grateful for the committee’s partnership and dialogue, which shaped this process.

Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

While we celebrate these accomplishments alongside many others that we are happy to share in this Annual Report, we also felt the devastating impact the coronavirus pandemic has had on the entire arts sector. What we thought would be a couple of weeks of mandated closure beginning March 13 turned into several months, resulting in the postponement of two major exhibitions and cancellation of numerous programs and events, including our annual Rock the Garden festival for 10,000-plus concertgoers that was scheduled for June 2020. As we abruptly shifted to remote working, I want to thank our staff for deftly juggling many personal and work challenges while continuing to care for the museum and the artists and audiences we serve. Closing our doors also meant the loss of museum admissions, rental income, and sales from the Walker Shop that we were counting on for support last year. As a result, the Walker felt an immediate impact of $3.7 million (17 percent) in lost revenue for the 2019–2020 fiscal year, which directly affected our operations. In spite of these substantial challenges, we were able to make a commitment to retain and pay all Walker and contract staff through the end of the fiscal year (June 30, 2020), support artists as their project plans were disrupted, protect artworks in our collection, provide access to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and share digital content and online resources while the museum remained closed. This was possible through a combination of efforts: expense reductions given the Walker’s closure and suspension of programming, the implementation of an immediate hiring freeze, support from the Paycheck Protection Program authorized through the CARES Act, and the extraordinary generosity of our member and donor community. As a result, I am very pleased to report the Walker ended the 2019–2020 fiscal year with a balanced budget for the 39th consecutive year.

I am exceedingly proud of how we are handling this crisis, carefully managing our resources, and always considering the safety of our staff, artists, visitors, and community. I am also inspired by how quickly our team pivoted to experimenting with new digital and virtual platforms to continue serving artists and audiences while the Walker’s doors were closed. No small feat, this required an all-hands-on-deck, cross-departmental effort along with a willingness to let go of “normal” in order to be open and flexible as we charted a new way forward. As we took this huge leap in to the space of virtual programming, I am deeply grateful to the Walker team for embracing this unexpected opportunity to rethink what we do, who we do it for, and how we execute our work. With innovative thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit, we launched new digital educational resources and art activities; offered online film screenings; organized virtual tours, workshops, and conversations with artists and curators; and published online articles by artists and creative makers. Cumulatively, between March and June 2020 these programs, events, and resources have been viewed, attended, or downloaded a sum total of 65,000 times. We also reorganized parts of the Walker website to foreground these new offerings; as a result, walkerart.org was recognized as one of the world’s best art sites to experience during the pandemic in the New York Times, which described the Walker’s site as “a networked treasure house, where its collection and exhibition displays mingle with a panoply of artistic and art-related content.” During this same time, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden remained open and free to the public when it was not possible to enjoy other cultural activities. During the long months of quarantine, I am delighted that the Garden served as a safe and welcoming site for so many members of our community seeking respite, inspiration, and connectedness.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

As we actively made changes in response to the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd on May 25 and the ensuing uprisings in our community that sparked nationwide protests brought the urgent need for reform around glaring inequities in US society to the surface. As part of a national reckoning on racial injustice, there is an animating call for change across the museum field, and we acknowledge that change needs to happen internally as well as externally. In the wake of these events, we continue to reflect on the role that the Walker has played in leading to this moment and the actions we must take moving forward. We acknowledge that presenting work by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) artists and serving our diverse population is not enough. While cutting ties with the Minneapolis Police Department was one direct and immediate action that we took this year, we acknowledge we must do more.

We are committed to evaluating our biases, beliefs, and priorities, and taking action toward making the Walker a more equitable, antiracist organization. A critical step in this important work was taken by the Walker’s Board of Trustees last year through the American Alliance of Museum’s initiative Facing Change: Advancing Museum Board Diversity & Inclusion. Launched in 2019 and supported by three national foundations (Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Alice L. Walton Foundation, and Ford Foundation), the initiative is providing the framework, training, and resources for committed museum boards to build a diverse and inclusive culture that better reflects and serves their communities.

As a demonstration of our commitment to support BIPOC artists and communities and amplify their voices, we took immediate steps to redesign our website’s homepage to feature Black artists and writers through newly commissioned essays and material from our archives. At this same time, we are working with artist-in-residence Jordan Weber and our partners at Youth Farm to create a new public artwork in the form of an urban farm in the Hawthorne neighborhood of North Minneapolis. While the project has been in development for many months, it quickly became a powerful space for healing following the death of George Floyd. Working with a crew of teenagers and young adults to transform a vacant lot into a garden in this racially diverse neighborhood, our partner Marcus Kar from Youth Farm noted the project became a type of therapy. In an interview with Minneapolis Public Radio, Kar shared, “We’ve been using it as a way to silence the noise and really feel our feelings.”

Moving Forward

As I reflect on the year, Jordan’s project with Youth Farm stands out as a potent example of the role that art plays in witnessing, healing, and connecting us. It is also reflective of a new chapter for the Walker that I have been increasingly excited about since I arrived in January 2019—one that is curious, creative, and collaborative in ways that we work with artists, with our communities, and with each other. I believe the Walker is a unique institution that has the potential to create innovative models not just in our interdisciplinary programming and in our public engagement but also in our structure and how we function. In fact, we can only realize the promise of change if we rethink traditional structures. As a step in that direction, we announced an organizational realignment at the end of August 2020 that centers audience engagement and the impact of our programs on the communities we serve. This strategic realignment and refocusing of our resources will make the Walker better prepared to fulfill our potential of connecting the most innovative artists and ideas with audiences here in the Twin Cities and around the world.

As we embark on this next chapter, I am looking forward to connecting what artists are thinking and excited about with what is important in people’s lives. My hope is that—as we make our way through the pandemic and take specific actions toward meaningful, lasting change—more and more people will feel at home at the Walker. We are deeply grateful for your patronage, participation, and partnership last year and invite you to join us in taking these next steps together.

With gratitude,
Mary Ceruti Executive Director, Walker Art Center