| Pacita Abad, L.A. Liberty, 1992. View of the exhibition Life in the Margins, Spike Island, Bristol, 2020. Courtesy the Pacita Abad Art Estate. Photo: Max McClure. |
OPENING EXHIBITIONS:
Rayyane Tabet: Deep Blues
June 12–October 24, 2021
Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping
August 5–January 2, 2022
Julie Mehretu
October 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
Shen Xin
November 18, 2021–July 3, 2022
David Hockney: People, Places & Things
December 18, 2021–August 21, 2022
Carolyn Lazard
February 12–November 27, 2022
Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was
April 24–September 4, 2022
Pao Houa Her
July 30, 2022–January 15, 2023
Jannis Kounellis
October 16, 2022–February 26, 2023
Paul Chan: Breathers
November 19, 2022–April 16, 2023
Pacita Abad
April 15–September 3, 2023
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
October 15, 2023–March 17, 2024
CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS:
The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance
May 15–August 8, 2021
Low Visibility
February 5–November 21, 2021
Don’t let this be easy
July 30, 2020–July 4, 2021
Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection
February 14, 2019–January 1, 2023
OPENING EXHIBITIONS
Rayyane Tabet: Deep Blues
June 12–October 24, 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. Weaving together personal stories with official accounts, Tabet’s work often 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, and technology. His research began with a site visit to a former IBM facility in Rochester, Minnesota. Designed in the 1950s by architect Eero Saarinen, the building was emblematic of the midcentury shift from industrial to postindustrial labor in the United States. From there, the artist unraveled a web of curious connections that includes Saarinen, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes (who designed the Walker’s 1971 building), and designers Paul Rand and Charles and Ray Eames.
Informed by this research, Rayyane Tabet: Deep Blues features a new multipart sculptural, light, and sound installation in which the gallery, bathed in blue light, cycles through the 10 shades of IBM’s corporate color spectrum. Decommissioned IBM Eames chairs are suspended from the ceiling in a kind of memory theater. A sound piece, performed by an artificial intelligence trained to read a script, mirrors the modulations of the artist’s voice.
The exhibition also expands beyond the space of the gallery via a site-specific architectural intervention in the Walker’s public spaces. In an echo of the famous two-toned blue IBM Rochester building, Tabet has transformed the Walker’s 60-foot-long glass curtain wall into a transparent blue landscape—superimposing Saarinen’s patterned design onto the museum’s facade. Through both environments, Tabet creates a probing space that blurs the boundaries between dematerialization, identity, and objecthood.
Curators: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts; with William Hernández Luege, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping
August 5–January 2, 2022
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. For her newly commissioned exhibition, 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.
Anchored by a nomadic tent structure—simultaneously a temporary shelter and a quasi-religious temple—the exhibition includes hand-drawn and hand-printed indigo textiles, hand-built ceramic sculptures, plaster cast objects, and a video animation that leads visitors through qigong breathing and movement rituals.
Cats abound in the gallery space. From ceramic cats that can be found curled up inside the tent to the video’s animated cat demon, Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping proposes an animist worldview—one that asks us to shift our focus from the human to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the exhibition encourages us to embrace a tactile form of thinking, or what might be understood as a cat’s way of knowing the world.
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue documenting the artist’s research materials and process, copublished by the Walker and CCVA.
Curators: Victoria Sung, associate 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 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and based in Harlem, New York, Julie Mehretu (b. 1970) is best known for abstract paintings layered with a variety of materials, 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 and director, Visual Arts.
Exhibition Tour
LACMA, Los Angeles: November 3, 2019–September 7, 2020
High Museum of Art, Atlanta: October 24, 2020–January 31, 2021
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: March 19–August 8, 2021
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis: October 16, 2021–March 6, 2022
Shen Xin
November 18, 2021–July 3, 2022
For their first US museum solo exhibition, Twin Cities–based artist Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu) debuts a new video and sound installation following its 2021 premiere at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Brine Lake (A New Body) (2020) meditates on the intersections between extractive economies, migrant populations, statelessness, and transnational identities.
Set against a backdrop of a fictional iodine recycling factory, the work follows both human and nonhuman protagonists as they converse in multiple languages—Korean, Japanese, and Russian—comingling topics such as ecology, technology, economy, and personal memory. Projected onto five large-scale screens suspended at intervals throughout the gallery space, Brine Lake encourages visitors to become active participants as they move between the work’s overlapping episodes.
Curator: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts
David Hockney: People, Places & Things
December 18, 2021–August 21, 2022
First gaining attention in the 1960s Pop era with his brightly colored portraits and landscapes, David Hockney (UK, b. 1937) has remained a constant presence in contemporary art, revisiting and reinterpreting favorite themes over six decades through experimentation with a range of media, from painting and printmaking to theater set design and, more recently, digital media. Hockney is now considered not only one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century but also a key contributor to the art of Los Angeles, his adopted hometown. Drawn from the Walker’s substantial holding of works by Hockney—including paintings, prints, drawings, and theatrical works— David Hockney: People, Places & Things covers the full arc of the artist’s career.
The exhibition is divided into several sections, beginning with a selection of works on paper featuring Hockney’s intimate portraits of friends and family members. Another grouping focuses on his passion for still lifes and simple domestic scenes. One recurring subject for the artist is the Southern California swimming pool, which he explores through a range of works.
Designing sets for stage and opera productions has been an important part of Hockney’s artistic activity through the decades, and was the focus of the 1983 Walker exhibition Hockney Paints the Stage. This presentation includes the artist’s tour-de-force set design for Poulenc’s opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of Tirésias) (1983) .
Hockney’s career-long engagement with the subject of landscape, from the Hollywood Hills to Mexico to Yorkshire, England, is the subject of another section featuring large-scale prints from the artist’s travels as well as more recent explorations of landscape made using digital media, such as an iPad. Together, the personal and often exuberant works in the exhibition show an artist consistently engaged with experimentation through decades of art-making and self-reflection.
Curator: Siri Engberg, senior curator and director, Visual Arts
Courtesy of the artist and Essex St. / Maxwell Graham, New York
Carolyn Lazard
February 12–November 27, 2022
This Walker-organized exhibition marks the first US solo museum presentation on the work of Philadelphia-based artist and writer Carolyn Lazard (b. 1987). Working across disciplines and media, Lazard explores the social and political dimensions of healthcare at the intersection of race, gender, and disability. The artist often incorporates found objects into their works, an approach they describe as “the most disabled way of making” as it relies on “the labor of others as a structural element of the work.” Their artworks and published writings articulate the everyday reality of illness, drawing attention to issues of care, intimacy, and dependency.
Lazard’s research often centers on labor, questioning the persistent ableist emphasis on productivity and consumption in a capitalist market economy. How do we value our physical and mental health within a society that reveres profit and efficiency? Some of the artist’s works also draw on experiences of recovery and recuperation. For example, A Conspiracy (2017) consists of a grid of white noise machines typically used to generate a sense of privacy within a hospital or therapist’s office.
More recently, Lazard has focused on matters of institutional accountability and transparency. Their 2019 open-source guide “Accessibility in the Arts: A Promise and a Practice” offers insights on ways that art institutions can become more accessible, while the recent moving image work Pre-Existing Condition (2019) examines marginalized histories of medical malpractice and ethics violations in the prison system.
For their exhibition at the Walker, the artist presents a newly conceived body of work.
Curator: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts
Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was
April 24–September 4, 2022
For the past three decades, Los Angeles–based artist Liz Larner (US, b. 1960) has explored the material and social possibilities of sculpture in innovative and surprising ways. Today she is one of the most influential artists of her generation engaged with the medium. Larner’s use of materials ranges from the traditional—such as bronze, porcelain, glass, or stainless steel—to the unexpected: bacterial cultures, surgical gauze, sand, or leather. The artist selects each medium for its physical or chemical properties as well as for social and historical associations. Taking direction from these materials, she creates works that can be delicate or aggressive, meticulously crafted or unruly and formless.
Liz Larner: Don’t put it back like it was, co-organized by the Walker and SculptureCenter, New York, is the artist’s largest survey since 2001. Presenting some 30 works produced between 1987 and 2020, the exhibition includes many pieces never before shown. Featured works include Larner’s early experiments with petri dishes and destructive machines, installations that respond to architecture, and more recent wall-based works in ceramic.
As a whole, the exhibition underscores the power and intention of Larner’s work to reconsider objects in physical space as not only a matter of architectural proportions but also as a social, gendered, and psychological construction. As her objects assert themselves in the gallery environment, they reflect a history of sculptural practice and an understanding of physical space that has largely been shaped by (or credited to) men. The experience of viewing these works compels an awareness of our own embodied presence and relationship to this space.
The exhibition examines ways in which Larner has investigated both the material potential of sculpture and its relationship to the viewer, bringing forward key themes that have occupied her work: the dynamic between power and instability, the tension between surface and form, and the interconnectedness of objects to our bodies.
Works such as Corner Basher (1988) and Orchid, Buttermilk, Penny (1987) call up destruction and decay as creative forces. Sculptures made in pliable fabric or metal, such as Bird in Space (1989) or Guest (2004), physically adapt to and alter our perception of the architectural spaces in which they are shown. The work 2 as 3 and Some, Too (1997–1998)—made from mulberry paper, steel, and watercolor—resembles two interlocking cubes, but like a freehand drawing, its lines have collapsed and softened into a relaxed form that resists rigid geometry or stability. V (planchette) (2013), an aluminum form covered in painted paper, appears to shape shift as we move around it. The exhibition also includes a selection of Larner’s more recent ceramic works of the past decade, in which she has embraced the unpredictability in the processes of shaping, firing, and glazing to create surfaces that allude to both landscape and abstraction.
Don’t put it back like it was is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by Dancing Foxes Press, which includes contributions by exhibition curator Mary Ceruti; Connie Butler, chief curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and poet, playwright, and performance artist Ariana Reines.
Curator: Mary Ceruti, executive director, Walker Art Center. The New York presentation is organized by Kyle Dancewicz, interim director, SculptureCenter.
Pao Houa Her
July 30, 2022–January 15, 2023
Pao Houa Her (b. 1980, Laos; lives and works in Minnesota) is known for her powerful photographs documenting the Hmong diaspora in the United States. The artist’s body of work represents a narrative extension of her family’s memories of fleeing Laos as well as a long-term engagement with telling the stories of ethnic Hmong communities that formed in the late 1970s and 1980s following the Vietnam War.
Using a formally rigorous approach, Her draws from traditions of Western portraiture and still life, critically and playfully engaging the boundaries between artifice and reality, landscape and studio backdrop, color and black-and-white photography. Throughout, the artist’s distilled images explore themes of migration, displacement, resilience, and longing. For her solo exhibition at the Walker, Her will debut a new body of work made during the past year.
Curator: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts
Jannis Kounellis
October 16, 2022–February 26, 2023
The wide-ranging work of artist Jannis Kounellis (Greece, 1936–2017) is the subject of this major Walker-organized exhibition, the first survey to be presented in the United States in more than 35 years. Kounellis played a central role in the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, and has had a broad influence on subsequent generations of artists over five decades. The exhibition, which includes some 80 works, offers the most comprehensive assessment of his career to date. Assembled with the full cooperation with the artist’s estate and featuring a host of international loans, the exhibition revisits Kounellis’s innovative practice through key stages of his career, examining both iconic works and pieces rarely or never-before seen.
The exhibition presents a broad range of examples, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, and hybrid works combining objects with live performance. Within this range, the artist considered all of his works to be seen as an expansive and deep analysis of painting as a medium. “Everything I do is painting, even if I don’t touch a brush,” Kounellis said. “I tell my truth as a painter.”
The show will be accompanied by a lushly illustrated, major publication, including contributions by a new generation of scholars, produced by the Walker’s award-winning design studio.
Curator: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and associate director of programs, Visual Arts
Paul Chan: Breathers
November 19, 2022–April 16, 2023
New York–based artist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan (b. 1973, Hong Kong) came to prominence in the early 2000s with vibrant moving image works that touched upon aspects of war, religion, pleasure, and politics. Around 2009, following a decade of art-making, Chan embarked on a self-imposed break, turning his attention to experimental publishing and the economics of information by founding the press Badlands Unlimited. Taking the notion of a “breather” as its organizing principle, this exhibition surveys Chan’s activities since his voluntary break from that point to the present.
Paul Chan: Breathers opens with Nonprojections and Arguments, two series that explore the possibilities of the moving image beyond its primary place of the screen or projection. Language, design, and networks of circulation are examined through the radical publications produced by Badlands Unlimited, which include paperbacks, e-books, zines, GIFs, and books on stone tablets in genres such as erotic fiction, artists’ writings, and poetry. Finally, the presentation showcases a new series of kinetic sculptures entitled the Breathers. These fan-powered billowing fabric bodies, which move in a free-form choreography in the gallery, are described by Chan as “animated by breath.”
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue created in close collaboration with the artist, designed and published by the Walker.
Curator: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts
Pacita Abad
April 15–September 3, 2023
This Walker-organized exhibition is the first-ever survey devoted to the work of Pacita Abad (US, b. Philippines, 1946–2004). Abad is best known for her trapunto paintings, a form of quilted painting the artist originated by stitching and stuffing her painted canvases as opposed to stretching them over a wood frame. The artist was prolific, making more than 5,000 artworks that traverse a diversity of subject matter, from tribal masks and social realist tableaux to intricately constructed underwater compositions and abstractions. With more than 100 works—most of which have never been on view—the exhibition showcases her experiments in different mediums, including works on paper, ceramics, and costumes, alongside her paintings. Developed in close collaboration with the artist’s estate, the presentation celebrates the multifaceted work of an artist whose vibrant visual, material, and conceptual concerns are as urgent today as they were three decades ago.
Abad immigrated to the United States in 1970 to escape political persecution after leading a student demonstration against the authoritarian Marcos regime. Informed by this experience, she was determined to give visibility to political refugees and other oppressed peoples through her art. “I have always believed that an artist has a special obligation to remind society of its social responsibility,” she said. Works from her Immigrant Experience series (1990–1995) highlight the rising multiculturalism of the 1990s, yet also call attention to the era’s contradictions and elisions, centering the sufferings and triumphs of people on the periphery of power. The series touches on the Los Angeles race riots, the Haitian refugee crisis, and the detention of Mexican migrant workers at the US border, among other subjects, offering an intimate look at lives often obscured by the reductive, xenophobic headlines of the day.
Though she became a US citizen in 1994, Abad lived for a number of years in Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, Singapore, Sudan, and elsewhere. Largely self-taught, she interacted with the various artistic communities she encountered on her travels, incorporating a diversity of cultural traditions and indigenous forms—from Korean ink brush painting to Indonesian batik—into her expansive practice. Abad’s global, peripatetic existence is reflected in the portability of her works and in her use of textiles, a medium often associated with female, non-Western labor and historically marginalized as craft.
The exhibition will be accompanied by the first major catalogue on Abad’s work, designed and published by the Walker. The volume will include scholarly essays and the most comprehensive documentation of the artist’s work to date, as well as oral histories conducted with artists, curators, family members, and others who knew Abad or were influenced by her practice.
Curator: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
October 15, 2023–March 17, 2024
Presenting works by artists from a number of nations, Multiple Realities offers a sweeping survey of experimental art made in the Eastern Bloc between the 1960s and 1980s. The exhibition features artworks rarely exhibited in the US, which together tell a story of artists questioning how, when, and where art could exist and the many meanings it might hold for society. Despite their geographical proximity, these artists encountered different conditions for daily life and art-making, confronting varying degrees of control and pressure exerted by state authorities. Charting a generation of artists invested in experimentation, Multiple Realities sheds light on ways that artists refused, circumvented, eluded, and subverted official systems. Their works are often riddled with wit, humor, or irony as well as conceptual or formal innovation and a spirit of adventurousness.
The exhibition opens with the cityscape, examining how artists responded to daily life in public spaces marked by histories of protest, confrontation, and displays of national loyalty. While some reflected on systems of surveillance and policing, others harnessed minimal gestures to question the boundaries of permissible public behavior. The second section focuses on the body as an artistic material. This approach offered rich terrain for women artists in particular, who were challenging patriarchal norms and socialist family models, as well as artists who were questioning sexual identities. For many, a retreat into private space led to explorations of the limits of bodily awareness by drawing on themes of ritual, endurance, and duress. The exhibition’s third chapter delves into artist collectives and subcultural groups, highlighting ways that artists and musicians imagined other forms of collectivity and sociability, galvanizing networks of exchange, commonality, and friendship both within and beyond the Bloc.
Finally, the presentation revisits imaginings of futures spurred by the revolutionary changes embodied by the Space Race, the advancement of nuclear energy, and new forms of communications. What might a new tomorrow look like? How were artists exploring the possibility of flight and escape, of transcending the limitations of the everyday? Seen together, the exhibition’s four themes encourage us to question the relationships between art and politics, the roles that institutions play in society, and how the production, circulation, and reception of art outside of capitalist economies informed artist practices.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts
CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS
The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance
May 15–August 8, 2021
Through works that bring together objects, movement, or the living body, The Paradox of Stillness explores the intersections between performance and visual art. The exhibition features some 100 artworks by successive generations of artists who test the boundaries between stillness and motion, mortality and time.
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.
An evolving exhibition, The Paradox of Stillness includes up to 15 live performances in the galleries or public spaces. As the presentation unfolds, visitors encounter the unexpected as the galleries gradually become more active. Puppets and automatons dance through space. Mechanized sculptures subtly transform, while paintings and sculptures alike are activated by performers. Organic materials melt and decay, marking time’s passing. The final gallery hosts a changing series of choreographed performances. The performance schedule is available at walkerart.org/paradox.
The presentation features works by Marina Abramović, 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, Robert Morris, Dudley Murphy, Senga Nengudi, Paulina Olowska, Roman Ondak, Dennis Oppenheim, 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, Franco Vaccari, Franz Erhard Walther, 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. Designed and published by the Walker, the catalogue includes more than 400 illustrations, from spectacular color images to rare archival documentation. Now available in the Walker Shop.
As a part of the museum’s safety protocols, all performers will wear masks and other personal protection items.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and associate director of programs, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, former curatorial assistant, Visual Arts; and William Hernández Luege, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Note: This exhibition was rescheduled from Spring 2020 (April 18–July 26, 2020).
Low Visibility
February 5–November 21, 2021
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, increased surveillance technology, grassroots protest movements, and complex disinformation campaigns. Against this backdrop, the international, multigenerational group of artists in this exhibition has developed strategies to avoid being seen or, conversely, to shed light on things typically hidden or overlooked. Works on view question the tactics of camouflage in today’s world by reexamining representations of warfare, systems of mass communication, or the signs and symbols of revolution.
The exhibition includes works by Fiona Banner, Baseera Khan, Christian Marclay, 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 by Stephanie Syjuco that will rotate throughout the run of the show.
Curator: Jadine Collingwood, guest curator
Don’t let this be easy
July 30, 2020–July 4, 2021
Featuring works from the 1970s to today, Don’t let this be easy is an institutional project taking the form of an exhibition, coupled with new scholarship and online publishing focused on women artists from the Walker’s collection. The initiative is presented in conjunction with the Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), a nationwide effort involving more than 100 museums committed to social justice and structural change.
This Walker-organized exhibition 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 show’s title 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 frameworks.
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. Some of these artists include: Andrea Carlson (b. 1979), who uses painting and printmaking 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
Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection
February 14, 2019–January 1, 2023
Does a portrait need to resemble its subject? Can a sculpture also be a landscape? 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 discover new pieces by artists who are reinventing genres we thought we knew.