Walker Art Center Announces 2021-2022 Exhibition Schedule

OPENING EXHIBITIONS:

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

The Paradox of Stillness: Art, Object, and Performance
May 15–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 60 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, 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,  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. Produced 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. Face coverings or masks are also required for visitors during this time.

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

This exhibition was previously announced and has been rescheduled from Spring 2020 (April 18–July 26, 2020).

Rendering of the exhibition Rayyane Tabet, 2020
Image courtesy the artist and Walker Art Center

Rayyane Tabet
June 12–October 24, 2021

Trained as both an architect and a sculptor, Beirut-based artist Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983, Achqout, Lebanon) 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. 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 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, the exhibition will include a multipart sculptural installation and site-specific architectural interventions that probe the relationship between dematerialization, identity, and objecthood.

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

Candice Lin
August 5–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, 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 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. The presentation 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.

Shen Xin, Brine Lake (A New Body), 2020 (still). Courtesy the artist. Supported by Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; De Appel, Amsterdam; M+ Museum, Hong Kong; and Gwangju Biennale, South Korea.

Shen Xin
November 20, 2021–May 1, 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. The Walker has substantial holdings of more than 230 works on paper by Hockney—including paintings, prints, drawings, and works made from pressed paper pulp—dating back to 1961.

This new exhibition, which covers the full arc of the artist’s career, is divided into four sections:

Section 1: People
This section focuses on individuals who appear in multiple portraits by Hockney: friends, lovers, and family members. Some of his favorite subjects featured in this gallery include the artist’s muse, textile and fashion designer Celia Birtwell; Hockney’s longtime friend and studio manager Gregory Evans; and the late art historian and curator Henry Geldzahler.

Section 2: Things
Hockney has long used the still life as a point of departure for his works. Presented here are examples of floral still lifes and simple elements of interior scenes. Another recurring theme for Hockney, a transplant to Los Angeles, is the swimming pool, which the artist explores through printmaking and large-scale works made from pressed handmade paper pulp.

Section 3: Literature and The Stage
Hockney’s work designing sets for stage and opera productions has been an important part of his 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) as well as graphics inspired by William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm.

Section 4: Places
The final section of the show celebrates Hockney’s career-long engagement with the subject of landscape, from the Hollywood Hills to Mexico to Yorkshire, England. The section features large-scale prints depicting the Hotel Romano Angeles in Acatlán, Mexico. Also included is the Walker’s 1983 painting Hollywood Hills House. The artist’s love of the landscape also figures into his more recent explorations of the subject through digital media, such as drawings made with an iPad, and multiscreen video works showing the changing seasons in the Yorkshire woods.

Curator: Siri Engberg, senior curator and director, Visual Arts

Carolyn Lazard, TV1 (Dead Time), 2020
Courtesy of the artist and Essex St. / Maxwell Graham, New York

Carolyn Lazard
February 12–July 3, 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,” relying 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.

The exhibition 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.

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, Khara En Penta (Joyer in 5), 2019
Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

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 Walker-produced publication.

Curator: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts

View of the exhibition A Million Things to Say, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila, 2018. Image courtesy the Pacita Abad Art Estate. Photo: Pioneer Studios.

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. Abad was prolific, making more than 5,000 artworks that traverse a diversity of subject matter, from tribal masks and social realist tableaus to intricately constructed underwater compositions and abstractions. With more than 80 major 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 (1983–1995) 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 publication on Abad’s work. 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 and/or were influenced by her practice.

Curator: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts

CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS:

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 and instead combine a 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—a range of uncommon materials, including 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

Designs for Different Futures. Photo: Peter VonDeLinde, courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

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

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

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? 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.

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