The Walker Art Center’s 2024 exhibition program features significant solo presentations of works by Keith Haring, Walter Price, and Sophie Calle, offering new insights into the depth and range of their individual practices. Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody, which opens in April, explores the distinctive quality and enduring influence of the artist’s oeuvre through more than 100 works and rarely seen archival materials. The exhibition will be accompanied by a wide range of public programs that reflect the Walker’s relationship with Haring prior to his death and the importance of his work to the Twin Cities. In August, the Walker will open the largest institutional exhibition of contemporary artist Walter Price, engaging audiences with both significant and never-before-seen paintings and establishing new scholarship on the development of his vision and approach through today. This will be followed by a major exhibition of French artist Sophie Calle, who, for nearly five decades, has explored the complexities of personal relationships and presentations of the self in ways that presaged today’s social media–obsessed culture. Sophie Calle: Overshare, opening in October, is the most comprehensive examination of her career to be presented in North America.
The 2024 exhibition program also features a complete reconceptualization of the Walker’s collection galleries, with dynamic juxtapositions between iconic works, rarely seen or lesser-known objects, and recent acquisitions. The installation is grounded in different notions of the home and placemaking and is developed to provide audiences with a greater understanding of the ongoing evolution of the Walker’s collection. The presentation is also supported by visitor feedback garnered from the institution’s recent exhibition Make Sense of This (2023), which sought to learn more about visitor interests and needs. Other upcoming presentations include Tetsuya Yamada: Listening, the Twin Cities–based artist’s first museum exhibition, and Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette’s The New Eagle Creek Saloon, an exuberant expression of her father’s San Francisco bar that will be programmed with weekly free events, including parties, screenings, and other events that exalt queer joy and liveness.
The Walker also recently opened, on November 11, a major survey presentation titled Multiple Realities, which explores experimental art made in six Central Eastern European nations during the 1960s to 1980s. The result of five years of extensive research and network-building to uncover works and documentation that have for many years been largely inaccessible, Multiple Realities includes more than 250 works by nearly 100 artists, with many objects and installations to be shown in the United States for the first time.
Further details about these exhibitions and other current and upcoming presentations follow below.
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
January 18–July 7, 2024
Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance
February 29–August 25, 2024
Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon
March 7–May 19, 2024
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody
April 27–September 8, 2024
This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection
June 20, 2024–April 29, 2029
August 8–December 15, 2024
October 26, 2024–January 26, 2025
CURRENTLY OPEN:
Through January 21, 2024
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
Through March 10, 2024
Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection
Through May 5, 2024
Among Friends: The Generosity of Judy and Ken Dayton
Through May 19, 2024
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
January 18–July 7, 2024
The exhibition marks Twin Cities–based artist Tetsuya Yamada’s (US, b. Tokyo, 1968) first museum presentation and features more than 60 works made between 2005 and today, including sculptures in ceramic, wood, and metal; paintings; drawings; photographs; video; and an environmental installation. His interdisciplinary practice engages with art, craft, and design and is inspired by a broad range of cultural references, from ancient Japanese forms of Noh theater to the modernism of Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi. The exhibition invites broader engagement with Yamada’s distinct aesthetics and technical sophistication.
Curators: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance
February 29–August 25, 2024
Motion Capture offers a compelling exploration of the Walker’s new media and performance acquisitions made since 2020, capturing ways that the institution’s multidisciplinary program embraces cutting-edge works that operate across genres. Most works will be on view for the first time at the Walker, with videos, installations, sculptures, and wall works by Ligia Lewis, Kelly Nipper, Jimmy Robert, and Jacolby Satterwhite, among others. Borrowing its title from the imaging technique that digitally registers motion, the show explores how artists who create across two- and three-dimensional media center dance and movement in their work. The presentation dovetails with the Walker’s broader reconceptualization of its collection galleries, which will open in June under the exhibition title This Must Be the Place.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon
March 7–May 19, 2024
The New Eagle Creek Saloon is artist Sadie Barnette’s (US, b. 1984) reimagining of her father’s Eagle Creek Saloon, the first Black-run, gay bar in San Francisco. The original bar, run by Rodney E. Barnette, from 1990 through 1993, offered a haven for working-class Black, brown, and queer individuals who were frequently the subject of racial profiling and violence. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is an exuberant expression of the historical bar with neon lights, glittered speakers, and a range of ephemera. As a site of activation at the Walker, the bar will be programmed in collaboration with local artists and cultural and community leaders, offering a lens into Minneapolis’s queer histories and contemporary contexts.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Amanda Hunt, Head of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact; and Taylor Jasper, Assistant Curator, Visual Arts
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody
April 27–September 8, 2024
The exhibition explores Keith Haring’s (US, 1958–1990) democratic approach to art and unique visual language, conveyed through vibrant color, energetic line work, and iconic characters such as the barking dog and the “radiant baby.” It features more than 100 artworks from across the full arc of the artist’s short career, including major paintings, sculptures, drawings, and mural-scaled works as well as rarely seen archival materials, including video, photographs, ephemera, and important source material from his personal journals. This major survey exhibition, which examines the ongoing influence and resonance of Haring’s work, is organized by The Broad, Los Angeles, and presented by the Walker.
Walker Coordinating Curators: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection
June 20, 2024–April 29, 2029
This Must Be the Place is a complete reinstallation of the Walker’s collection, offering new insights into the vision and development of the institution’s holdings through dynamic juxtapositions across media of iconic works, lesser-known objects, and recent acquisitions. The presentation is grounded in the many meanings and permutations of “home” and unfolds over three large galleries, with spotlight sections that give emphasis to beloved works and core ideas. The reinstallation incorporates visitor feedback gathered from its prior collection exhibition Make Sense of This (2023), with special considerations to how works are presented and described to encourage public understanding and engagement.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts; Taylor Jasper, Assistant Curator, Visual Arts; and Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
August 8–December 15, 2024
Walter Price’s (US, b. 1989) paintings and drawings blur the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, immersing everyday objects and bodies in bold, vivid color and tangles of marks. In his works, interior landscapes and mundane moments are transformed into surreal dreamscapes weighted with personal and communal meaning. Pearl Lines offers the most comprehensive exploration of the artist’s evolving practice. Featuring significant as well as never-before-seen works on canvas, the exhibition establishes new scholarship on the development of the artist’s work through today.
Curators: Rosario Güiraldes, Curator, Visual Arts; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
October 26, 2024–January 26, 2025
Overshare is the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s (France, b. 1953) practice across the past five decades. It will feature select major bodies of work as well as lesser-known and stand-alone pieces, extending into the present moment, which together illuminate central themes and significant evolutions in Calle’s singular oeuvre. Spanning photography, text-based works, artist books, video, and installations, Calle engages with universally resonant experiences, especially the complex nature of relationships and the love, trust, suspicion, control, intimacy, and power possible within them.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Erin McNeil, Program Manager, Curatorial Affairs; and Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
CURRENTLY OPEN:
Through January 21, 2024
Regarded as one of the most influential photographers and thinkers of his generation, Allan Sekula (US, 1951–2013) is known for blending documentary-style photography with essays to create poignant narratives that speak to and critique global social, economic, and political structures. Fish Story, which is being presented for the first time in its entirety in the United States since its 1999 institutional debut, is the artist’s groundbreaking nine-chapter image-based research project. It explores the profound impact of the globalized shipping trade as well as romantic notions of the sea through 105 photographs, slide projections, and accompanying texts.
Curator: William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and former Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
Through March 10, 2024
Multiple Realities is the largest survey of Central Eastern European art to be presented in the United States. Through more than 250 works by nearly 100 artists, the exhibition explores the range of experimental visual art, performance, music, and material culture that emerged across East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia from the 1960s through the 1980s. While the exhibition includes select canonical figures from these nations, such as Geta Brătescu, Sanja Iveković, and Alina Szapocznikow, it places greater emphasis on lesser-known practitioners, highlighting the true depth of artistic innovation, experimentation, and exchange that developed in the region during this period.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; with William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and former Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; and Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
Curatorial Consultants: Daniel Muzyczuk, head of contemporary art, Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Poland; Dušan Barok, editor, Monoskop.org; Joanna Kordjak, curator, Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw; Michał Grzegorzek, independent curator, Warsaw; and Ksenia Nouril, gallery director, Arts Student League, New York
Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection
Through May 5, 2024
Make Sense of This fosters a dialogue about visitor preferences and tests curatorial assumptions about public opinion. Organized in four concise thematic chapters that will unfold throughout the run of the exhibition, each chapter is anchored by a significant recent acquisition and features a diversity of works drawn from the Walker’s collection. Visitors to the exhibition can participate in a short, anonymous survey—offered in English, Spanish, Somali, and Hmong—about the artworks on view, the gallery texts, and additional content of interest.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; William Hernández Luege, Curatorial Associate, Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and former Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center; Erin McNeil, Program Manager, Curatorial Affairs; Jake Yuzna, Content Producer; and Simona Zappas, Youth & Community Programs Associate, Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact
Among Friends: The Generosity of Judy and Ken Dayton
Through May 19, 2024
Between 1969 and 2022, Ken Dayton, whose family’s business grew into the present-day Target Corporation, and his wife, Judy Dayton, a long-standing member of the Walker’s board, amassed an expansive collection of 20th-century art, featuring some of the most groundbreaking works of the time. Through their extraordinary generosity, they gave 550 artworks to the Walker, greatly shaping the institution’s collection. Among Friends features 25 of these paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints, including works by Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol, among others.
Curator: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts
ABOUT THE WALKER ART CENTER
The Walker Art Center is a renowned multidisciplinary arts institution that presents, collects, and supports the creation of groundbreaking work across the visual and performing arts, moving image, and design. Guided by the belief that art has the power to bring joy and solace and the ability to unite people through dialogue and shared experiences, the Walker engages communities through a dynamic array of exhibitions, performances, events, and initiatives. Its multi-acre campus includes 65,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the state-of-the-art McGuire Theater and Walker Cinema, and ample green space that connects with the adjoining Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The Garden, a partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, is one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States and home to the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Recognized for its ambitious program and growing collection of more than 15,500 works, the Walker embraces emerging art forms and amplifies the work of artists from the Twin Cities and from across the country and the globe. Its broad spectrum of offerings makes it a lively and welcoming hub for artistic expression, creative innovation, and community connection.
Visit walkerart.org for more information about upcoming presentations, programs, and opportunities to experience the art of our time.