Pacita Abad, L.A. Liberty, 1992, installed in the exhibition Life in the Margins, Spike Island, Bristol, 2020. Image courtesy Spike Island, Bristol. Photo: Max McClure.
The Walker Art Center’s 2023 exhibition schedule includes a diverse and compelling range of solo and thematic exhibitions that feature emerging and under-represented voices and capture new additions and approaches to its collection development. In February, the Walker will open a focus exhibition of new work by Saint Louis-based artist Kahlil Robert Irving that explores and challenges notions of identity and culture through the medium of ceramics. This will be followed in April by the first retrospective of artist Pacita Abad, featuring more than 100 significant and rarely seen works from across her 32-year career, and in October, by a major group show, titled Multiple Realities, that offers a sweeping exploration of art made in six Central Eastern European nations during the 1960s to 1980s.
Additionally, the Walker will begin a four-rotation presentation of works from its collection, titled Make Sense of This, that invites visitor feedback about the artworks, the gallery texts, and more, using a touch screen in the gallery. The accumulating responses will be on real-time display, revealing a composite view of ideas, opinions, and preferences. Other presentations include solo shows of work by New York–based choreographer Sarah Michelson and photographer, theorist, and critic Allan Sekula, as well as a group show celebrating the many major works of art gifted to the Walker through the generosity of Judy and Kenneth Dayton.
Ongoing presentations include Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts, which explores the influential practice of the Arte Povera artist; Paul Chan: Breathers, which captures Chan’s evolving work over the past 15 years, from his groundbreaking approach to publishing through his return to artmaking; and a solo exhibition of new photography by Pao Houa Her.
Further details about these exhibitions follow below.
OPENING EXHIBITIONS:
Sarah Michelson: /\ March 2020 (4pb)
January 19–April 23, 2023
Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection
February 18–November 19, 2023
Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present
February 23, 2023–January 21, 2024
Pacita Abad
April 15–September 3, 2023
Among Friends: The Generosity of Judy and Ken Dayton
June 10, 2023–July 7, 2024
Allan Sekula: Fish Story
August 24, 2023–January 21, 2024
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
October 14, 2023–March 17, 2024
Sarah Michelson: /\ March 2020 (4pb)
January 19–April 23, 2023
For nearly 20 years, the Walker has sustained a close relationship with the New York–based choreographer Sarah Michelson (UK, b. 1964), whose performances have been presented here onstage and at sites across the campus, in both indoor and outdoor locations. Michelson has been creating dances since the early 1990s, which she has referred to as “‘studio work,’ to look at and be with, constructed in this time for this time—an attempt to stay fresh and work hard, but invite no celebration, no opinion, no success.” Her performances have attempted to explore the nature of dance itself, both as an art form and as physical, intellectual, and emotional labor.
Michelson’s previous presentations at the Walker have included the commissioned performances Daylight (for Minneapolis) (2005), Devotion (2011), and tournamento (2015) as well as October2018/\ (2018), which focused on themes of aging, pleasure, and sacrifice and also informed the creation of her new work featured in this exhibition. Built for a gallery space and made specifically for the Walker, /\ March 2020 (4pb) (2020) is the artist’s first object-based work. This exhibition marks the premiere of the new installation, now part of the Walker’s collection, and is Michelson’s first museum acquisition to date.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; and Philip Bither, McGuire Director and Senior Curator, Performing Arts
Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection
February 18–November 19, 2023
Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection is an exploratory exhibition developed to engage audiences with different themes within the Walker’s growing collection and invite feedback that will inform the institution’s approaches to future presentations. The exhibition will unfold in four thematic chapters over a nine-month period, with each installation including artwork from the collection that spans media and time periods.
Featuring a selection of paintings, photographs, and sculptures, the first chapter focuses on portraits and considers how diverse lived experiences find expression in artistic depictions of family, friends, and artists themselves. Other chapters take a closer look at the connections between music and visual art, notions of memory and commemoration, and ways that today’s artists push the boundaries of art movements from the past, such as 1970s Minimalism.
With each chapter, visitors are invited to respond to a set of questions about the artworks, the gallery texts, and more, using a touch screen in the gallery. This short, anonymous survey is offered in four languages—English, Spanish, Somali, and Hmong—reflecting the most spoken languages in the Twin Cities. A series of in-person workshops with invited groups will also be held in the space. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, visitors’ accumulating responses will be on real-time display, revealing a composite view of ideas, opinions, and preferences.
CHAPTER 1: Portrait and Lived Experience, February 18–April 16;
CHAPTER 2: Minimal Art and the Measure of the Body, April 22–June 25;
CHAPTER 3: Remembrance and Commemoration, July 1–August 27;
CHAPTER 4: A Piece of Music, September 2–November 19
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, chief curator and director of Curatorial Affairs; William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts; Erin McNeil, program manager, Curatorial Affairs; Jake Yuzna, content producer; and Simona Zappas, youth & community programs associate, Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact
Kahlil Robert Irving: Archaeology of the Present
February 23, 2023–January 21, 2024
St. Louis–based artist Kahlil Robert Irving (US, b. 1992) creates complex and layered assemblages of images and sculptures composed of replicas of everyday objects. Mainly working in ceramics, Irving critically engages with the history of the medium and challenges constructs around identity and culture in the Western world. For his forthcoming exhibition, Irving will present new sculptures, videos, and found objects that together consider our relationship to the city street as a place and a concept. The street can be seen as not only a space of collective gathering but also one of transit between points of safety and security. Like sifting through archaeological strata, Irving’s work reveals how our present moment is composed of physical remnants that begin to tell a fragmented story.
For the first time, Irving will be installing his work within a large plywood platform that visitors will be able to move onto to experience the objects through a variety of approaches. Some, such as a painted industrial ceramic pipe, will be elevated through the platform, standing above most viewers like a large pillar or column, while ceramic tiles made to resemble textures from the urban street are sunken into the platform or visible through openings protected by a railing. Also set into the structure are two video works that depict both the city street and the sky, inverting expectations of the sky as a place of possibility and the ground as one of necessity. These gaps or cutouts make room for each work to be revealed, drawing attention to what Irving calls “the unspoken, inherited reality of being a non-white person in America.”
Curator: William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts
Pacita Abad
April 15–September 3, 2023
This is the first retrospective of artist Pacita Abad (US, b. Philippines, 1946–2004), featuring significant and rarely-seen works from across her 32-year career. Pacita Abad will serve as the most comprehensive exploration of Abad’s works to date, including more than 100 objects drawn from private and public collections across Asia, Europe, and the United States. A largely self-taught artist, Abad developed a distinct visual vocabulary that embraced the artistic traditions of global cultures and actively blurred the boundaries between fine art and craft. While Abad was engaged in artistic and political dialogues during her life, the depth, range, and inventiveness of her work is only now coming to prominence. The forthcoming presentation positions Abad within art historical narratives, providing new insights into her conceptual and aesthetic evolutions as well as the life experiences that so richly influenced her practice.
Pacita Abad is curated by Victoria Sung, associate curator of Visual Arts at the Walker, with support from Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial fellow in Visual Arts at the Walker. The exhibition is developed in collaboration with the Pacita Abad Art Estate, managed by Jack Garrity, Kristi Garrity, and Pio Abad, which provided unprecedented access to archival materials, including photographs, correspondence, sketchbooks, and other primary sources, as well as to the depth of existing artworks by the artist. Pacita Abad is also accompanied by new scholarship in a 352-page catalogue, edited by Sung, and with texts by Sung and Miranda as well as by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Ruba Katrib, Nancy Lim, and Xiaoyu Weng. It also features an expansive oral history, edited by Sung and Pio Abad, with 20 contributors, including artists, curators, family members, and friends.
Curators: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts; with Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Exhibition Tour:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: October 21, 2023–January 28, 2024
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: October 12, 2024–January 19, 2025
Among Friends: The Generosity of Judy and Ken Dayton
June 10, 2023–July 7, 2024
Those who have spent time in the Walker Art Center’s galleries or the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden will have encountered major works of art gifted to the Walker’s collection by Judy and Kenneth Dayton, patrons who made a profound impact on the cultural institutions they supported, helping to make Minnesota a national hub for the arts. Together, the Daytons assembled a distinctive collection of American art. Their approach to collecting was driven by curiosity, passion, and lasting relationships: some of the artists whose works had pride of place in their home—such as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Claes Oldenburg—became their close friends. At the Walker, Judy and Kenneth Dayton’s philanthropic legacy is second only to that of founder T. B. Walker, who opened his art collection to the public more than 140 years ago.
This exhibition pays tribute to the generosity of the Daytons, who over the decades enabled more than 550 artworks to enter the Walker’s collection, including many sculptures in the Garden. In 2000 the Daytons made headlines when they announced their intention to gift their personal collection to the Walker, a bequest fully realized in 2021 following Judy’s passing. On view in the current exhibition are significant paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by artists including Alexander Calder, Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Barnett Newman, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol.
Curator: Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts
Allan Sekula: Fish Story
August 24, 2023–January 21, 2024
Photographer, theorist, and critic Allan Sekula (US, 1951–2013) is known for photographs and essays that blend researched, descriptive realism with emotionally impactful narrative. His photography actively engaged ideas around labor, capitalism, and Marxist theory, providing complex and poignant critiques about social reality. This exhibition features the entirety of Sekula’s tour-de-force project Fish Story (1990–1994), the result of seven years of documenting harbors and port cities around the world. Beginning his journey in Los Angeles at the port in San Pedro where he grew up, the artist traveled as far as Korea, Scotland, and Poland, photographing the prosperity, poverty, and political powers that continue to play out in these sites.
A powerful work that unfolds over nine chapters, Fish Story is considered one of the most important image-based research projects of the late 20th century. Conceived as both an exhibition and a book, the piece is composed of 105 photographs, slide projections, and accompanying texts that challenge and expand both the tradition of documentary photography and romantic notions of the sea. The project, documented at the beginning of a truly globalized shipping industry, reminds us that the precarious balance between large economic forces, climate change, and international politics has existed across decades. Now part of the Walker’s collection, the complete presentation of Fish Story has been shown in its entirety only a few times and has not been seen in the United States since 1999.
Curator: William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts
Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s
October 14, 2023–March 17, 2024
Multiple Realities offers a sweeping survey of experimental art made in six Central Eastern European nations during the 1960s to 1980s. Charting a generation of artists invested in experimentation, the Walker-organized exhibition features artworks rarely exhibited in the United States. Despite their geographical proximity, artists working during this time encountered different conditions for daily life and artmaking, confronting varying degrees of control and pressure exerted by state authorities. Embracing conceptual or formal innovation and a spirit of adventurousness, Multiple Realities sheds light on ways that artists refused, circumvented, eluded, and subverted official systems, in the process creating works often riddled with wit, humor, or irony.
Drawing on visual art, performance, music, and material culture, Multiple Realities brings together works by more than 100 artists from the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. While it presents select canonical figures from the region, the exhibition foregrounds lesser-known practitioners, particularly women artists, artist collectives, and those exploring embodiment through an LGBTQ+ lens.
Presented as a sequence of thematic chapters, the exhibition explores the urban context; the notion of embodiment as artists considered their immediate physical surroundings, shared social spaces, and representations of the self in the media and ideological propaganda; the work of artist collectives and subcultural groups; and artists’ imagined futures embodied by the Space Race, the advancement of nuclear energy, and new forms of communications. Though rooted in the recent past, the exhibition’s themes resonate deeply today.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, 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, curator, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; and Ksenia Nouril, curator, Print Center, Philadelphia
CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS:
Paul Chan: Breathers
November 17, 2022–July 16, 2023
Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts
October 14, 2022–February 26, 2023
Pao Houa Her: Paj quam ntuj / Flowers of the Sky
July 28, 2022–January 22, 2023
Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection
February 14, 2019– November 19, 2023
Paul Chan: Breathers
November 17, 2022–July 16, 2023
This is the first major US-based museum exhibition of works by artist, writer, and publisher Paul Chan in 15 years. Chan, who was recently awarded the prestigious 2022 MacArthur Fellowship, came to prominence in the early 2000s with vibrant moving image works that touched on aspects of war, religion, pleasure, and politics. Around 2009, Chan embarked on what he described as a “breather” from the art world, turning his attention to experimental publishing by founding the press Badlands Unlimited. The forthcoming exhibition, titled Paul Chan: Breathers, traces the artist’s return to artmaking through approximately 40 works and suites of objects, including a new installation made especially for the Walker. Together, the featured works capture Chan’s creative and conceptual innovations, from his publishing through to his current experimentations with the boundless possibilities of the moving image.
The exhibition is accompanied by a Walker designed and published catalogue created in close collaboration with the artist, with contributions by Pavel S. Pyś, Vic Brooks, and Paul Chan.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts; with Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Exhibition Tour:
Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU: September 8, 2023–January 7, 2024
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis: March 8–August 11, 2024
Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts
October 14, 2022–February 26, 2023
The first US-based retrospective in 35 years on the work of influential Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis (1936–2017), whose wide-ranging interdisciplinary practice examined critical questions about culture, nature, and humanity. Titled Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts, the exhibition will feature 50 works from across every major stage of Kounellis’s career, including works that will be shown publicly for the first time. While Kounellis’s work has been presented extensively in Europe, especially in his adopted country of Italy, the artist has remained lesser-known in the US. The forthcoming retrospective introduces new audiences to Kounellis’s practice, which remains deeply relevant to contemporary art dialogues, and offers new scholarship that enriches global understanding of his innovative vision and approach. Jannis Kounellis in Six Acts will remain on view at the Walker through February 26, 2023, and then travel to co-organizing institution Museo Jumex in Mexico City.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, former curator and associate director of programs, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center; and Kit Hammonds, chief curator at Museo Jumex, Mexico City; with William Hernández Luege, curatorial assistant, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center
Exhibition Tour:
Museo Jumex, Mexico City: April 1, 2023–September 17, 2023
Pao Houa Her: Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky
July 28, 2022–January 22, 2023
Pao Houa Her (US, b. Laos, 1982) is known for her powerful photographs focusing on the Hmong diaspora in the United States and Laos, exploring themes of migration, displacement, and social and ecological resilience. Using a formally rigorous approach and working with both color and black-and-white photography, the Twin Cities-based artist draws from traditions of portraiture, landscape, and still life, critically and playfully engaging the boundaries between fiction and reality.
For her solo exhibition at the Walker, Her debuts a new body of work made during the past two years in Northern California. The artist was inspired by a newspaper article on the “Green Rush,” a term used to describe the recent migration of farmers to California that recalls the Gold Rush of the mid-1800s. In the remote Mount Shasta area, Hmong farmers have used their ancestral knowledge of highland agriculture to cultivate the mountain’s volcanic terrain. Her’s photographs focus on the much-contested landscape that has become the site of considerable subsistence agriculture and cannabis cultivation following the state’s legalization of marijuana. The exhibition title Paj qaum ntuj (pronounced “paah kohm duu”) translates to “Flowers of the Sky,” a Hmong phrase alluding to growing marijuana. The poetic and vivid quality of this saying demonstrates the artist’s interest in making visible how Hmong language and land often intertwine.
Curators: Victoria Sung, associate curator, Visual Arts; and Matthew Villar Miranda, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Five Ways In: Themes from the Collection
February 14, 2019–November 19, 2023
Does a portrait need to resemble its subject? Can a sculpture also be a landscape? The Walkers 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.
Curators: Siri Engberg, senior curator, Visual Arts; with Jadine Collingwood, former curatorial fellow, Visual Arts; and Alexandra Nicome, former interpretation fellow, Education and Public Programs