The Walker Art Center’s 2024–2025 exhibition program is anchored by major solo exhibitions, including expansive and first-time presentations of works by Sophie Calle, Pan Daijing, Walter Price, Kandis Williams, and Stanley Whitney. Sophie Calle: Overshare, which opens in October 2024, explores the artist’s work across five decades, including major, acclaimed installations and lesser-known pieces that add depth to scholarly understanding of her practice. The exhibition reflects on the universality of Calle’s work and the ways that it anticipated the rise of social media and reality television. The Walker will kick off 2025 with the January opening of a site-specific installation by Berlin-based, Chinese noise musician and visual artist Pan Daijing, offering US audiences the first substantive opportunity to engage with her dynamic and immersive practice. Later in 2025, the institution will open a midcareer survey of celebrated artist Kandis Williams, which includes a new body of work that the artist has been conceptualizing for several years.
The Walker’s forthcoming program also includes significant thematic explorations, including a complete reconceptualization of the Walker’s collection galleries. The installation is grounded in different notions of home and placemaking and features dynamic juxtapositions between iconic works, rarely seen or lesser-known objects, and recent acquisitions. In March 2025, the Walker will open Ways of Knowing. This exhibition engages audiences with a diversity of research-based practices by emerging and established artists from nine countries, including Argentina, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, and the United States, who seek to interpret a range of complex ideas into vivid and exciting visual forms. The 2024–2025 exhibition program captures the Walker’s ongoing commitments to experimental forms, pathbreaking artists, and multidisciplinary interactions and engagements. These new exhibitions build on current presentations, including those that celebrate practitioners from or with ties to the Twin Cities, such as Tetsuya Yamada: Listening.
Further details about these exhibitions and other current and upcoming presentations follow below.
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection
June 20, 2024–April 29, 2029
Walter Price: Pearl Lines
August 8–December 8, 2024
Sophie Calle: Overshare
October 26, 2024–January 26, 2025
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon
November 14, 2024–March 16, 2025
Pan Daijing
January 16–July 6, 2025
Ways of Knowing (Working title)
March 8–September 7, 2025
Kandis Williams: A Surface
April 24–August 24, 2025
CURRENTLY OPEN:
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody
Through September 8, 2024
Tetsuya Yamada: Listening
Through July 7, 2024
Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance
Through August 25, 2024
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
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 a 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
Walter Price: Pearl Lines
August 8–December 8, 2024
Walter Price’s (US, b. 1989) paintings 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 daily experiences are transformed into surreal dreamscapes weighted with personal and communal meaning. Pearl Lines represents the most in-depth museum exploration of the artist’s practice to date, and features selections from significant bodies of work produced between 2017 and 2023, including never-before-seen canvases and a painting acquired by the Walker in 2020 that will be on public display for the first time.
Curators: Rosario Güiraldes, Curator, Visual Arts; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
Sophie Calle: Overshare
October 26, 2024–January 26, 2025
Overshare is the first North American exhibition to explore the full range of artist Sophie Calle’s (France, b. 1953) practice across the past five decades. Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures ways that Calle’s early work anticipated the rise of social media as a space to shape and present lived experience. The exhibition features photography, text-based works, video, and installations, highlighting the artist’s efforts to probe the boundaries between public and private, truth and fiction, control and chance. Overshare is the first large-scale exhibition to engage North American audiences with the significance of Calle’s recurring themes, and to capture their ongoing relevance to contemporary experiences and dialogues about our digitally mediated world.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Erin McNeil, Program Manager, Curatorial Affairs; and Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon
November 14, 2024–March 16, 2025
How High the Moon is the 50-year career retrospective of artist Stanley Whitney (US, b. 1946), whose practice is recognized for its powerful engagement with painterly abstraction. The exhibition charts the trajectory of Whitney’s career, from his early experimentations with palette, form, and rhythm in the 1970s and 1980s to later decades when his work was transformed by his extensive travels, and into his current, ongoing explorations of color as experienced within the framework of the grid. The presentation features major paintings, improvisatory small paintings, and drawings and prints, which constitute an important but frequently overlooked aspect of his oeuvre, offering audiences a deep understanding of the richness and singularity of Whitney’s practice.
Curator: Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Walker Coordinating Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
Pan Daijing
January 16–July 6, 2025
The presentation marks the first US solo exhibition for Berlin-based artist Pan Daijing (China, b. 1991), whose practice emphasizes immersive, atmospheric installations. Her work often incorporates architectural interventions, sound, and moving image. Some pieces involve live choreography that encourages engagement between performers and viewers, or ephemeral materials such as water and ice. An acclaimed noise musician, Daijing recently staged a one-night live performance at the Knockdown Center in New York. The Walker presentation will be the first substantive opportunity for US audiences to experience her distinctive work. Her site-specific installation, which is still in development, will embrace the elements core to her oeuvre.
Curator: Pavel Pyś, Curator, Visual Arts and Collections Strategy
Ways of Knowing (Working title)
March 8–September 7, 2025
Ways of Knowing explores research-based strategies as a major engine of contemporary artistic production, highlighting diverse ways that artists give form to complex ideas. The exhibition features painting, photography, drawing, installation, and films by 11 artists from 9 countries, offering a snapshot of their unique approaches and practices. The exhibition highlights how some of today’s most compelling artists resist conventional assumptions about how information should be gathered, documented, and shared. Bringing their own perspectives and disciplinary freedoms to cultural artifacts and histories, they find new narratives and possibilities within them. Some focus on the ethics of research or the connections between culture, place, and language, while others examine the impacts of colonialism across continents or the historical formation of gender identity, among other themes. Participating artists are Iosu Aramburu, Sammy Baloji, Anna Boghiguian, Cabello/Carceller, Chang Yuchen, Petrit Halilaj, Sky Hopinka, Eduardo Navarro, Gala Porras-Kim, Rose Salane, and Christine Howard Sandoval.
Curator: Rosario Güiraldes, Curator, Visual Arts; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
Kandis Williams: A Surface
April 24, 2025–August 24, 2025
The exhibition is the first museum survey on the work of celebrated artist Kandis Williams (US, b. 1985), whose inquisitive practice spans collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, pedagogy, and publishing. Williams leverages the experience of the body alongside personal and communal histories to explore and challenge notions of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism, among other subjects. Williams is also the founder and editor of Cassandra Press, a publishing and educational platform that produces and distributes Black scholarship. A Surface features examples of both important and lesser-studied works from the past 10 years of the artist’s career, offering audiences the most in-depth experience of her essential vision and oeuvre to date.
Curator: Taylor Jasper, Assistant Curator, Visual Arts; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
CURRENTLY OPEN:
Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody
Through 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 Curator: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
Tetsuya Yamada: Listening
Through 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.
Curator: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts
Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance
Through August 25, 2024
Motion Capture offers a compelling exploration of the Walker’s 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 museum’s broader reconceptualization of its collection galleries, which will open in June under the exhibition title This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection.
Curator: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts