The Walker Art Center announced today that it has recently acquired, through purchase and gift, more than 50 works of art for its growing collection. The works represent an incredible depth of conceptual rigor and reflect the Walker’s commitment to experimentation and artistic breakthroughs. The acquisitions also represent the Walker’s strategic efforts to diversify its holdings with the work of both acclaimed and lesser-known artists from around the globe, ensuring that its collection features a range of voices, approaches, and innovations.
Among the works is a major painting by Gerhard Richter, one of today’s most celebrated painters. Titled Abstract Painting (1990), the monumental work is part of an ongoing series that Richter began in the mid-1970s that reflects his transition from largely figurative to more abstract works. The painting captures the artist’s distinct and highly considered approach, which retains aspects of figuration even within the shimmering, saturated abstract surfaces. Abstract Painting complements another significant work by Richter already in the Walker’s collection—Chicago (1992). Also in the group is an important installation piece by multidisciplinary artist Shu Lea Cheang, whose work explores the shifting boundaries between the analog and digital, virology, A.I., and the future of production. Those Fluttering Objects of Desire (1992) engages with core cultural happenings of the 1990s, including the struggles over labor rights, the AIDS crisis, and LGBTQ+ rights, and invites discourse on sexual politics and personal experience. The Walker is among the first institutions to begin acquiring Cheang’s early work.
The acquisitions also include objects from and related to the Walker’s exhibition program. Among these is Sophie Calle’s North Pole (2009), which features photography, video, and porcelain plaques with text that document her journey through the Arctic and engage with her deceased mother’s dream to visit the North Pole, and selections from her most recent series On the Hunt (2024). The works were featured in the Walker’s acclaimed exhibition Sophie Calle: Overshare. The Walker also purchased Sadie Barnette’s installation Mirror Bar (2022), which takes inspiration from the artist’s The New Eagle Creek Saloon—on view at the Walker in 2024—and several works from Rose Salane’s Confessions series (2023), which features photographs depicting small objects taken from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii alongside written letters by regretful visitors returning the stolen materials. The series will be featured in the exhibition Ways of Knowing, opening in March.
Among the other acquisitions are paintings by Edgar Arceneaux, Wade Guyton, Suzanne Jackson, Guillermo Kuitca, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Motherwell; sculptural works by Siah Armajani, Tarek Atoui, Olga Balema, Petrit Halilaj, Jay Heikes, Senga Nengudi, Doris Salcedo, Keith Sonnier, and Haim Steinbach; moving image works and installations by Chlöe Bass, Sharon Hayes, Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, Eva Koťátková, and Tiffany Sia; and works on paper by John Baldessari, Georg Baselitz, Frank L. Gaard, Jeffrey Gibson, Lauren Halsey, Barbara Kasten, Eso Malflor, Kelly Nipper, Ian Tweedy, and JoAnn Verberg.
The Walker stewards a collection of more than 16,000 objects, including works by modern art icons and some of the most influential artists of today. In June 2024, the Walker opened the first significant reinstallation of works from its collection in more than five years. Titled This Must Be the Place, and oriented around ideas of “home”, the presentation features beloved, touchstone works alongside lesser known but equally important objects. The Walker will periodically rotate new acquisitions into the collection galleries in addition to their inclusion in forthcoming special exhibitions.
“In recent years, we have placed a special emphasis on acquiring more works by women artists, BIPOC artists, artists working in new media and performance arts, and artists with ties to Minnesota. Our overarching strategy centers support for new artforms and creative innovations, whether conceptual, formal, or technical,” said Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collection Strategy. “The collection provides new opportunities for research, dialogue, and exploration of emerging ideas across modern and contemporary art. As such, we are particularly attuned to boundary-pushing artists and those who have made critical contributions to art but have not necessarily received the scholarly recognition they deserve. We are delighted by the new works entering our collection and look forward to sharing them with our audiences.”
Additional Acquisition Highlights:
Tarek Atoui. Home (2021).
Paris-based artist Tarek Atoui (b. 1980, Lebanon) is an electroacoustic composer, working across sound performance and composition. Using custom-built electronic instruments and computers, Atoui explores music and new technologies as powerful tools in the expression of identity and the formation of social and political realities. Home is part of the series The Whisperers, which the artist began during the pandemic with his son’s kindergarten class. It consists of a stone basin filled with water, within which there is a submerged cymbal and a bronze half sphere that conceals a mechanism to play a composition recorded by the artist. The various sounds produced by the object can be heard through headphones or other listening systems. The complex and engaging work explores sound transmissions in relation to material, space, motion, and perception. It is the first work by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.
Jeffrey Gibson. I AM A RAINBOW TOO; I WANNA GIVE YOU DEVOTION; IF I RULED THE WORLD; KNOW YOU’RE MAGICK BABY; THE FUTURE IS PRESENT (all 2019).
Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1973, US, citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and Cherokee heritage) is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work celebrates the diversity and hybridity of this land, combining Indigenous, American, and Queer histories with influences from abstract painting, politics, music, and pop culture. His works reflect a distinct use of material as well as color, geometric patterning, and language. For this series, Gibson uses language adapted from pop song lyrics of the ‘80s and ‘90s. To make the prints, he developed a system of typography using vivid letterforms, which he screen-printed and then collaged on to a printed background sheet. These prints join other works by Gibson already in the Walker collection.
Chlöe Bass. we turn to time (2024).
Chloë Bass (b. 1984, U.S.) is a conceptual artist whose practice explores themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and the complexity of human relationships. Using a variety of mediums such as performance, text, photography, and public art, she delves into how people interact with one another in both personal and collective contexts. we turn to time is a four-channel, immersive film installation that serves as the culmination of Bass’s broader work, Obligation To Others Holds Me in My Place. This work, which is created from footage gathered over two days, reflects on the experiences of four mixed-race families from across America, including the Twin Cities. The acquisition marks the artist’s first work to enter the Walker’s Collection.
Eva Koťátková. Untitled (2022).
Eva Koťátková (b. 1982, Czech Republic) considers themes of the body, power, ecology, and the histories of medical, psychiatric, and educational institutions. She often develops installations that involve collage, sculpture, and collaborative performance activations. Untitled was part of the artist’s exhibition at CAPC Bordeaux, titled My Body is not an Island. The work is displayed in a recessed vitrine-like wall installation filled with dozens of paper cutouts of animals, figures, fruits, and landscapes as well as text fragments hung from string. It also includes a series of small soft, biomorphic sculptures. Taken together, Untitled frames and questions humanity’s position within a broader interconnected world. The installation marks the first work by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.
Suzanne Jackson. Palimpsest Grit (2022-2023).
Suzanne Jackson (b. 1944, U.S.) works experimentally and fluidly across drawing, painting, printmaking, bookmaking, poetry, dance, theater, and costume design. Palimpsest Grit is part of Jackson’s “environmental abstractions,” a series of works in which the artist releases her painting materials from the confines of supports, allowing them to actively engage with space. The work is particularly unique in that the lower register is canvas and has figurative elements moving across it. The work also has a particular concern with structure, as the wood plank running through its center creates a strange tension between weightiness and grace. The work is the first by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.
Sharon Hayes. Ricerche: four (2024).
Sharon Hayes (b. 1970, U.S.) often blends performance and social engagement outside of the gallery context to explore political events and their connections to the past, present, and future. The two-channel video installation Ricerche: four is the last in a decade-spanning series of works focused on sexuality and gender in the United States. In each video, the artist asks probing questions of an assembled collective, including 35 students at an all-women’s college; children of queer and trans parents in Provincetown, MA; and players on two women’s tackle football teams. In Ricerche: four, three groups of LGBTQIA elders also reflect on their lives, loves, and identities. The work explores the importance of chosen community and questions of communal gathering. It is co-acquired with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and is the first by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.
Tiffany Sia. Journey from North to South (2024).
Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer, whose work explores place, migration, and cultural hybridity. Drawing on her personal experiences across the cultures and histories of Hong Kong as well as other locales, Sia examines the social and political ramifications of globalization. Her recent work explores various forms of material loss. Journey from North to South, presented on a 3-channel rackmount monitor, captures a 22-hour drive across interstates, including a segment tracing the Mississippi delta. The title of the work draws from wuxia, a genre of Chinese martial arts epic characterized by the hero’s journey across a beautiful yet treacherous landscape. The work is the first by the artist to enter the Walker’s collection.
Barbara Kasten. Seated Form (red) (1972) & Figure/Chair (1973/2023).
Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, U.S.) is recognized for her work in photography, sculpture, installation, and set design. Often abstract, her objects and installations are the result of careful manipulations of space, perspective, and light. Seated Form (red) is one of three painted wooden chairs that Kasten combined with hand-woven and hand-dyed sisal—an organic material used for industrial ropes. The chair has a loosely corporeal form—with two legs and suggestions of breasts—and speaks to design as an architectural setting for the body. Figure/Chair is a series of photographic diazotypes—a print process akin to architectural diagrams—in which a female model was posed repeatedly on and around a bentwood chair. In 12 prints that have been scanned and re-printed on archival paper, Kasten plays with the different ways that the body might relate to the architecture of the chair. The works are the first by the artist to enter the Walker collection.
Edgar Arceneaux. Skinning the Mirror (Spring) (2024).
Edgar Arceneaux (b. 1972, U.S.) explores historical events through a rich array of drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, revealing how language, technology, and systems of order produce our sense of reality. Skinning the Mirror is a characteristic example of the artist’s material-based abstractions, in which he transforms silver nitrate—used in the fabrication of mirrors—into a painting medium. Glass shards, mirrors, and disfigurement have appeared throughout Arceneaux’s extensive practice, as a means of exploring gaps in history and memory as well as the intersections between materiality, self, and the world around us. The work adds meaningfully to two others by the artist already in the Walker’s collection.
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 multiacre 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 16,000 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.