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The artist collective Los Carpinteros (the Carpenters) was formed in 1994 by Marco Castillo, Dagoberto Rodríguez, and Alexandre Arrechea (until his departure in 2003). This outstanding watercolor is part of a series that refers to some of the most illustrious examples of Cuban architecture. The work underlines the island’s current inability to create new structures— resources of this nature only exist in an imagined future.

A staging of the group’s performance piece Conga Irreversible at the 2012 Havana Biennial captured international attention. The work is also featured in the exhibition Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950, co-curated by Walker executive director Olga Viso and opening at the Walker on November 11. The work of Los Carpinteros can be found in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Founded in Havana, Los Carpinteros is based in Havana and Madrid.

Paul Chan’s artistic practice takes many forms: video, drawing, collage, installation and collaborative site-specific projects. Chan’s An email about Blanchot is part of a series of works in which the artist investigates the transformation of words in signs. “I don’t remember why I began mutating fonts into forms that both reduce and expand its signifying possibilities,” the artist says of this work. “It wasn’t as if language had stopped working for me. I could still express love and malice and the infinite space of the future with the existing alphanumeric set on my keyboard: I could still write. But I wanted more. I got greedy. I wanted language to only work for me and no one else.”

Chan’s work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center; the New Museum, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Walker; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Born in Hong Kong, Chan lives and works in New York.

Michael Dean reconstructs various aspects of language, from his pieces based on the tongue muscles to his typographical sculptures, to create a physical conversation in connection with the work and its surroundings. Each element in this sculpture corresponds to the words “yes” and “no.” Beginning with the typographical layout of each word, the artist then abstracted the forms beyond legibility. These were translated into molds from which he cast in concrete each of the sculpture’s components.

Dean was shortlisted for the 2016 Turner Prize, for which he received acclaim for his work United Kingdom poverty line for two adults and two children: twenty thousand four hundred and thirty six pounds sterling as published on 1st September 2016. His solo exhibitions include Qualities of Violence at De Appel, Amsterdam (2015); Sic Glyphs at South London Gallery (2016); Lost True Leaves at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2016); and Stamen Papers at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2016). Born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, Dean lives and works in London.

A visual artist, performer, poet, essayist, and activist, Jimmie Durham has for more than 45 years explored the potential of art to question ingrained cultural belief systems. Durham has consistently made work that examines the notion of citizenship, the interface between art and activism, and the role of art and artists in society.

This work belongs to a series produced for his 2015 solo show Venice: Objects, Work and Tourism at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice. After receiving the invitation in 2011, Durham began gathering stories by talking to workers in and around the city—boatbuilders, glassblowers, goldbeaters, and woodcarvers as well as people who work in restaurants and various administrative positions. This process led to new works for the show formed from unexpected combinations: collected broken glass collected paired with brightly colored paint; 300-year-old Venetian bricks posed against elements from the city’s industry and commerce. Intended by the artist as vehicles for dialogue, these pieces address a complex melding of ideas, including tourism, labor, the social landscape and history of Venice, and the human-made object.

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, the artist’s first US retrospective, is currently on view at the Walker and includes the tour venues the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Remai Modern, Saskatoon. Durham’s work has been widely exhibited, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma; Serpentine Gallery, London; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; the 55th Venice Biennele; the 13th Istanbul Biennial; and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2014). Born in the United States, Durham is based in Berlin and Naples.

Carlos Garaicoa worked as a draughtsman in the military before attending the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Since the early 1990s, his work—which includes photography, performance, drawing, sculpture, installation, text, and video—has been focused on architecture and its effect on the politics, economy, and culture of urban life. The architectural history of post-revolution Havana, in which new projects were blocked and older buildings neglected, is an ongoing subject for the artist. His work will be included in Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950, an exhibition co-curated by Walker executive director Olga Viso and opening November 11 at the Walker.

Garaicoa’s work has been presented internationally in both group and solo shows, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MOCA Los Angeles; Art in General, New York; Documenta XI; and at the Venice Biennale; the Havana Biennial; and the São Paolo Biennial. His artwork is included in the collections of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana; National Gallery of Art; Tate Modern; MOMA, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and private collections worldwide. Born in Havana, Garaicoa lives and works between Havana and Madrid.

The works of Theaster Gates point to his larger strategy of civic-minded art-making, which ties together his material practice with his interest in activating and revitalizing communities. This work is composed of the same custom-made black bricks used to construct Black Vessel for a Saint (2017), a Walker-commissioned piece for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the artist’s first permanent outdoor sculpture. The production of bricks marks an evolution in Gates’s practice—one that involves not only a repurposing of existing materials but also, as the artist says, an “insertion of new modular units into the world.”

Gates’s work has been widely exhibited internationally and is in a number of collections including Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Tate Gallery, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Walker Art Center. Gates was born in Chicago, where he lives and works today.

Isa Genzken examines ways that our everyday aesthetic language informs our social and political ideologies, focusing primarily on installation and sculpture to create her complex works. In Weltempfänger, the artist imbues forms with narrative content through a minimum of means. With the simple addition of chrome antennas, blocks of concrete become multiband radio receivers. “My antennas were also meant to be ‘feelers’—things you stretch out to feel something, like the sound of the world and its many tones,” says Genzken. The artist created dozens of concrete Receivers in the early 1990s. By subtitling each one with the name of an international city, she evokes a global network communicating with one another from different locations.

In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art, New York presented Isa Genzken: Retrospective, a solo exhibition spanning 40 years. Genzken’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum der Moderne Salzburg; Venice Biennale; and Documenta XI. The artist was awarded the International Art Prize in 2004 and the Wolfgang-Hahn Prize in 2002. Born in Bad Oldesloe, Germany, Genzken lives and works in Berlin.

John Henderson’s practice is centered on painting as a building block, though his works span a range of mediums, including sculpture, photography, and performance. His artworks address themes of authorship and simulacra, often incorporating deceptive appearances to spur the viewer into questioning the fidelity of the piece.

Solo exhibitions of Henderson’s work have been presented at Galerie Perrotin; T293, Rome; Peep-Hole, Milan; and Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. He has participated in group shows at the American Academy, Rome; Prague Biennial 6; and MCA, Chicago. His work is included in the collections of Moderna Museet, Stockholm and MCA, Chicago, among others. Born in Minneapolis, Henderson lives and works in Chicago.

Seitu Ken Jones was deeply influenced by the Black Arts Movement and its central belief that artists have an obligation to leave their communities “more beautiful than they found it.” In his five-decade career, Jones served as the first-ever artist-in-residence in the City of Minneapolis, transported audiences with set designs as an original company member of Penumbra Theatre and other stages, and recently set the table for a diverse cast of 2,000 guests at CREATE: The Community Table, a half-mile-long public art installation designed to spark conversations about access to healthy food. 

Inspired by the legacy of Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks, a five-year effort to plant 7,000 trees in Kassel, Germany, Jones’s We Shall Never Stop Planting is a series of 40 small “seed bombs.” Each signed and numbered work is made from a mixture of compost, clay, and cottonwood seeds and displayed in a handmade cottonwood lumber box.

Nationally recognized as a dynamic collaborator and a creative force for civic engagement, Jones has been honored with numerous awards and fellowships, including a McKnight Distinguished Artist award, a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, a Bush Leadership Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts/Theatre Communications Group Designer Fellowship, and a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Jones recently retired from the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA program at Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington. Born in North Minneapolis in 1951, Jones lives and works in St. Paul with his wife, Soyini Guyton, a poet and fellow master gardener.

Exploring the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the self, Deborah Kass is most recognized for her paintings, prints, photography, sculptures, and neon-lighting installations. Kass mimics and reworks signature styles of iconic male artists of the 20th century, including Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Ed Ruscha. Kass’s technique of appropriation is a critical commentary on the intersection of social power relations, personal identity, and the historically dominant position of male artists in the art world. In summer 2016, Kass declared her support for Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton with this bold, Andy Warhol-style artwork. The work mimics Warhol’s iconic screenprint Vote McGovern (1972), in which the title words, urging viewers to support Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern, appear under the face of Republican incumbent Richard Nixon.

The artist’s solo exhibitions include Deborah Kass: Before and Happily Ever After, a Mid-Career Retrospective at the Andy Warhol Museum, Philadelphia, and My Elvis + at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Her works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Fogg Museum, Boston; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Jewish Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Born in San Antonio, Texas, Kass lives and works in Brooklyn.

Lee Kit creates objects fashioned from everyday materials and household items—fabric, soap, cardboard boxes, and plastic containers—that he transforms through subtle gestures of painting, drawing, and placement. Featuring imagery such as fragments of hands or soles of feet, many of his works point to the intimate and often sensory aspects of everyday life. This piece similarly represents a softly gesturing hand amidst an abstract canvas of familiar marks.

The artist received shortlist nomination for the 2013 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award and represented Hong Kong in the 2013 Venice Biennale. In 2012, the Walker presented I can’t help falling in love, the artist’s first solo US museum exhibition. Originally from Hong Kong, Lee lives and works in Taiwan.

Goshka Macuga is known for using institutional histories as staging grounds for complex proposals. When the Walker presented her first US solo museum exhibition in 2011, she seized upon the museum’s financial underpinnings in the lumber business of its founder, T. B. Walker, and linked this history with that of contemporary art and the economic and nationalist mythologies of the American landscape. Goshka Macuga: It Broke from Within included elements from the Walker collections and archives against a monumental tapestry depicting the “Lost Forty” pine forest in Northern Minnesota, which survived logging due to a surveying error. Untitled/Town Square Manifesto is one of the works she created for this exhibition.

The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and was included in the 8th Berlin Biennale and dOCUMENTA (13). Born in Warsaw, Macuga lives and works in London.

Goshka Macuga is known for using institutional histories as staging grounds for complex proposals. When the Walker presented her first US solo museum exhibition in 2011, she seized upon the museum’s financial underpinnings in the lumber business of its founder, T. B. Walker, and linked this history with that of contemporary art and the economic and nationalist mythologies of the American landscape. Goshka Macuga: It Broke from Within included elements from the Walker collections and archives against a monumental tapestry depicting the “Lost Forty” pine forest in Northern Minnesota, which survived logging due to a surveying error. Her collage Glimpse at “Don’t Tread On Me” (through Herzog & de Meuron’s Screen) is one of the works created for this exhibition.  

The artist’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and was included in the 8th Berlin Biennale and dOCUMENTA (13). Born in Warsaw, Macuga lives and works in London. 

Matt Mullican examines the relationship between reality and perception in his artwork, breaking down the paradigms of everyday life. In addition to projects exploring the subconscious—in the 1970s, he became one of the first to introduce hypnosis as a performative practice in contemporary artistic language—the artist also developed the use of various media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, video, and installation in his practice.

Mullican’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally since the early 1970s at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Galerie, Berlin; and Haus der Kunst, Munich. His pieces are included in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York; and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Born in Santa Monica, Mullican currently lives and works in New York.

Functioning as a nontraditional archaeologist, Reynier Leyva Novo excavates and unravels our ideological construction of a transparent and linear history through conceptually charged works. His multidisciplinary practice transforms foundational events in history into simple abstractions.

Novo’s work has been featured internationally in both solo and group exhibitions at the Havana Biennial; MARTE Museo de Arte de El Salvador; Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy; Liverpool Biennial; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Novo was born in Havana where he currently lives and works.

Catherine Opie turns her lens to iconic natural sites in Untitled #4, an example of a recent series of photographs. The artist captures these images out of focus so that it’s impossible to identify the famous location. The result is a deliberately painterly one as well as a means for Opie to “ask on a cognitive level for you to fill in the blanks of the experience of nature,” as the artist has said.

Catherine Opie has received tremendous critical acclaim since the early 1990s, with her photographs included in the collections of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center. She was artist-in-residence at the Walker in 2001–2002, and her work was the subject of a solo exhibition in 2002. Retrospectives of her work have also been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Born in Sandusky, Ohio, Opie lives and works in Los Angeles.

Eva Rothschild is best known for her striking objects that investigate new relationships between mass and volume, surface and structure. While she does not intend specific content in her works, Rothschild is nonetheless engaged with ways that her forms suggest narrative associations or meanings. Natural Disaster is one of a series of sculptures she created for a special intervention at the modernist Dutch Functionalist Sonneveld House, Rotterdam. The sculpture arrests a moment in time—a glass breaking on a tabletop—creating a surreal take on domestic space.

Rothschild’s Empire, one of several new works in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden by a younger generation of artists who explore abstract forms, is her first permanent outdoor work in the United States. The artist’s work has been widely exhibited internationally, most notably in a solo shows at the Kunsthalle, Zurich and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Group exhibitions include shows at the New Museum, New York; Tate Liverpool; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio; and the Fundación Banco Santander, Madrid. Born in Dublin, Rothschild lives and works in London.

Though she draws inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, Amy Sillman creates paintings often imbued with humor, psychological elements, and feminist critique. The artist has said she is not interested in truth and beauty—rather, she uses words such as “backward” and “amateurish” to affectionately describe her art.

In 1995, Sillman was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in painting and the Elaine de Kooning Memorial Fellowship. She has also received fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and in 2000 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Sillman’s solo shows were organized by Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Drawing Center, New York; Portikus, Frankfurt-am-Main; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz, Austria; Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; Aspen Art Museum; and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and her work was included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Brooklyn Museum of Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Born in Detroit, Sillman lives and work in New York.

Monika Sosnowska is inspired in her work by elements of ordinary architecture—staircases, benches, windows, and other features of residential and commercial structures. She often looks to the utilitarian buildings of postwar Poland, considering ways she might reimagine aspects of these simple, unadorned constructions. Sosnowska manipulates these forms, using heavy machinery to crush, twist, flatten, and otherwise change them. A graceful, abstract torque of steel, her Untitled (gate) (2014) is now on view in the reimagined Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

The artist has presented solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Austin, Texas (2016); Cahiers d’Art, Paris (2015); Fundaçao De Serralves, Porto (2015); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2013); Australian Center for Contemporary Art ACCA, Melbourne (2013); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2013); Public Art Fund, New York (2012); K21 Düsseldorf (2010); Schaulager, Basel (2008); Polish Pavilion, 52th Biennale di Venezia (2007); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz (2007); and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006). Born in Ryki, Poland, Sosnowska now lives and works in Warsaw.

Alec Soth is one of the most compelling voices in contemporary photography. The artist’s curiosity, penchant for research, and openness to serendipity in seeking out subjects have all become hallmarks of his working process. Working in a photographic tradition of road photography established by such figures as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and William Eggleston, Soth captures stunning large-scale color images with an eye toward finding overlooked beauty in the banal. His offbeat images of everyday America form powerful narrative vignettes.

Soth has published more than 25 books, among them Sleeping by the Mississippi, NIAGARA, Broken Manual, and Songbook. The artist has had more than 50 solo exhibitions, including survey shows organized by Jeu de Paume, Paris; Media Space, London; and the Walker, which presented From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America, the first US survey of his work, in 2011. Soth was born in Minneapolis, where he lives and works today.

A key figure in Italian Minimalism, Ettore Spalletti employs a formal vocabulary that melds and balances painting and sculpture, form and color, interior and exterior space. Each work is the result of a meditative but rigorous process of applying a layer of color at the same time each day, capturing a specific tone that recalls an hour, a season, and the weather. The artist manipulates the work’s surface by gently sanding the accumulated layers to reveal both an interior luminosity and an external skin with a range of tonal and textural variations.

Spalletti’s work has been featured in a number of major international exhibitions, including Documenta VII and IX and editions XL, XLIV, XLVI and XLVII of the Venice Biennale. He has had solo shows at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; the Musée St. Pierre, Lyon, France; Institut Valencià d’Arte Modern (IVAM), Spain; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst (M HKA), Antwerp; Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; Villa Medici: Académie de France, Rome; Museum Kurhaus Kléve, Kleve, Germany; Museo Nazionale Delle Arti del XXI Secolo (MAXXI), Rome; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), Turin; and Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE), Naples. Spalletti was born in Cappelle sul Tavo, Italy, where he lives and works today.

Aaron Spangler is known for his intricately carved basswood sculptures. This untitled sculpture is an organic form that looks at once abstract and figural, changing shape as one walks around it. The richly detailed surface carvings feature overlapping outlines of tools and other objects of contemporary American culture, also referring to natural phenomena and the Midwestern landscape. Representing a new direction in the artist’s sculptural practice, this work was created in conversation with Spangler’s Walker-commissioned Bog Walker (2017), now on view in the Wurtele Upper Garden.

Spangler’s artwork is in the collections of the Walker Art Center; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Saatchi Gallery, London; and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Spangler received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2014) and the McKnight Artist Fellowship for Visual Artists (2010). Born in Minneapolis, Spangler lives and works in Park River, Minnesota.

A distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Donald Sultan had his first solo exhibition in 1977 and has since exhibited worldwide in solo and group exhibitions, including at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Gotlands Konst Museum, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Memphis Brooks Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; National Galerie, Berlin; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Born in Asheville, North Carolina, Sultan lives and works in New York City.

Since the mid-1970s, Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within grids of multihued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages. His current motif, honed over many years, is the stacked composition of numerous saturated color fields, delineated by between horizontal bands running the length of a canvas. Taking his cues from early Minimalism, Color Field painters, and jazz music, Whitney is as much an exponent of the process-based, spatially gridded square in art as artists such as Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, and Agnes Martin.

His work has exhibited at Documenta 14; American Academy, Rome; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Cheim & Reid, New York; and the 50th Venice Biennale. He is the recipient of the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996). Born in Philadelphia, Whitney lives and works between New York City and Parma, Italy.

Cerith Wyn Evans’s works give form to ideas through text, sculpture, film, photography, and installation. He often considers literature as a point of departure, creating artworks that give text a spatial and sculptural dimension. In an ongoing series of neon text sculptures, Wyn Evans cites text from literature or film subtitles, fabricating unfinished sentences that beg the viewer to use his or her imagination to complete them and give them meaning.

In his white neon text sculpture Subtitle, the artist renders a text backwards that reads: “Thoughts unsaid, now forgotten …” The work is to be installed facing a reflective surface, so that the mirrored words read legibly. Subtitle is not a complete work until the viewer intervenes, giving order to disorder by acknowledging the power of reflection, both literal and personal.

Recent solo exhibitions include White Cube Bermondsey, London; the Museion Bolzano, Italy; and Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London. His work has also been included in the Venice Biennale, Moscow Biennial, Aichi Triennale, Yokohama Triennale, and Istanbul Biennial. Born in Llanelli, Wales, Wyn Evans lives and works in London.