Walker Reader

Walker Art Center's editorial perspective on contemporary art: news links plus original interviews, essays, and videos. 

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Celebrate Chuck Close's 76th Birthday in Photos

As Chuck Close turns 76, the art world—from the Walker to the Whitney and beyond—has taken to Instagram to wish him well and share images of his iconic work, including portraits of Kara Walker, Lucas Samaras, and the artist himself.

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Campus Renovation Update: Breaking Ground, Making Progress

With the Walker’s new entrance and plaza opening in just five months, and a year until the grand reopening of the fully renovated Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, we’ll be publishing monthly updates from now on to catch our community up on new developments in our ambitious campus renovation project. In this month’s update: ground is broken, new sculptures take form, and a reshaped hillside emerges.

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Abbas Kiarostami, Palme d'Or-winning Iranian film-maker, dies aged 76

He wasn’t just a film-maker, he was a modern mystic, both in his cinema and his private life.” Iranian filmmaker Abbas Karostami, who won the Palm d’Or for Taste of Cherry (1997), has died at age 76. 

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Pyrotechnic Party of Legend, Killed Off by Social Media

“It was 300 hipsters from Bushwick coming down the driveway, and I nearly died.” Brooke Alderson and Peter Schjeldahl on their annual fireworks extravaganza in upstate New York, and why (thanks, in part, to social media) it ended.

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Bill Cunningham, Legendary Times Fashion Photographer, Dies at 87

“To see a Bill Cunningham street spread was to see all of New York. Young people. Brown people. People who spent fortunes on fashion and people who just had a strut and knew how to put an outfit together out of what they had.”

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Chance the Rapper Colors Outside the Lines

“Young artists of color are literally dying because they don’t feel like they have any other way into the music industry except through displays of violence,” writes Toki Wright. But Chicago’s Chance the Rapper presents an alternative: “Much of Chance’s Coloring Book mixtape sounds like a prayer for the youth of his city and proof that you can make it out of hard times when you express your best self.”

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Zoom Pavilion’ at Unlimited Gives Art Basel a Real-Time Look at Surveillance

Offering the rare political work at Art Basel, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof Wodiczko turn the gallery experience into surveillance, tracking visitors and presenting their real-time images—complete with red box around their faces—enlarged on the walls.

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Self-Portrait as a Building: In the Studio with Mark Manders

Checking in on the progress of Mark Manders’s commission for the renovated Minneapolis Sculpture Garden—one of 16 new works to be unveiled in 2017 and the artist’s first major public artwork in the US—Misa Jeffereis visits the artist’s studio in Ronse, Belgium. There, she witnesses the process behind Manders’s uncanny bronzes and experiences first-hand the artist’s “self-portrait as a building.”

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Muhammad Ali, We Still Love You

Artist Naeem Mohaiemen considers Muhammad Ali’s 1978 trip to Bangladesh as part of the boxer’s embrace of a “Muslim International,” as well as a balm for both an unsteady new nation and for himself, having just been humiliatingly beaten by Leon Spinks.

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Let's Talk About the "Universal" (White, Male) Artist

In a sprawling essay meandering from Joseph Beuys and George Morrison to recent MFA thesis work by MCAD graduate Nick Rivers, artist Andrea Carlson unpacks the tangled, Eurocentric assumptions inherent in art historical notions of Abstract Expressionism as a bastion for universal, "pure" artistic expression.

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9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

The DIS-curated Berlin Biennale, writes Karen Archey, “errs by so uniformly investing in the corporate gaze that any radical vision of emancipation from this aesthetic comes off as puritanical. Consumer options are tragically offered as real options.”

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Reconciling a Hyphenated Identity

A profile of ceramic artist and sculptor Katayoun Amjadi, in a conversation ranging from take-out to geopolitical trade, feminism, the identity-blurring experience of immigration, and the feel of clay in your hands.

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New Frontier at Sundance Film Festival: 10 Years of Changing Boundaries

To commemorate ten years of innovation and experimentation at the New Frontier at Sundance Film Festival Program, the Walker’s Sheryl Mousley and Shari Frilot, New Frontier chief curator, offer this illustrated survey. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier program has provided the highest level of curation in this emerging field since 2007. Virtual Reality: The New Frontier runs at the Walker Art Center on Sunday, June 12 through Thursday, June 16 and is presented in collaboration with the Sundance Institute’s New Frontier program and Northern Lights.mn.

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Olafur Eliasson’s Spectacular Versailles Takeover Stands Up to Climate Change

Spotlighting climate change, artist Olafur Eliasson has installed three site-specific, water-related projects in the gardens at the palace of Versailles, including Waterfall, a gold-toned construction crane that cascades water into the Grand Canal.

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Igniting Change: Northern Spark Targets Climate Chaos

Northern Spark, the nation’s premier dusk-to-dawn experimental art festival, returns June 11–12 with a new theme, Climate Chaos/Climate Rising, and plenty of questions about the human effects on nature’s systems. For a festival known for infusing wonder and transformation into mundane city spaces through art, it’s a vital next step: pushing attendees to imagine that another world is, indeed, possible.

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Kara Walker Talks to One of Her Biggest Influences: Her Father

“There’s this heaviness in the work that is really affecting. Seeing my dad as just not my dad but as an artist who is struggling with mortality is humanizing and scary.” Kara Walker on the new show of work by her father, Larry, she curated at Sikkema Jenkins.

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Live Then, Live Now: Chris Larson, Hüsker Dü, and Land Speed Record

On August 15, 1981, Hüsker Dü ran through a blistering set at downtown Minneapolis’s 7th St. Entry, recording 17 songs in 26 minutes to create the punk trio’s debut album Land Speed Record. Thirty-five years later, artist Chris Larson channels that energy in an immersive installation that reflects on memory, loss, and the fire-damaged remains of Hüsker Dü drummer Grant Hart’s childhood home.