For several decades, the Walker’s Design Studio made its home on the top level of the Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed building in a space that hosted an array of graphic designers, editors, curators and guests. Sometime in the late 1980s, one section of wall was conscripted to tally the presence — and heights — of the many people who passed through the studio’s doors. That tradition continued until 2004…

Breast milk, cake frosting, melted wax, viscera, piss, blood, mud, and egg yolks: This is how exhibition co-curator Eric Crosby describes Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg’s newest project, . With her musical collaborator Hans Berg, the Berlin-based couple has created an environment populated by more than eighty individual bird sculptures, each with wildly varying colors and mish-mash anatomies. The flock is…

Mexico City-based Pedro Reyes’ Walker exhibition, Baby Marx, is an in-gallery film production studio featuring the founders of communism and capitalism. The artist and curators Camille Washington and Bartholomew Ryan chose a Playbill-influenced direction for the gallery guide, featuring the all-puppet cast “bios” and project chronology. And as theater programs often have advertisements, we decided to…

I’ve been digging through a lot of online image libraries recently, and thought I might post a few of them up here. The New York Public Library runs a Digital Gallery featuring over 700,000 images of photos, maps, scientific illustrations, illuminated manuscripts, and whatnot. Above is a selection from a great series of astronomical illustrations by Eteinne Leopold Trouvelot. The library also offers…

From July 1942 to the end of 1944, Marguerite Duras worked in Paris for the state authority that controlled the distribution of paper to publishers in German-occupied France. Acting as a censor, the Paper Allocation Agency (P.A.A.) determined which manuscripts were appropriate for print. Source: Laure Adler and Anne-Marie Glasheen, Marguerite Duras: A Life (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1998), 101. “It was…

Last fall I was enlisted to make a Photoshop file with the artist Goshka Macuga which would be made into a woven tapestry and hung in one of the Walker’s galleries. Needless to say, I was very excited to be involved in the production of such an unusual piece. To clarify, this wouldn’t be made by having ink from an inkjet printer sprayed on blank white fabric. The image in this case would actually…

We recently collaborated with Machine Project to create a series of fliers for their upcoming Walker Open Field residency, Summer Jubilee, which begins this Tuesday, July 19. The Summer Jubilee (and it is truly a jubilee—check out this great teaser video) is a two week long series of events that take place all over the Walker campus, including directly underneath the Open Field. The idea for these…

Remember France? It broke from within. That can happen here. We can only protect our own country within by making more of us understanding of each other’s freedom and each other’s work and possessions. We must learn to place a high value on the things that we have created an built and which we would inevitably lose through disunity and social revolution. Nothing is more important to us than those…

Since 1980, the Walker Art Center Design department has maintained a graphic design fellowship program that provides recent graduates (both undergrad and grad) the opportunity to work in a professional design studio environment. Selected from a highly competitive pool of applicants, fellows represent a diverse range of graphic design programs, such as Art Center College of Design, California College…