Among the first class of Doris Duke Artists, who’ll receive multi-year cash grants of $225,000, are Walker friends Anne Bogart, Bill Frisell, Vijay Iyer, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Young Jean Lee, Eiko Otake, Ralph Lemon, Meredith Monk, Sarah Michelson, and others.

Bucking band-culture expectations, the Lisps have added a nontraditional project to their recording and touring schedule: making a musical. The band prioritizes spectacle over, say, shoegazing, but their work FUTURITY is still “a musical made by people who don’t make musicals.” The group’s Sammy Tunis and César Alvarez weigh in on why they chose this form and how it kept their band together.

Unlike Naked, presented in the Walker galleries in 2010, Eiko and Koma’s Fragile will be performed to a live soundtrack by Kronos Quartet at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts this weekend.

“If we compartmentalize the environmental question, the whole earth burns, so we might as well get everybody in any way that we can,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, whose new Walker-commissioned performance examines issues of environmental justice. red, black & GREEN: a blues uses hip-hop, spoken word, and audience participation to expand the discussion about how to define that “environmental question.”

Last week the Minnesota State Arts Board announced recipients of $1.2 million in arts funding. The 140 grantees include choreographer Penelope Freeh, poet Bao Phi, artist Liz Miller, and painter (and former Walker Teen Arts Council member) Luke Tromiczak.