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Event Horizon: Postwar Art from the Walker’s Holdings
Darsie Alexander
Oct 2009
Event Horizon. Bringing to mind deep space and gravitational pulls, this suggestive phrase, repurposed from the world of science, here serves the more creative aim of framing the Walker’s newly installed permanent collection exhibition—a cross-disciplinary blend of film, video, performance, painting, sculpture, and photography. In fact, the title is intended to be taken rather literally: Event Horizon…
VA
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Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider
Doryun Chong
Aug 2009
Poetry, politics, and human emotion inform Haegue Yang’s practice—and its relationship to the everyday. Over the past few years, working with nontraditional materials such as customized venetian blinds and electrical devices, the Berlin/Seoul–based artist has created a series of carefully orchestrated installations that operate as microcosms of sensory experiences and are the results of her ongoing…
VA
Articles

Ceramics Appeal: Three Views on Contemporary Clay
Articles
Aug 2009
As the curators of Dirt on Delight predicted, presenting an exhibition about dirt will bring the clay artists out of the studio. While researching the show last winter, Walker coordinating curator Andria Hickey, quickly found out that a number of Minneapolis’ best ceramics artists are in some way connected to the renowned Northern Clay Center or the University of Minnesota’s Department of Ceramics…
VA
Articles
Painting the Essence of an Era
Laura Hoptman
Mar 2009
One of the extraordinary things about Elizabeth Peyton’s oeuvre is that it can serve as a chronicle of a particular period—at a certain moment in the history of culture in certain places among a few people who were enthusiastically making it. Sometimes they knew each other; sometimes they were just mutual fans. In retrospect, her paintings have become a kind of essence of a fifteen-year period in…
VA
Articles

Collecting Energy
Articles
Aug 2008
In the view of artist Tomás Saraceno, there’s nowhere for society to go but up. His floating sculptures employ principles from engineering, aeronautics, and architecture that rethink the way we experience space and relate to forms and to one another. Indebted to the ideas championed by visionaries such as architect Buckminster Fuller and artist Gyula Kosice, he makes objects and installations that…
VA
Articles
Composing the Contemporary Collection
Articles
Jul 2008
In a Walker exhibition of the not-too-distant future, you’ll see a piece by San Francisco–based artist Trisha Donnelly. In 2005 the Walker acquired its first work by Donnelly—a drawing entitled Bend Sinister (2004)—and over the past two years has added two additional pieces, including the video Untitled (1998–1999). In it, the artist, dressed in white, performs in slow motion the signature “rock star…
VA
Articles

Trailer Made
Philippe Vergne
Apr 2008
The word “picnic” comes—though nothing is cast in bronze—from the French verb piquer (“pick” or “peck”) is associated with the rhyming nique (things of little importance). Richard Prince’s latest work, Untitled (Upstate), which made its premiere at the Walker, picks on and transcends things of little importance that populate the world. A full-sized basketball hoop and pole pierce the center of a beat-up old…
PA
Articles

Trisha Brown Draws on Her Muse—on Paper and Onstage
Matt Peiken
Feb 2008
In the 1970s, Trisha Brown created notational drawings as road maps for her dancers. Today, one of the founding innovators of postmodern dance draws with abandon, largely as a personal, impulsive expression unto itself. That is, of course, when she can muster the time. If she isn’t steering the vaunted dance company bearing her name, Brown is choreographing opera productions-her next one, she says, will…
VA
Articles

JoAnn Verburg
Matt Peiken
Jan 2008
JoAnn Verburg holds two St. Paul zip codes—one for the apartment she shares with her husband, poet Jim Moore, and one for her studio, just south of the Wabasha Street bridge. But Verburg’s photography has always had a trajectory far beyond the Twin Cities. Many subjects of the portraits, landscapes, and still lifes that elevated her name in fine-art circles are East Coast artists and friends, Italian…