One of the most iconic artists of her generation, Kiki Smith makes work containing unflinching and often exquisite meditations on the body, myth, and spirituality that, as Walker director Kathy Halbreich says, “possess the power to bring one to a complete stop.” Smith exhibits great fluency with a wide variety of media, yet she has often gravitated toward humble materials such as paper, clay, and fabric…

“It’s impossible to be bound by national borders when one talks about aesthetics. Nationality is not an aesthetic category, and I truly hope it never will be.” —Philippe Vergne This year’s edition of the Whitney Biennial, opening in New York City on March 2, is a historic one: it’s the first to be titled and the first organized without an American-born curator. Subtitled Day for Night, the survey is…

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s relationship with the Walker goes back to the 1995 exhibition Economies: Hans Accola and Rirkrit Tiravanija and his subsequent artist residency. Since then, he has realized many projects around the world and become one of the most influential thinker-practitioners in contemporary art. Fittingly embodying his peripatetic, gregarious existence, Tiravanija’s open, generous art often…

By calling Lynne Tillman’s work “so striking and original that it transforms the way you see the world, the way you think about and interact with your surroundings,” the Los Angeles Reader might as easily be describing Kiki Smith’s powerful yet vulnerable art as the writing of her longtime friend. The Walker exhibition catalogue Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980–2005 describes Smith’s craft in similar…

On December 1, 1987, Huang Yong Ping placed a classical Chinese art history book and a Western art history book into a washing machine and washed them for two minutes. These two long-standing histories were transformed into a pile of unreadable pulp within two minutes. One of the most important Chinese artists on the post-1990s international contemporary art scene, Huang was born in Xiamen, China, in…

Huang Yong Ping’s art is an entire ontology in itself. It’s a universe unto itself, and like the universe itself, it’s a complex system generated out of paradox and perplexity, which endow it with ultimate dynamism and vitality. His art is powerful but intelligent, revealing the essence of existence: that the truth of the world is that there is no unique ontological truth. The world is an eternal…

An amazingly complex American artist, Paul Thek (1933–1988) began his career in New York in the 1960s with a series of works collectively titled Technological Reliquaries, created as a reaction against the war in Vietnam. They combined pristinely assembled, minimalist containers with brutal, wax-modeled chunks of meat or severed limbs (one of them, Hippopotamus, is in the Walker’s collection). Now, some 30…

For nearly four decades, Chuck Close has painted dozens of large-scale faces of family members, friends, and fellow artists, including Philip Glass, Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, and Kiki Smith. But, more than any other subject, he’s painted himself. The first such self-portrait, begun in 1967 and purchased in 1969 by the Walker Art Center, was followed by nearly 100 more, each exploring different media…

Everyone loves it and feels some ownership as they point out the center-piece spoon and cherry to their visitors; and now that it’s just across the way from what is rapidly becoming another Twin Cities landmark—the Walker’s gleaming new expansion—it’s even easier to find. As people drive by or stroll the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden grounds, however, they discover that they can’t say exactly how…