ArchiveVisual Arts Articles
99 Items
VA
Articles
The Last Movement
Helen Molesworth & Bartholomew Ryan
Jun 2012
Many of the artists featured in This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s came of age in an era that saw the assimilation of two powerful and converging forces—mass-media saturation and movements for social justice. Exhibition curator Helen Molesworth talks with Walker assistant curator Bartholomew Ryan about the impetus for the show and what she hopes will resonate with viewers.
VA
Articles
Journeys of the 25th Hour
Minouk Lim
Jun 2012
Minouk Lim engages with the arteries of city life—the streets—to create poignant artworks that speak to individual alienation amid Seoul’s rapid development. Merging performance, video, and documentary, Lim says works in her Walker exhibition are “pilgrimages to places left out of our memory, journeys of the 25th hour.”
VA
Articles
Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires
Ruben Nusz
May 2012
Ruben Nusz’s contributions to the exhibition Lifelike are easy to overlook: 20 sculpted ashtrays—created using acrylic, oil, tea, and walnut ink on wax and resin, with incense and ashes—discreetly placed throughout the Walker’s public spaces and its administrative offices. Here he shares his notes on the project, which he considers “fictitious realism.”
VA
Articles
Recollecting Bremen Towne: Keith Edmier Creates his 1971 Kitchen
Paul Schmelzer
Apr 2012
An Amana 25 refrigerator, an oven/range with Perma-View glass window, a rotary phone in harvest gold: These items are part of Bremen Towne, Keith Edmier’s reconstruction of the kitchen in the suburban home of his youth. Exactingly reproduced for Lifelike, the piece is paradoxical: it’s the product of the artist’s memories, yet the act of re-creating it supplanted some of those same memories.
EC
Articles
Graffiti on the Concourse: Keith Haring’s 1984 Walker Mural
Paul Schmelzer
Mar 2012
The year was 1984, the site was the Walker concourse, the hall between the museum and the Guthrie Theater, and the artist—then the toast of New York’s graffiti and gallery scene—was Keith Haring.
VA
Articles
Kaz Oshiro’s “Painting Problem”
Paul Schmelzer
Mar 2012
Artist Kaz Oshiro creates pieces that occupy a kind of middle ground—between Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, representation and conceptualism, painting and sculpture. In a new conversation, he discusses his work in the Walker’s Lifelike exhibition and how he creates art to help address his “painting problem”—a desire to progress from exacting realism to hesitation-free abstraction.
PA
Articles
My Hand or My Voice
Susy Bielak
Mar 2012
Theaster Gates doesn’t use the word activism. “I grew up thinking that my politics would be more in my hand and in my body and in labor,” he said. This month the Walker presents an exhilarating work by Marc Bamuthi Joseph that features Gates’ sets and addresses environmental justice. He and Bamuthi recently discussed the project and the question, “Is my hand needed more in this situation, or my voice?”
VA
Articles
Radical Realism: Lifelike Explores the Mutability of Reality
Julie Caniglia
Feb 2012
One long-standing notion in western culture is that an artist’s work should stand out. It should look and be strange somehow—if not bizarre, then at least out of the ordinary. The new Walker exhibition Lifelike explores a contrary proposition: What if realism is the new radicalism, dull is the new bizarre?