Yes, this week everyone’s talking about 1969 and some sort of summer music jamboree, but we’re going to bump ahead a couple of years, into the next decade: “The paint on the walls was barely dry when Robert Irwin was invited to conceive a piece that would ‘challenge’ the Walker’s new building, which was designed by architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. The year was 1971 and then-director Martin Friedman’s…

This seems to be the summer of Bruce Nauman, at least at the the Venice Biennale, where he won the Golden Lion, and to some extent here at the Walker, where his work in The Quick and the Dead is garnering particular attention from Walker staff. One of our installation technicians, the multimedia whiz Peter Murphy, wrote on the complexities of setting up Nauman’s 1971 Microphone/Tree PieceMurphy, and…

This is a longer version of the interviews with visual arts fellows Dan Byers and Andria Hickey, from a story in the July/August issue ofWalkermagazine. Design fellow Noa Segal has posted her interview and Mylinh Trieu’s over on the design blog. For nearly three decades, the Walker has been recruiting recent graduates and junior professionals to work as fellows in its design and visual arts…

In reference to Claes Oldenburg’s The Garden, this humorous image was passed along to me and needs to be shared. The sad lemon was drawn by Todd Balthazor, a student at the College of Visual Arts in St. Paul and a guard at the Walker.

With his item titled “Walker on a photo-acquiring mini-spree,” Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes gives the skinny on some of our newest acquisitions, including this giant Gursky, almost 7′ x 8′ — and, as always, a few nuggets of his always-unvarnished opinion. Look for stories and blog posts coming up about some of these works and other pieces destined to become part of our collection. For now, here are links…

Yesterday morning a group of staff looked on as Tomás Saraceno and and gallery crew installed Saraceno’s Iridescent Planet. Our photographer Cameron Wittig documented the install and we’ve put the images on flickr: The work itself is made of an iridescent foil material provided to Saraceno by 3M and is constructed in a manner similar to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, allowing solar panels…

Where can we do a test inflation of a two-story balloon? That’s just one of a million questions that curator Yasmil Raymond is dealing with as she works on installing Tomas Saraceno: Lighter Than Air (opening May 14). In this case, happily, there was a ready answer: the McGuire stage (how’s that for an interdisciplinary solution?). Shimmering in the dark, its plastic quietly rustling, the balloon was a…

We’ve posted two additional videos about The Quick and The Dead. In this installment, Peter Eleey discusses Adrian Piper’s personal collection work, What Will Become of Me, and Lygia Clark’s folding sculpture, Bicho. The first two videos are also here. Both videos have been shot in high definition, and you can grab the highest quality video from The Quick and the Dead page in iTunes U. Additionally, we…

One of the works installed in The Quick and the Dead is a piece by Claes Oldenburg called The Garden, originally concepted and proposed in 1968, but not realized until this exhibition. In general terms, the work consists of 100 objects buried in the ground and dug out and placed on display over the course of 100 days. For the installation at the Walker, we’ve used lemons as the object and are…