In general, museum registrars keep track of art as it moves to, from and within a museum. My focus is on loans of artwork from the Walker’s permanent collection. I began working as the Walker’s assistant registrar less than three years ago, so the drastic spike in loan activity, traditionally averaging around 30 artworks per year, was a trial by fire at almost 100 loans in 2008. That year we sent out…

Irene V. Small, “Material Remains,” Artforum (February 2010), 95-96 Haroldo de Campos, “Hangliders of Ecstasy,” in Helio Oiticica(exhibition catalogue). Paris: Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 219 For a full-fledged scrutiny of the term, “contemporary art history,” see the questionnaire in the Fall 2009 issue of October, including texts by Alexander Alberro, Okwui Enwezor, Grant Kester, Pamela Lee, and Anton Vidokle…

Following up on the mid-Novemberblog posting, which introduced the newOnline Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI)at the Walker, is a report from our big meeting at the Getty Center last week where all of the grantee institutions convened. In attendance were Andrew Blauvelt (Design), Robin Dowden (New Media), Betsy Carpenter (Visual Arts), and myself, together with teams fromArt Institute of Chicago,Freer…

So asks Tad Simons on Mpls.St.Paul magazine’s “Morning After” blog. While we would of course heartily affirm that notion – we love the f-word! – we also wonder why Mr. Simons believes the Walker was previously a no-fun zone. (Read his blog yourself for his take on that.) Suffice it to say that we are delighted by his delight. Simons began his tour of the galleries with the retrospective of work from…

[i] Other OSCI participants are Art Institute of Chicago, Freer Gallery of Art / Arthur M. Sackler Gallery,Smithsonian Institution, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art (DC), SFMoMA, Seattle Art Museum, Tate Gallery. The Walker’s next collection catalogue will be free for the whole world. Getty has sponsored nine art museums[i] to lead the pilot stage of what has been…

Dan Graham and his retrospective got robbed of the “Artist of the Year” and “Solo Show of the Year” awards at last night’s First Annual Art Awards, a glitzy and somewhat tongue-in-cheek affair at the Guggenheim in New York. Here in Minneapolis, however, Graham delighted everyone at yesterday’s media preview for Dan Graham: Beyond, offering chatty, humorous insights into work from four decades and…

Reports on the burning of Hélio Oiticica’s work have been somewhat exaggerated: The artist’s work is not a quite a near-total loss. Stories a couple of days ago cited that “90%” of the work made by Oiticica, a major figure of the Brazilian avante garde in the late 1960s and early 1970s, had been destroyed in a fire at the home of Oiticica’s brother César in Rio de Janeiro. Now César and others been…

We recently featured the Walker’s Collectors’ Council Acquisitions Fund (CCAF) in the July/August issue of WALKER magazine. The CCAF was established in 2006 to create a way for members to participate in the Walker’s acquisition process, including the opportunity to vote on an artwork they acquire as a gift to the Walker each year. The fund is unique in that it’s dedicated to acquiring “first works…

For the last three weeks, a small group of individuals with a variety of expertise have been meeting twice or more weekly to participate in an experimental project with artist-in-residence, Haegue Yang. Entitled Shared Discovery of What We Have and Know Already Yang’s project involves a series of seminar workshops that investigate critical themes and ideas in her work, such as abstraction…