Landscape designer, furniture builder, conceptual artist, blogger, avid researcher: Matt Olson’s diverse passions come together in ROLU, the experimental design studio he founded with Mike Brady in Minneapolis. When we asked him about his favorite moments of 2012, he unsurprisingly took a diverse look at culture, listing the year’s best in art and design, spirituality and technology.

Just as art in Abraham Cruzvillegas’ forthcoming Walker exhibition, The Autoconstrucción Suites, includes found objects, the Mexico City–based artist’s best-of-2012 list includes a sampling of items from all over, including literature, sculpture, journalism, film, and his personal life, which is the category of his year’s top moment: the birth of “La Dragona,” his daughter Ana.

To commemorate the year that was, we invited artists and designers to take part in an open-ended exercise: share with us 2012’s best “things”—artworks, books, albums, political moments, memories, spectacles, failures, etc. The first to take us up on the offer was photographer Alec Soth, who weighs in with the “10 things that gave me pleasure in 2012.”

History and performance are twin threads that connect artworks recently brought into the Walker collection. This notable selection from our recent acquisitions includes several first works by new artists and inclusions by artists long in relationship with the Walker, including Andrea Bowers, Elad Lassy, Dave McKenzie, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

By anyone’s measure, the inaugural Northern Spark festival last June was a wild success. From dusk to dawn, people discovered the Twin Cities in a new light while making the rounds to some 100 projects by more than 200 artists. This year’s all-nighter, on June 9, features more projects, concentrated in downtown Minneapolis for easier navigation. Here are a few happenings that piqued our interest.

With Jim Hodges’ sculptural boulders—four mammoth, 400-million-year old stones clad in shiny steel—there’s more than meets the eye. In this slideshow, Hodges shares his inspiration for the work and his thinking about scale, materiality, light, and keeping such iconic works—now a permanent part of the Walker hillside—untitled.

Can the use of realism be seen as unconventional in the context of contemporary art? This core question of Lifelike can be addressed through many of the works on view. Here, artists Ai Weiwei, Vija Celmins, Susan Collis, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Kaz Oshiro, Peter Rostovsky, Paul Sietsema, and Mungo Thomson offer a glimpse into their work process and the notion of radical realism.