The way that exhibitions originate often plays a determining role in their final execution, and the kernels of inspiration are frequently the most enduring. The idea for Benches & Binoculars began about a year ago with a photograph from an early moment in Walker history. It shows a domestic interior with objects—including a dense array of paintings—stacked floor to ceiling in a salon display style…

Event Horizon. Bringing to mind deep space and gravitational pulls, this suggestive phrase, repurposed from the world of science, here serves the more creative aim of framing the Walker’s newly installed permanent collection exhibition—a cross-disciplinary blend of film, video, performance, painting, sculpture, and photography. In fact, the title is intended to be taken rather literally: Event Horizon…

Poetry, politics, and human emotion inform Haegue Yang’s practice—and its relationship to the everyday. Over the past few years, working with nontraditional materials such as customized venetian blinds and electrical devices, the Berlin/Seoul–based artist has created a series of carefully orchestrated installations that operate as microcosms of sensory experiences and are the results of her ongoing…

As the curators of Dirt on Delight predicted, presenting an exhibition about dirt will bring the clay artists out of the studio. While researching the show last winter, Walker coordinating curator Andria Hickey, quickly found out that a number of Minneapolis’ best ceramics artists are in some way connected to the renowned Northern Clay Center or the University of Minnesota’s Department of Ceramics…

One of the extraordinary things about Elizabeth Peyton’s oeuvre is that it can serve as a chronicle of a particular period—at a certain moment in the history of culture in certain places among a few people who were enthusiastically making it. Sometimes they knew each other; sometimes they were just mutual fans. In retrospect, her paintings have become a kind of essence of a fifteen-year period in…

In the view of artist Tomás Saraceno, there’s nowhere for society to go but up. His floating sculptures employ principles from engineering, aeronautics, and architecture that rethink the way we experience space and relate to forms and to one another. Indebted to the ideas championed by visionaries such as architect Buckminster Fuller and artist Gyula Kosice, he makes objects and installations that…

In a Walker exhibition of the not-too-distant future, you’ll see a piece by San Francisco–based artist Trisha Donnelly. In 2005 the Walker acquired its first work by Donnelly—a drawing entitled Bend Sinister (2004)—and over the past two years has added two additional pieces, including the video Untitled (1998–1999). In it, the artist, dressed in white, performs in slow motion the signature “rock star…

The word “picnic” comes—though nothing is cast in bronze—from the French verb piquer (“pick” or “peck”) is associated with the rhyming nique (things of little importance). Richard Prince’s latest work, Untitled (Upstate), which made its premiere at the Walker, picks on and transcends things of little importance that populate the world. A full-sized basketball hoop and pole pierce the center of a beat-up old…