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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?
VA
Articles
Jim Hodges’ Buoyant Monoliths: The Walker’s Newest Outdoor Commission
Olga Viso
Feb 2012
What began as a sketch on Jim Hodges’ studio wall—an image of a boulder with a small swatch of pink foil added—will become the newest addition to the Walker campus this spring. The circle of massive stones, collectively weighing 90,000 pounds and skinned with striking sheaths of reflective steel, will be the first major public work to join the Walker’s green space since the 2005 expansion.
VA
Articles
Postcards from America: We Don’t Ask About the Oryx
Ginger Strand and Alec Soth
Feb 2012
Postcards from America, the newly published book by a group of five Magnum photographers and writer Ginger Strand, recounts a two-week road trip through the American Southwest in May 2011. Here, published online for the first time, is “Treasure: A True Story,” a collaborative project from the book featuring Strand’s writing and photos by Minnesota’s Alec Soth.