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Trisha Brown Draws on Her Muse—on Paper and Onstage
Matt Peiken
Feb 2008
In the 1970s, Trisha Brown created notational drawings as road maps for her dancers. Today, one of the founding innovators of postmodern dance draws with abandon, largely as a personal, impulsive expression unto itself. That is, of course, when she can muster the time. If she isn’t steering the vaunted dance company bearing her name, Brown is choreographing opera productions-her next one, she says, will…
VA
Articles
JoAnn Verburg
Matt Peiken
Jan 2008
JoAnn Verburg holds two St. Paul zip codes—one for the apartment she shares with her husband, poet Jim Moore, and one for her studio, just south of the Wabasha Street bridge. But Verburg’s photography has always had a trajectory far beyond the Twin Cities. Many subjects of the portraits, landscapes, and still lifes that elevated her name in fine-art circles are East Coast artists and friends, Italian…
VA
Articles
Partnering for Picasso
Rachel Hooper
Jul 2007
In 1942, artist John Graham organized an exhibition in New York that was in many ways the precursor to Picasso and American Art. Just as the Walker’s show pairs works by important American artists with the Picasso pieces that inspired them, Graham’s juxtaposed paintings by New York artists of the day with those by their Parisian contemporaries. A few works by Picasso were shipped across the…
VA
Articles
Silhouettes and Stereotypes
Kathy Halbreich
Feb 2007
Kara Walker’s purposefully provocative and seductively graphic work is difficult. It confounds, and sometimes offends. In addressing the concerns of some viewers, I’ve tried to convey that part of our mission as a cultural institution is to represent many different value systems, to give space, alongside more familiar or palatable expressions, to the unfamiliar, the invisible, the unspeakable, and the…
VA
Articles
Recent Acquisition: Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe, 2004/2005
Articles
Dec 2006
Ellen Gallagher (American, b. 1965) is known for employing potent visual symbols to reveal sly musings on the history of racial identity in America. She gained attention in the 1990s with paintings that initially appeared abstract and minimal, with a subtle palette and geometry. The delicate grids were formed by sheets of penmanship exercises adhered to the canvas, onto which the artist rendered…
VA
Articles
Conceptual Café
Paul Schmelzer
Sep 2006
Senior registration technician Dave Bartley bristles, just a little, when he sees people ignoring the bold geometric patterns that illuminate the walls of Gallery 8 Café by Wolfgang Puck. And pity the hapless soul who, not realizing the mural is an artwork in the Walker collection, leans against the gold, red, and blue wall while Bartley’s in the room.
It’s not that he’s overly sensitive to the…
VA
Articles
An Ordinary Interview
Articles
Aug 2006
Linoleum, masks, and punchlines: the everyday materials and themes in the work on view in Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/McMillian live up to the exhibition’s title, but the interplay between elements in each work—and between works by other artists—makes this installation of new art by Jay Heikes, Adam Helms, and Rodney McMillian anything but common. In a four-way e-mail exchange, exhibition curator…
VA
Articles
Backyard Anthropology
Ralph Rugoff
Aug 2006
Like the work of a growing number of contemporary artists, Cameron Jamie’s art at times seems to overlap with the concerns and methodologies of visual anthropology. A number of his major projects, after all, have documented the rites, rituals, and artifacts of specific subcultures in Europe as well as in North America. In at least some of these works, Jamie appears to assume the role of an amateur…
VA
Articles
Recent Acquisitions: Mircea Cantor’s Deeparture and Cao Fei’s COSPlayers
Doryun Chong
Jun 2006
The Walker has recently acquired videos by two remarkable young talents, Mircea Cantor (b. 1977) and Cao Fei (b. 1978). Hailing from Romania and Southern China and living and working in Paris and Beijing, respectively, both Cantor and Cao have become increasingly notable presences at many important art events and museums around the world, although they are still considered early-career artists. Their…