Archive Articles
256 Items
PA
Articles
The Lisps: In Defense of the Musical
Jesse Leaneagh
Apr 2012
Bucking band-culture expectations, the Lisps have added a nontraditional project to their recording and touring schedule: making a musical. The band prioritizes spectacle over, say, shoegazing, but their work FUTURITY is still “a musical made by people who don’t make musicals.” The group’s Sammy Tunis and César Alvarez weigh in on why they chose this form and how it kept their band together.
EC
Articles
Agonizing over “Agonism”: Exploring How Difference Can Fuel Democracy
Susy Bielak & Ashley Duffalo
Apr 2012
Agonism. The word can feel awkward and obtuse—even painful. But for months it’s been at the tip of the tongues of Walker staff and colleagues who’ve been considering it as an approach to a politics that embraces difference and disagreement as important parts of democracy. While the term may be unfamiliar to many, agonism speaks acutely to our current political moment. So … what is it?
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.
FV
Articles
Listening to the World: A Conversation with Béla Tarr
Matt Levine and Jeremy Meckler
Mar 2012
Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has a reputation for terse gruffness, and some may conclude, misguidedly, that his films merely exhibit misanthropy and hopelessness. Yet what becomes apparent very quickly in speaking with the director is his humanism, his deep respect for individuals both in reality and as characters in his movies.
PA
Articles
Human and Natural Ecologies
Jesse Leaneagh
Mar 2012
“If we compartmentalize the environmental question, the whole earth burns, so we might as well get everybody in any way that we can,” says Marc Bamuthi Joseph, whose new Walker-commissioned performance examines issues of environmental justice. red, black & GREEN: a blues uses hip-hop, spoken word, and audience participation to expand the discussion about how to define that “environmental question.”
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?
