Last week we celebrated a beloved colleague, Rosemary Furtak, who retired recently after a 29-year career at the Walker. Countless curators, scholars, writers, artists, designers, and others—both inside and outside the art center—have a special fondness for the Walker Library, which houses more than 35,000 publications in a wonderfully hushed, secluded underground space. This is thanks largely to…

Dedicated last week, the Walker’s newest outdoor sculptures,Jim Hodges’ Untitled (2011), are best experienced in person. But if you’re not in the Twin Cities, here’s a virtual tour–a panoramic generated from the Photoshop-stitched image below. The stitched image is comprised of eight vertical images made with a super wide-angle lens.

Filmmaker/author John Waters — who guest curated the Walker’s Absentee Landlord exhibition — was recently invited to San Francisco where he extended his curatorial prowess to a new Reading Shop in the city’s Mission district. Kadist SF (counterpart to Kadist Art Foundation based in Paris, France) is a mixed-use 1,400 square foot nonprofit art space on the corner of Folsom and 20th. Since opening…

Real life ranges far and wide and happens in unexpected places — so too with the Lifelike exhibition, which includes a number of artworks placed outside the Walker’s galleries, Jonathan Seliger’s milk carton and Robert Therrien’s table-and-chair set being two outsized examples. However, the “fixture model” paintings by David Lefkowitz and ashtray sculptures by Ruben Nusz are not so immediately…

Commissioned in 1979 to make a piece for the Walker collection, Jud Nelson took two years to carve from marble a garbage bag bursting with familiar throwaways from the latter half of the 20th century.

With registrar Joe King and registration technician Evan Reiter we took a trip to art storage to see the first 5 works by women to enter the Walker’s collection.

About the artist: Todd Balthazor is a satirical, often anthropomorphic illustrator, fine artist, muralist and children’s art instructor from St.Paul, MN, with a BFA in illustration from the College of Visual Arts (CVA).  He has done artist residencies at Jackson Elementary and the St. Paul University Club, and his work has been displayed in venues both locally and abroad, including: illustrations in…

One day in early 2005, I spotted Frank Gaard getting off the bus on Hennepin Avenue. Toting a pink-painted plank under his arm, he was headed my way, to the temporary offices Walker staff was occupying during construction of the new expansion. We greeted, and he showed me what he had: a going-away present for Philippe Verne, then senior curator and Visual Arts department head. It was a sign that…

The newest video by St. Vincent, who performed here in October, has a distinctly Walker vibe. Set in a white-walled gallery, singer Annie Clark is presented as a gigantic and uncannily realistic sculpture, one the video’s director, Hiro Murai, says is inspired by the work of Ron Mueck, whose Crouching Boy in Mirror is in our Lifelike exhibition. Pitchfork caught up with Murai and asked about the…