The United Nations has designated today, December 18th, International Migrants Day. In cities throughout the world, artist Tania Bruguera and those involved with her five-year project Immigrant Movement International(IM International) presented the Migrant Manifesto: 1. We know that international connectivity is the reality that migrants have helped create, it is the place where we all reside. We…

Born in Cuba in 1915, Carmen Herrera charted her own alternative modernism while working in virtual obscurity for some seven decades. While living in New York in the 1950s, where the male-dominated Abstract Expressionist movement held sway, she made reductive, hard-edged abstractions that predate the work of artists such as Lygia Clark in Brazil and Ellsworth Kelly in the U.S. There’s a…

Photographer JoAnn Verburg and Minneapolis-based Location Books have teamed up to create what is likely the first artist’s book created expressly for the iPad. Launched today after a preview at Verburg’s riverfront studio on Sunday, the free app, entitled AS IT IS AGAIN, is linked to Minnesota’s long winters, although it was shot over three months in Italy. The subject of a 2007 Museum of…

For one month in 1970, Dayton’s 8th floor auditorium (usually home to extravagant seasonal displays) housed artist Red Grooms’ replica of a Crystal, Minn., Target store.

This is the latest video from Mexican artist Pedro Reyes’ Walker exhibition Baby Marx, which explores the intersections between ideology, entertainment and contemporary art. A couple of weeks ago, Karl Marx and Adam Smith took a field trip to New York City to visit the Occupy Wall Street protest in Liberty Plaza–separately, and with different views on the issues at hand. Marx sees in the current…

Here are the latest scenes from Pedro Reyes’ ongoing project, Baby Marx. Shot at the Walker in August, the episodes have just been released. In these scenes, the action takes a melodramatic turn as Karl Marx and Adam Smith have a falling out over the “green” movement and Smith’s penchant for consumerism. Hearts heavy, the two wander separately around the Walker, lamenting the breakup and meeting the…

Last week Karl Marx and Adam Smith, two of the stars of the Pedro Reyes exhibition/video series Baby Marx, made an impromptu trip from the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis to Occupy Wall Street in New York’s Financial District. The artist had been tracking the protests and decided the puppets…

When artists such as Tino Sehgal, Meredith Monk, Danh Vo, Trisha Brown, or Merce Cunningham enter the Walker Art Center’s collections, some vexing issues arise when it comes to cataloguing their often ephemeral, multidisciplinary, and indiscrete works. On Nov. 4, presenters, curators, archivists, and researchers from around the country will come to the Walker and spend the day together talking about what…

One bonus of working at the Walker is the proximity to primary resources. One minute you can be sitting at your desk, in total office mode, and a few stairs and hallways later you are in the theater, or a gallery space, or art storage, face to face with the actual objects of your study. Around every corner there are visual reminders of why you do what you do. As the Walker begins to unpack some of the…