I have seen your dystopian films like Bladerunner and the one with that rich American, Christopher Lloyd, and so I argue for you to consider a contrary possibility: the future is smashing! If you have a chance to go there, seize it! Carpe diem posterum! Seize the behind of tomorrow! I can understand it might not be for everybody, but if you have a keen curiosity about — well, mostly about yourself — I think…

In order to pack in some primary research, last week I visited the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Cunningham Dance Foundation.  The building that houses the Rauschenberg space used to be an orphanage (St. Joseph Mission of the Immaculate Virgin), and it retains traces of this almshouse in its broad wooden stair cases, the behemoth cast iron…

These are the first two scenes from the latest stage of Pedro Reyes’ Baby Marx. The founders of communism and capitalism, Karl Marx and Adam Smith, have been brought to the future by way of a glitch-prone Smart-O-Wave magic microwave oven. Here, they explore the Walker Art Center galleries and café while the exhibition in which they feature is being installed. Expect more scenes in the upcoming weeks!

As a part of the forthcoming exhibition , which opens on Thursday, August 11, the Walker is collaborating with the University of Minnesota Political Science department to host a Town Hall-style debate that explores some of the issues embedded within the project, loosely inspired by Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1″ . Moderator and event co-organizer Ben Ansell of the University of Minnesota’s Political…

As the Cunningham Collection continues to be catalogued, here are more close-ups of the aquisition items.   This week’s images focus on Antic Meet (1958), a piece that the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will present as part of their Farewell Legacy Tour at the Walker’s McGuire Theater this November 4/5/6.  Robert Rauschenberg costumed the piece with both his own designs and loot gathered from the New…

ARRIVAL: Many items from the Cunningham acquisition are now living at the Walker.  In preparation for the November opening of Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg, the art storage basement is filled with Robert Rauschenberg-designed costumes and set pieces (or decors, as Merce referred to them).  Rauschenberg collaborated with Merce Cunningham on pieces from 1954-1964, 1977, 2000, and…

We wouldn’t be doing the Cunningham acquisition justice if we didn’t have at least one story about food.  Here is a short anecdote and recipe for John Cage’s almond cookies, a treat that made the rounds through the Merce Cunningham Dance Company establishment and its friends.  Cage and Cunningham were introduced to a macrobiotic diet by Yoko Ono, and the cookies reflect those healthy precepts.  Merce…

This conversation was originally published in the July/August 2011 issue ofWalker magazine. Waters’ exhibition, Absentee Landlord, is on view through July 2012.  Filmmaker and pop culture provocateur John Waters has played many roles in his career, but never that of curator until now. At the invitation of the Walker, he enacted a “curatorial intervention” in one of its current collection exhibitions and…

This is the original teaser for , an ongoing project by Pedro Reyes that explores the intersections of mass entertainment, ideology and contemporary art. The teaser was produced for the Yokohama Triennial in Japan in 2008, and was followed by a television pilot shot in Mexico City in 2009. He worked closely with Japanese master puppeteer Takumi Ota for over a year to design and build the puppets…