“The failings of the body were never lost on Franz,” Walker chief curator Darsie Alexander wrote in late July in remembrance of Vienna-based artist Franz West, who passed away July 25. “He devoted much of his career to thinking about the oddities and wonder of the physical realm. How people walk, interact, make love, snore in public, and do other intimately human and occasionally embarrassing things…

On November 29, 1994, art historian Amelia Jones gave a lecture at the Walker Art Center entitled, “The Duchampian Phallus.” Jones’ introduced her book, Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp. Her critique of the “fetishization” of Marcel Duchamp offered an alternative view to the masculine-oriented sensibilities that pervaded modern art. The talk was presented in conjunction with the…

On November 8, 1994, Vassar professor Molly Nesbit gave a lecture at the Walker Art Center in which she discussed gender and language in Marcel Duchamp’s glass painting, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even—a work commonly referred to as The Large Glass(1915-1923). Nesbit’s talk was presented in conjunction with the Walker’s exhibitionDuchamp’s Leg. Below is an excerpt from the…

“The trip I took into the mystic was inspired by Duchamp,” says Minneapolis-based painter Frank Gaard, subject of an early 2012 solo show at the Walker, “as was my sense that language was a medium for visual artists.” In commemoration of today’s 125th anniversary of Marcel Duchamp’s birth, Gaard shares ten musings on the man.   Marcel Duchamp,Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage… (Given: 1…

Untitled (Blog): An open-ended look at contemporary art – both inside the Walker and out – as framed by our Visual Arts curators.

A beloved member of the Walker family and the book arts community, Rosemary Furtak, the Walker’s librarian for 29 years, passed away Sunday, July 8, 2012, at age 69.

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…