A History of Design Exhibitions at the Walker

This fall, the Walker Art Center continues its long tradition of design programming with Beyond Materialism, the inaugural Walker Design Triennial. For this first presentation, the curatorial team selected 26 designers investigating how design can impact the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing the world today.

Design has been central to life at the Walker since its January 1940 opening. One of the first exhibitions held was Letters, Words, Books: An Exhibition of 5000 Years of the Graphic Arts (February–April 1940). It featured scripts from ancient Egyptian jars, printed pages from a Gutenberg Bible (1454–1455), and examples of modern typography, including the catalogue for Bauhaus: 1919–1928, designed by Herbert Bayer. Curator J. LeRoy Davidson argued that this sweeping historical survey had something to say about the present moment, as the United States slowly exited the Great Depression and war loomed. As he wrote in the exhibition catalogue:

It is fitting that the Walker Art Center hold a graphic arts exhibition which emphasizes the artistic qualities inherent in the written and printed word, and which demonstrates the importance of printing as an essential of modern democracy. Just as printing has permitted knowledge to reach large masses of people freely and easily, so as a Center we serve the community as an educational force. As an Art Center we emphasize those universal qualities which make a finely printed page, a book illustration or an old master, a work of art.

Subsequent design programming continued to emphasize the discipline’s relevance to everyday life. In the 1940s, the Idea House Project drove that point literally home. Daniel S. Defenbacher, the Walker’s director and an architect, originally conceived the program as a series of eight homes: two to be built on the museum’s grounds and a community of six homes to be built in a neighboring suburb.

Idea House I was the first modern exhibition home realized by a US museum when opened to the public in 1941. Architects and Walker staff Malcolm E. and Miriam (Bend) Lein designed Idea House I for an average family of five. It included modern innovations such as leather accordion panels instead of walls to divide spaces. Malcolm Lein explained, “Essentially, we were focusing on the openness . . . to get the maximum feeling of space in the minimum amount of area.”

Idea House II, designed by Walker curators Hilde Reiss and William Friedman, expanded on the modern concepts presented in the first house and included such features as a peekaboo window offering views of the living room from the upper-story master bedroom, built-in storage units by George Nelson, and furniture by Isamu Noguchi and Charles and Ray Eames. Idea Houses III through VIII were never constructed, but models and plans were displayed at the Walker. These housing-related presentations covered everything from how to work with an architect to current ideas and trends in appliances and interior decor. Inside the museum, visitors to the Everyday Art Gallery beginning in January 1946 could peruse furniture, kitchenware, lamps, and other ordinary objects within reach of the average family in the new postwar economy. As Reiss, the Walker’s first design curator, wrote:

New materials and techniques with which to build a better environment for ourselves are again within our reach. This environment includes an endless variety of things with which we are in daily contact: houses and other buildings, vehicles and furniture, fountain pens and frying pans, doorknobs and drinking glasses. In the Everyday Art Gallery, the public may examine the best examples of handmade as well as factory-made products. . . . Thus, the Gallery serves as a link between consumer and producer—a testing ground for well-designed objects of everyday use.

The Everyday Art Quarterly, which also began publication in 1946, extended the Walker’s scholarship on design to a larger audience beyond the Twin Cities.

By the mid-1950s, the Walker subtly shifted its framing of beautiful and functional products away from “everyday art,” renaming the Everyday Art Gallery and Everyday Art Quarterly as the Design Gallery and Design Quarterly. Programming expanded beyond product shows like Danish Silver (1955) and Japan Design Today (1960) to include surveys on design thinking separate from consumerism. Among these was a modest, yet significant exhibition of models and photographs by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1960. As a designer, inventor, and educator, Fuller was a tireless champion for what design could be or do for the world. He wrote:

All the world’s political ideologies assume that our planet’s resources are inadequate to support all of humanity. . . . Nothing politics per se can do can make the resources adequate to support all of humanity. Adequacy can be attained only by competent design.

Fuller toured and spoke widely on his cutting-edge ideas. While at the Walker, he gave a six-and-a-half-hour lecture entitled “Surprise Major World Trending: Probable Shift of Russia’s and USA’s Highest Technical Capacity Competition from a Weaponry to a Living Emphasis.”

By 1962, design exhibitions had expanded beyond the confines of the Design Gallery into the Walker’s main galleries. There, Design Curator Mildred “Mickey” Friedman took programming to a new level. For example, in a flurry of exhibits in the mid-1970s, the Walker presented the imaginary mindscapes of Ettore Sottsass (1973), experimental educational environments in New Learning Spaces and Places (1974), and modern design masters in Nelson/Eames/Girard/Propst: The Design Process at Herman Miller (1975).

The procession of major design exhibitions continued through the last two decades of the twentieth century, including Tokyo: Form and Spirit (1986), a large survey of Japanese design; the influential Graphic Design in America (1989); and Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko (1992), an exhibition of the artist’s inventive vehicles and projections addressing homelessness and other social issues.

Since the new millennium, exhibitions have included Strangely Familiar: Design and Everyday Life (2003), which featured multifunctional solutions to housing, space constraints, and other common problems of contemporary living, and Design for the Other 90% (2008), which focused on real-life solutions that unabashedly prioritized function over beauty. Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2015) reflected on the brief but influential radical counterculture of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Theaster Gates: Assembly Hall (2019–2020), the artist-designer posed two related questions, “How do we deal with abandonment, ruin, decay? How do we start to imagine ourselves as deeper caretakers of the things that exist in the world?” And Designs for Different Futures (2020–2021) on view during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic presented a multitude of sometimes unsettling futures, such as Ane Crabtree’s costume designs for the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian classic, The Handmaid’s Tale. But it also showcased innovative uses for natural resources, such as seaweed textiles by designers Violaine Buet and Julia Lohmann.

All these exhibitions explore experimental, imaginative, and pragmatic projects, ultimately stressing that design, whether using new technology or reusing existing materials, can improve our lives and the world in which we live. Design influences everything we do every day.

It is fitting that Beyond Materialism follows this trajectory ushering in the next phase of design presentations at the Walker. The Design Triennial is sure to be equally groundbreaking, creative, and thought-provoking as its predecessors.