A Large Number of Artists Make Their Homes Here: Henriette Huldisch on the Walker’s Collection

Originally from Hamburg, Germany, Henriette Huldisch arrived at the Walker as chief curator and director of Curatorial Affairs after periods at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Germany, and the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Bringing with her a collaborative spirit and passion for interdisciplinary approaches to art, Huldisch quickly began to invite more local artists and communities to the Walker.

After staging the first new presentation of the Walker’s permanent collection in over five years, This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection, Huldisch sat down to talk about the role of museum collections, the local art ecosystem, and the surprises of snow maintenance.

Walker Art Center

How long have you been at the Walker?

Henriette Huldisch

I’ve been at the Walker for five years. I lead the team reinstalling the Walker’s permanent collection. This was the first curatorial project I began working on when I came to the Walker, but it ended up being postponed due to the pandemic. It is great to see it come to fruition after so long.

WAC

What is a museum’s permanent collection?

HH

Museum collections are the artworks that the institution has acquired for the collection. An artwork can enter a collection by being purchased by the museum, as well as by being donated by collectors and artists. They become the works of art that we care for in perpetuity and exhibit.

WAC

Why do art museums collect?

HH

That is a good question. Museums were founded on the idea that human artistic expressions are worth preserving for future generations to see, think about, and learn from. In many ways, that is still the principle that we operate on. For the Walker, we are not looking back hundreds or thousands of years, like one might find in the collections at natural history or encyclopedic [art] museums.

The Walker’s collection focuses on the 20th century and into the 21st century. Our collection is more a record of our recent past that is essentially a repository of artworks reflective of the breadth of human thought and expression.

WAC

What makes the Walker’s collections unique?

HH

There are a number of ways in which our collection is unique. Although we have a few artworks that were acquired in the earlier part of the 20th century, the focus of the collection really starts in the 1950s and continues to the present. This makes the Walker’s collection quite contemporary, as well as being one with a willingness to embrace risk. The Walker has supported artists and collected works that are interdisciplinary and don’t easily fit into conventional categories or genres of art.

For example, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a concerted effort to collect Japanese Gutai, Viennese Abstractionism, and other forms of performance art that weren’t broadly embraced by other museums at the time.

Additionally, the Walker has historically been very invested in supporting artists across the breadth of their career. In many instances, the Walker has acquired an artist’s work very early on, and is often the first museum to collect their work. In the case of Julie Mehretu, the Walker staged her first solo exhibition at a museum. We then acquired an artwork from that exhibition into the collection and became the first museum to collect her work.

WAC

With so many possible projects you could start with when arriving at the Walker, why did you choose the permanent collection?

HH

The Walker’s collection ties so closely to our local communities. It gives people living in the Twin Cities and Minnesota the opportunity to have repeat encounters with artworks, to learn more about the artworks and this collection that was originally created to be a local resource. I’ve always viewed museum collections as belonging to the people who live in cities they are kept in.

Selfishly, I also really wanted to learn about the collection and immersed myself into all the artwork we have at the Walker.

WAC

How did you arrive at the title?

HH

It began with the overarching idea for the exhibition being home and placemaking. This led me to a song lyric by Talking Heads that is prophetic and suggestive around these ideas.

WAC

The curatorial approach was more collaborative. How did that come to be?

HH

From the beginning, it was clear that I didn’t want to approach it as the solo curator and that it required a group of curators. The team consists of Siri Engberg, Taylor Jasper, Laurel Rand-Lewis, and myself. In addition, there were close conversations and collaborations with others working in the Design and Learning departments. This allowed us to spend more time considering elements like interpretation materials, gallery furniture, and a space for education and reading.

WAC

How did this team tackle the interpretive materials in the gallery, such as labels?

HH

Early on, we collectively felt that the exhibition should have multilingual interpretation beyond English and Spanish, which are the most commonly spoken languages at home in the United States. However, in the Twin Cities, the four most commonly spoken languages also include Somali and Hmong. It was important to us to also provide interpretation texts in all four languages as well in a way that would be accessible to many kinds of readers.

This approach to interpretation was also informed and guided by the exhibition, Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection, that was on view from February 2023 through May 2024.  That exhibition gave anyone who visited the gallery a chance to respond to and share their thoughts on different types of interpretation in the gallery. We really valued the feedback from visitors in the gallery, and it shaped how we approached staging This Must Be the Place.

We are also creating an audio guide available for free on the Bloomberg Connects app. Instead of having the curators speaking on the audio guide, a range of Walker staff members are sharing their insights and thoughts on the artworks on display. It is a nice way to give a little bit more of a behind-the-scenes [glimpse] of the Walker, as well as make more visible all the many people at the Walker who make any exhibition or program possible.

WAC

What led to becoming a curator and then moving to the Twin Cities?

HH

I went to graduate school in New York for film studies. Back then, I had imagined that I would become a film programmer. During my studies, I did an internship at the Whitney Museum of American Art in its film/video department. That led me to being hired, and I ended up working at the Whitney for eight years.

During that time, the museum did away with medium-specific departments and titles for curators.  Instead of being the assistant curator of film/video, I became just an assistant curator. I really loved the job and getting to work more spaces in the galleries and helping with big projects like the Whitney Biennial. Essentially, I learned on the job what it meant to be a curator. I never went to a curatorial studies master’s program or something like that. After eight years, being a curator was what I did, and I haven’t looked back.

WAC

Are there any artworks in This Must Be the Place that you’re specifically excited to have on view?

HH

Absolutely. There are works that the Walker hasn’t shown before, like Mark Leckey’s Dream English Kid, as well as Sylvia Stone’s minimalist work made from glass and metal, Untitled; and paintings by Njideka Akunyili Crosby.

There is also Marie Watt’s neon piece from 2023, Shared Horizon (Keepers of the Western Door), and Senga Nengudi’s installation work Water Composition II, comprised of PVC, rope, and colored water.

Those are just a small sample, though. There are so many wonderful works that it is hard to just select a few.

WAC

As someone who moved to Minnesota from elsewhere, how has it been making your own home in the Twin Cities?

HH

It was quite different for me, a big part of which is that it is the first time in about 25 years that I’m not living in an apartment. There is a lot of snow responsibility. (laughs)

One of the things that I immediately enjoyed about the Twin Cities is the large number of artists who make their homes here. Although I had heard about it before, I was still surprised to experience how robust the arts ecosystem is here—not only with artists working in visual arts, but also in performing arts, moving image, literature, and more. I moved here from Boston, which has many institutions, like universities, that help create the arts ecosystem. The Twin Cities arts communities are very self-sufficient. It is more of a grassroots type of arts ecosystem.

WAC

What would you hope visitors take away from This Must Be the Place?

HH

I would really love for people to feel empowered to make their own meaning from artworks on view. To have each visitor decide for themselves what the artworks mean and their own relationship to the work. As curators and a museum, we have a role to provide context about the works—where and when they were made, what the artist has said their approach was, what was happening in the place and time the work was made—but I think that, ultimately, any artwork that somebody makes and put out into the world is going to live there on its own. It will mean different things to different people, and that is part of the beauty of making art.▪︎

Experience This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection for yourself. Now on view through April 29, 2029. Learn more here.