Thank You for Coming: Faye Driscoll on Participation, Performance, and Community
"I wanted to make something about what moves us from being stagnant and stationary to being active and involved, and recognizing that we are always participating in this world." In this new video, choreographer Faye Driscoll draws on her Thank You For Coming trilogy to reflect on the relationship between the performer and audience and the way in which the theatrical stage can create a space of temporary community and coming together.
Bookends of the American Imagination: Theaster Gates on Assembly Hall
Theaster Gates discusses two of the four rooms in Assembly Hall, one featuring ephemera from the Johnson Publishing Company Collection—including furniture, art, and magazines from the publisher of Jet and Ebony magazines—and the other selections from the Ana J. and Edward J. Williams Collection of “negrobilia.” "I hope one day these objects disintegrate, both physically and emotionally," he says, "that instead we have this truth of equity, this truth of dignity."
In this new Artspeaks video, choreographer Meg Stuart discusses the source material and ideas that drive her dances: from how thoughts move to physical and emotional states, subtle geometries, and gestures. Made on the occasion of her April 2019 residency at the Walker, the video includes footage of An evening of solos and duets, a retrospective dance that revisits 30 years of work, and the Walker commission Celestial Sorrow, made by Stuart and Indonesian visual artist Jompet Kuswidananto. A key aspect of Stuart’s practice, discussed here, is the connection of artistic languages through simple exercises like contact improvisation, and more elaborate forms of collaboration with visual artists.
Spanning disciplines of theater, performance, music, and visual art, Rabih Mroué's work engages with the contemporary politics of the Middle East and the enmeshed history of discord in the region, often drawing from his personal experience of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). Here, Mroué discusses a trio of projects presented at the Walker: Again we are defeated, a gallery presentation of visual works; the lecture-performance Sand in the Eyes, and Borborygmus, a theater work by Mroué, Lina Majdalanie, and Mazen Kerbaj.
Framing Jazz History: Jason Moran on Recreating Jazz’s Lost Stages
A key aspect of Jason Moran’s career as a jazz musician and visual artist has been research, including poring over archival photos of stages at legendary jazz clubs of decades past. “But they were never enough to satisfy my urge to feel what it was like to sit inside one.” As his Walker-organized exhibition sets to open at the Wexner Center for the Arts on June 1, we share video of Moran discussing the stages he recreated—both as art objects and as performance spaces within the galleries—from the Savoy Ballroom, the Three Deuces, and Slugs' Saloon.
Copying and Collecting: In the Studio with Allen Ruppersberg
"You want people to see something that is important, and it's your job as an artist to focus that somehow." Inside his studio in El Segundo, California, Allen Ruppersberg discusses the roles collecting and copying play in his practice—and how ephemera, from old comic strips and advertising signage to historical materials from the Walker Art Center Archives, makes its way into his art.
Occupying a space between live performance and visual art, artist/choreographer Maria Hassabi’s work explores stillness and sustained motion. At the Walker in February 2017 to present STAGING, a new dance work performed in the galleries of Merce Cunningham: Common Time, she discussed her sculptural movement installations examine the tension between the human form and the artistic object.
"As an abstract painter, I work with things that I cannot see," says Jack Whitten. "Google has mapped the whole earth. We have maps of Mars. We don't have a map of the soul, and that intrigues me." Here the painter discusses Soul Map (2015), a large-scale acrylic collage on view in the exhibition Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting.
