At the heart of the Walker Art Center's—and Walker Reader’s—mission is a call to "examine the questions that shape and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and communities." Soundboard embraces this aim by tackling myriad questions—sometimes thorny, sometimes philosophical, always, we hope, worth considering—that surround the work of making, presenting, understanding, and living with art. Through a single interface, an array of voices are invited to respond to a pressing cultural question of our time. Just click each author's photo to read more, then join us as we continue the conversation on Twitter and Facebook.
To suggest a topic for a future edition of Soundboard, email editor@walkerart.org.
Inspired by February's Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film Dialogue and Retrospective, five voices, all working at the intersection of documentary, politics, and activism, offer perspectives on the documentary form. Together, they describe how storytelling has the power to redefine history, inviting us to consider a walk in different shoes—a proven strategy to influence powerful decisions, impact laws, and save and change lives.
Movement artist Miguel Gutierrez notices that, especially in the US, more and more people are starting their bios by naming their nationality, sexual orientation, or race. "While I understand this kind of specification as a call to consciousness around minoritarian presence, I also wonder if it ends up making their/our position…. inert?" As guest editor of a new edition of Soundboard, he invites four Latinx voices in performance—Brianna Figueroa, Xandra Ibarra, Pedro Pablo Lander, and Sebastián Castro Niculescu—to consider the question of identity.
Indigenous fashion has seen a surge in public interest of late, with high-profile runway shows and exhibitions popping up across North America. But with this spike in attention, inevitably, comes controversy, as Native fashion continues to be appropriated by major houses and designers, from Victoria's Secret to Jean Paul Gaultier. Can efforts to counter these trends be described as decolonization? Or should we sidestep that trending term altogether and focus on Indigenizing the industry instead? Four voices in Native fashion—Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, Virgil Ortiz, Jessica Metcalfe, and Sage Paul—tackle these questions.
A flip of the calendar page into a new year affords each of us an opportunity to reflect on our values and resolve to live in better harmony with them. As with individuals, cultural institutions could stand to take stock in similar ways. Headlines and hashtags from last year cover a few areas where museums have been called upon to change—from questions about the ways museum philanthropists and board members amassed their wealth to #MuseumsAreNotNeutral and #DecolonizeThis, the ripple effects of the #MeToo movement in the art world to alarming studies about the rapid pace of climate change. Continuing our Soundboard series, we invited four art world figures to share their suggested New Year’s resolutions for art museums in 2019.
One of the things recent events at the Mexico/US border have shown us is the power of documentation: audio, video, and photos that indelibly show the human impact of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. While the viral response to images of separated families and children held in "tender age facilities" underscores the power of documentary practices, it also raises questions for those of us in the art world: What can art do that journalism can’t? If documentation can stop us in our tracks, is it art’s job to help us move beyond that, to process what we encounter in the media? In the third edition of Soundboard, four artists weight in: documentary filmmaker Natalia Almada, Guatemala-born artist Jackie Amézquita, artist and mediator Dorit Cypis, and Ifrah Mansour, a playwright and refugee from Somalia.
The design canon is often the foundation of practices by educators in the field, but it is inherently reliant on impenetrable binaries. What would a queering of design education look like? What would a pedagogical approach that emphasizes asking questions instead of problem solving consist of? How can we understand designers as bodies in space, with agency, instead of simply “creatives”? And how can we understand bodies of text as living things that produce difficult conversations, instead of simply “content”? In our second edition of Soundboard, guest editor Nicole Killian puts these questions to Kristina Ketola Bore, Nate Pyper, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, and Ramon Tejada.
As the #MeToo movement hits the art world, we invite five experts to weigh in on what museums must consider when showing or contextualizing work by artists accused of wrongdoing. Sharing perspectives are: artist Rashayla Marie Brown, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts CEO Deborah Cullinan, critic/historian Tyler Green, Hammer Museum Associate Director of Academic Programs Theresa Sotto, and journalist/editor Jillian Steinhauer.
