The Walker Art Center's 2017–2018 Exhibition Schedule

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

*First US solo museum exhibitions

CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS

KATHARINA FRITSCH: MULTIPLES, through October 15, 2017

JIMMIE DURHAM: AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD, through October 8, 2017

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OPENING EXHIBITIONS

NAIRY BAGHRAMIAN: DÉFORMATION PROFESSIONNELLE

September 7, 2017-February 4, 2018
Galleries 4, 5, and 6

Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle marks the artist’s first international museum presentation. Over the past two decades, Baghramian (b. 1971, Iran; lives and works in Berlin) has created sculptures and site-responsive installations that often address the human body and its gestures. Her works mark boundaries, transitions, and gaps in museum and urban sites, considering form and meaning through the conditions of interior and exterior space. Baghramian questions and challenges the boundaries of sculpture in artworks that juxtapose rubber with steel, wood with wax, or assembled elements with photography. Many of her works provocatively reference fashion, design, theater, and dance. The show presents a series of new pieces that mirror the artist’s previous bodies of work while responding directly to the gallery site, allowing the notion of the retrospective to evolve in real time and space.

The exhibition takes its title from a French phrase often translated as “professional distortion” or “job conditioning,” referring to ways that a person’s worldview can be altered by a chosen vocation. Baghramian uses the show as an opportunity to take apart her own profession. The word deformation can also be applied to form and relates to the basic actions involved in making sculpture, such as shaping, modeling, and casting. Through her playful yet critical take on the notion of a survey exhibition, Baghramian interrogates the conceptual, physical, and social aspects of sculpture-making today.

Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis with Victoria Sung

Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle is co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium.

Image: Installation view of Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle at S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, 2016, Photo: Timo Ohler

I AM YOU, YOU ARE TOO

September 7, 2017-October 27, 2019
Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman

At a time of heightened uncertainty, social division, and geopolitical tension, I am you, you are too foregrounds works from the Walker’s collections that explore contemporary life through themes of citizenship and belonging, borders and barriers, and how these inform our understanding of ourselves. Bringing together a diverse, multigenerational, and international group of artists, the exhibition questions how we memorialize the past and understand the social, geographic, and political structures that shape us.

The show’s title is taken from I M U U R 2 (2013), a room-scaled installation by artist Danh Vo that considers how collected objects, such as knickknacks and souvenirs, can communicate who we are. Monuments and shared public space play a key role for Francis Alÿs, Song Dong, and Robert Longo, whose works examine the relationship between the individual and the state. Chantal Akerman and Julie Mehretu reflect upon shifting geographical borders and changing political systems; while Postcommodity and Wolfgang Tillmans reference recent debates on the Mexico-US border and Brexit, respectively. While some artists invoke recognizable places and known stories, others, including Mark Bradford, Michael Dean, Lara Favaretto, and Guillermo Kuitca, turn to abstraction to elicit themes of home, the city, and national belonging. In the exhibition’s final gallery, an immersive installation of works from the collection hang against wallpapers by Yto Barrada, Yoko Ono, and Adam Pendleton, forming unexpected juxtapositions across generations, geographies, and media. Seen together, these pieces chart ways that artists have challenged prevailing systems, including gender, race, and sexual orientation. In presenting a broad range of artistic approaches, I am you, you are too draws out timely questions of national identity, shifting political borders, and international and intercultural dialogue.

Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, Adrienne Edwards, and Pavel Pyś

Image: Robert Longo, National Trust, 1981; Collection Walker Art Center; Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1981. Courtesy Walker Art Center; © Robert Longo

LAURE PROUVOST: THEY ARE WAITING FOR YOU

October 12, 2017-February 11, 2018
Gallery 7/Medtronic Gallery

Laure Prouvost (France, b. 1978; lives and works in Antwerp) produces absorbing moving image and sound installations in which she conflates reality with fiction and art with everyday life, reveling in moments of mistranslation that can open up new avenues for meaning. Prouvost’s environments often confound expectations through a rapid-fire succession of sound and image. Narrated in the artist’s soft, seductive voice, they are interspersed with spoken and written instructions that directly address the viewer. Combining painting, sculpture, and found objects alongside her projected images, Prouvost lures the viewer-turned-participant into an abstracted, preverbal state of consciousness from which to rediscover the joy of learning language, words, and meanings.

In conjunction with her new gallery installation, Prouvost will create a theatrical performance in the McGuire Theater that draws on similar thematic elements. Joining Prouvost on- and offstage will be choreographer Pierre Droulers and artist Sam Belinfante. The performance features live singing and recorded text, embodied performance and video projections, and percussive and electronic sound. Co-commissioned and coproduced by the Walker and the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, the performance will premiere at the Walker on February 8-9, 2018, followed by a presentation at EMPAC on February 16, 2018.

Exhibition curators: Victoria Sung with Gwyneth Shanks

Performance curators: Philip Bither, Victoria Brooks (EMPAC), and Gwyneth Shanks

Image: Laure Prouvost, At night this water turns black in the exhibition For Forgetting at New Museum, New York, 2014. Courtesy the artist, carlier | gebauer, Natalie Obadia, and New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley

ADIÓS UTOPIA: DREAMS AND DECEPTIONS IN CUBAN ART SINCE 1950

November 11, 2017-March 18, 2018
Galleries A, B, and C/Target, Friedman, and Burnet Galleries

Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950 looks at how Cuba’s revolutionary epoch shaped 65 years of Cuban art. The exhibition brings together more than 100 important works of painting, graphic design, photography, video, installation, and performance created by more than 50 Cuban artists and designers.

Anchored by key moments of the 20th- and 21st-century Cuban history, Adiós Utopia is the most comprehensive and significant presentation of modern and contemporary Cuban art shown in the United States since 1944, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented Modern Cuban Painters.

Through a selection of pivotal artworks–created in each of six decades since 1950–the exhibition explores Cuba’s artistic production through the lens of utopia, both its construction and its deconstruction. Adiós Utopia introduces US audiences to key events in Cuba’s history and explores ways that this history has affected individual artists, shaped the character of art produced on the island, and conditioned the reception of Cuban art both there and abroad. A newly published, related publication accompanies the exhibition.

Adiós Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950 is a project conceived by the Cisneros Fontanals Fundación Para Las Artes (CIFO Europa) and the Cisneros Fontanals Arts Foundation, CIFO USA. The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Curators: Cuban independent curators Gerardo Mosquera, René Francisco Rodríguez, and Elsa Vega with museum advisors Olga Viso and Mari Carmen Ramírez

Walker coordinating curator: Olga Viso, with curatorial fellow Fabián Leyva-Barragán

Image: Los Carpinteros, Faro tumbado (Felled Lighthouse), 2006, mixed media, American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2006. ©Los Carpinteros / photo courtesy of the artists

ALLEN RUPPERSBERG: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 1968-2018

March 16-July 29, 2018
Galleries 4, 5, 6, and 7/Medtronic Gallery

This major retrospective presents the work of Allen Ruppersberg (US, b. 1944), who has not been the subject of a comprehensive US survey for more than 30 years. One of the most rigorous and inventive practitioners among the generation of conceptual artists to emerge in the late 1960s, Ruppersberg’s work, rooted in language, has been wide-ranging in media and approach. His projects have consistently had at their center a focus on the American vernacular–its books, music, popular images, and ephemera–mining the nuances of our culture through its visual details, unsung conventions, and modes of the everyday. Often participatory, Ruppersberg’s works invite a layered experience for the viewer through language, visual density, accumulated elements, and ideas.

The exhibition offers an opportunity to experience Ruppersberg’s work with unprecedented breadth and depth, with many pieces from private and public collections in Europe and elsewhere that have never before been exhibited in US museums. Featured artworks include early installations such as Al’s Cafe and Al’s Grand Hotel, his groundbreaking participatory projects of the late 1960s; seminal photo-based narratives combining text and image; and a progression of more recent installations containing his commercial letterpress posters, ephemera, drawings, and films. The show will also include a broad selection of drawings and artist’s books. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the Walker Art Center.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Ruppersberg’s You & Me (2013), a public artwork first shown as a billboard next to New York’s High Line, will be featured in the Target Project Space, an exhibition space adjacent to the Walker’s restaurant Esker Grove.

Curator: Siri Engberg, with curatorial fellow Fabián Leyva-Barragán

Image: Allen Ruppersberg, The Singing Posters: Allen Ginsberg’s Howl by Allen Ruppersberg (Part 1 & 2), 2003 (detail), printed posters, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York.

JASON MORAN

April 26-August 19, 2018
Target and Friedman Galleries

The work of interdisciplinary artist Jason Moran (US, b. 1974) is grounded in musical composition, yet bridges the visual and performing arts through stagecraft. Moran is known for using personal experience to create dynamic musical compositions that challenge the conventional form of the medium. His experimental works embrace the intersection of objects and sound, pushing beyond the traditional staged concert or sculpture to amplify ways that both are inherently theatrical. This exhibition, the artist’s first museum show, features the range of work Moran has explored, from performance and collaborations with visual artists to his own sculptural works.

In all aspects of his work, Moran’s creative process is informed by one of the essential tenets of jazz: the “set” in which musicians come together to engage in a collaborative process of improvisation, riffing off of one another to create the musical experience. The exhibition will highlight Moran’s mixed-media “set” installations based on storied jazz venues from past eras including STAGED: Savoy Ballroom 1 and STAGED: Three Deuces (both 2015), sculptural vignettes that were his acclaimed contributions to the 2015 Venice Biennale. The exhibition will additionally premiere a new sculptural commission from this series that takes inspiration from the celebrated New York jazz venue Slugs’ open from 1964 to the early 1970s. Also presented will be a selection of Moran’s most recent charcoal drawings and several projected media works from his long-standing collaborations, or sets, with artists including Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Joan Jonas, and Stan Douglas. In-gallery performances and a new commission for the stage will be orchestrated during the run of the show to complement the gallery presentation.

Curator: Adrienne Edwards with curatorial fellow Danielle Jackson

Image: Jason Moran, STAGED: Three Deuces, 2015, Photo: Farzad Owrang ©Jason Moran; Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

SIAH ARMAJANI: FOLLOW THIS LINE

September 8, 2018-December 30, 2018
Galleries 4, 5, 6, and 7/MedtronIc

Siah Armajani: Follow This Line is the first comprehensive US retrospective devoted to the work of Minneapolis-based artist Siah Armajani. Born in Tehran in 1939, Armajani moved to Minnesota in 1960 to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, where he immersed himself in the study of philosophy and American literature. He has lived and worked in the Twin Cities ever since, while exhibiting internationally.

Armajani is best known today for his works of public art–including bridges, gazebos, reading rooms, and gathering spaces–across the United States and Europe. Near the Walker, the artist’s landmark 375-foot Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge connects Loring Park to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. This groundbreaking exhibition spans seven decades of the artist’s studio practice and resituates his work first within the context of prerevolution Tehran and, later, postwar and present-day United States. The exhibition encourages viewers to “follow the line” of language woven throughout Armajani’s practice, which engages a range of thinkers and references–from Persian calligraphy to the manifesto, letter, and talisman; from poetry to mathematical equations and computer programming; from the Abstract Expressionist canvas to the vernacular architecture of rural America, Bauhaus design, and Russian Constructivism.

Curators: Clare Davies (Metropolitan Museum of Art) with Victoria Sung (Walker Art Center)

Image: Siah Armajani, Prayer, 1962, oil, ink on canvas mounted to board. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Art Center Acquisition Fund, 1962.

MARIO GARCÍA TORRES: ILLUSION BROUGHT ME HERE

October 4, 2018-February 10, 2019
Target Gallery

Illusion Brought Me Here is the first US survey to focus on the work of the Mexico-based artist Mario García Torres. Working in a variety of media, including video, installation, photography, and sculpture, he creates environments that explore obscure histories and personalities, particularly those associated with conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s.

García Torres juxtaposes facts with imagined scenes and dialogue to foreground the often blurred division between truth and fiction. Appropriation, narrative, repetition, reenactment, and the tropes of reportage are some of the strategies that he employs to uncover the limitations of memory and the subjectivity of historical records.

Illusion Brought Me Here takes a radical approach to the traditional retrospective. A newly commissioned sound piece–a soundtrack compilation of all of García Torres’s media-based works to date–creates the framework for the exhibition, which features a selection of artworks and site-specific installations.

Illusion Brought Me Here is organized by the Walker Art Center and co-presented with WIELS, Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. It will be accompanied by the first publication to survey the artist’s work, published by the two institutions.

Walker Art Center Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis with Fabián Leyva-Barragán (Walker Art Center)
WIELS Curators: Dirk Snauwaert and Zoë Gray

Image: Mario García Torres, Tetela, n.d. (Film stills); HD video (color, sound), 19 min., in Spanish with English subtitles

ELIZABETH PRICE

November 9, 2019-October 27, 2019
Perlman Gallery

London-based artist Elizabeth Price (UK, b. 1966) creates richly layered, narrative moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.

Conceived in response to the architecture and past history of the Walker’s Perlman Gallery, this solo exhibition includes two new moving image works, FELT TIPP and KOHL (both 2018), marking the artist’s first commission for a US museum. Projected floor to ceiling at more than 20 feet, FELT TIPP focuses on the design motifs of men’s neckties from the 1970s and ’80s featuring patterns that evoke electronic networks and digital systems. In focusing on the tie as both a sign of professional distinction and a sexually charged object, the work weaves together narratives of early computer technologies in the workplace and the gendered distinctions of its workforce. In KOHL, four fictional characters tell stories related to coal: its link to ink, writing, and the archive as well as its uses as a source of fuel and a cosmetic. Seen together, Price’s new works take motifs of dress and body adornment to reflect upon the relationship between the material and digital, sites of labor, and markers of class.

Curator: Pavel Pyś

Image: Elizabeth Price, FELT TIPP, 2017/2018, two-projector video installation, Courtesy the artist. FELT TIPP (working title) is commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Film and Video Umbrella, and Nottingham Contemporary. Supported by Arts Council England.

THE BODY ELECTRIC

October 4, 2018-April 14, 2019
Friedman Gallery

In an age dominated by digital technology, The Body Electric explores themes of the real and virtual, the organic and artificial, moving from the world into the screen and back again. Today, computer and phone screens are fast becoming the primary places of encountering new information, effectively blurring the boundary between three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional image. The exhibition presents work by an international and intergenerational group of artists who examine ways that photographic, televisual, and digital media change our perceptions of the human body and everyday life.

With works ranging from the 1960s to today, The Body Electric brings together artists including Eleanor Antin, Trisha Baga, Nam June Paik, and Shigeko Kubota, whose work across performance, sculpture, and the moving image conflates the physical world and its life on screen. For many artists, such as Martine Syms, Andrea Crespo, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, the lens of the camera creates a space to rethink the representation of sociopolitical identity and to question the structures that govern our understanding of race, gender, and sexuality. For others, such as Mark Leckey, Pierre Huyghe, and Bruce Nauman, technology offers the opportunity to consider the malleable, fragmented, and impossible body. Charting the embrace and manipulation of technology across varying generations, The Body Electric examines how the screen has increasingly shifted the way we picture ourselves and understand our place in the world.

Curator: Pavel Pyś

Image: Trisha Baga, 4pm on a Sunday (2015), mixed-media installation, Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York

CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS

KATHARINA FRITSCH: MULTIPLES

Through October 15, 2017
Burnet Gallery

Celebrated as one of the most innovative sculptors of our time, Katharina Fritsch (German, b. 1956) mines the history, myths, and fairy tales of Germany as well as her own thoughts and dreams to explore the nature of human perception and experience. By using everyday objects as subject matter–small animals, body parts, religious figurines, and other elements from the made and natural worlds–and altering them through unexpected shifts in scale, color, and materials, Fritsch evokes a sense of wonder and blurs the boundaries between the ordinary and the deeply symbolic.

Katharina Fritsch: Multiples spans the artist’s career, from early examples from her student years at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie to later pieces, providing a look into her long-standing themes and ideas through some 40 works drawn from the Walker’s collection. The show is presented alongside the installation of Fritsch’s monumental new work in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The 20-foot-high ultramarine blue Hahn/Cock (2013/2017), the artist’s largest public art piece in a US museum collection, will be unveiled in the newly renovated Garden in June 2017.

Curators: Pavel Pyś and Victoria Sung

JIMMIE DURHAM: AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

June 22-October 8, 2017
Target and Friedman Galleries

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World is the first US retrospective of the work of one of the most compelling and multifaceted artists working internationally today. A visual artist, performer, poet, essayist, and activist, Durham (b. 1940, Washington, Arkansas) has for more than 45 years explored the potential of art to question ingrained cultural belief systems. Calling himself an “interventionist,” he has consistently made work that examines the notion of citizenship, the interface between art and activism, and the role of art and artists in society. Durham’s expansive practice spans sculpture, drawing, collage, photography, video, performance, and poetry and is noteworthy for its use of language and distinctive wit. Featuring nearly 175 works dating from 1970 to the present, At the Center of the World provides a much-anticipated opportunity for audiences to gain a deeper understanding of, or perhaps encounter for the first time, the richly rewarding work of this complex and influential artist. A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World is organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. The exhibition was curated by Anne Ellegood, senior curator, with MacKenzie Stevens, curatorial assistant. The Walker Art Center’s presentation was organized by Vincenzo de Bellis, curator, with Misa Jeffereis, curatorial assistant. Following the Hammer Museum and the Walker Art Center, the exhibition will travel to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Remai Modern in Saskatoon.

Image: Jimmie Durham, Cortez, 1991-1992, fiberglass and resin, PVC, metal car parts, metal rebar, sheet metal, pulleys, handles, 88.5 x 57 x 20.5 in. (225 x 145 x 52 cm), Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium. Image ©S.M.A.K. / Dirk Pauwels

Exhibition information is subject to change. Please confirm before publishing with Rachel Joyce, rachel.joyce@walkerart.org, 612-375-7635.

Opening Hours

The Walker Art Center's 2017–2018 Exhibition Schedule

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS

OPENING EXHIBITIONS

CONTINUING EXHIBITIONS