Walker Art Center's Target Free Thursday Nights in April Highlighted by Preview, Performance, and Reception for New Trisha Brown Exhibition

The Walker Art Center’s Target Free Thursday Nights in April are highlighted by a preview, performance, and reception for the latest exhibition, Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, opening on Friday, April 18, and providing an in-depth look at the visual arts practice of an artist recognized primarily for her work in dance and opera. In conjunction with the exhibition, the centerpiece of the Walker’s Year of Trisha tribute, Brown will create a performative drawing on the floor of the Medtronic Gallery, as patrons watch a simulcast in the Cinema. A reception follows in the Bazinet Garden Lobby (April 17, 7 pm). Other Target Free Thursday Night highlights include a Youth Showcase featuring spoken-word and video artists presenting works created during the artist residencies of poet/theater artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and hip-hop filmmaker Eli Jacobs Fantauzzi (April 3, 7 pm); the gallery talk American Mythologies: The Art of Richard Prince (Part 1: Masculinity), presented in conjunction with the exhibition Richard Prince: Spiritual America (through June 15), led by Jonathan Metzl, associate professor of psychiatry and women’s studies at the University of Michigan (April 3, 7 pm); a Free Verse poetry reading by Kent Johnson, whose work touches on art and politics (April 10, 7 pm); and the panel discussion Next Exit: The Shifting Landscape of Suburbia (April 24, 7 pm), in conjunction with the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes (though August 17), at which panelists discuss the ever-growing suburbs and what challenges lay ahead for those who plan and develop these areas.

Target Free Thursday Nights sponsored by Target.

Target Free Thursday Nights

April 3, 10, 17, 24
Galleries open 5–9; special events follow.
Free

Thursday, April 3

Gallery Tour, 6 pm

Performance: Youth Showcase, 7 pm

Cinema
Free tickets available from 6 pm at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk
Local young spoken-word and video artists present works they created during the residencies of poet/theater artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph and hip-hop filmmaker Eli Jacobs Fantauzzi, demonstrating how spoken word and media can serve as vehicles for personal expression and positive civic and social dialogue.

Gallery Talk: American Mythologies: The Art of Richard Prince (Part 1: Masculinity), 7 pm

Meet in the Bazinet Garden Lobby
Richard Prince’s humorous and dystopic examination of American pop culture and its place in our collective consciousness spans nearly three decades, beginning with his first photos of luxury furniture appropriated from ads in Time magazine. The first in a series of three, this talk takes on the masculine mythos in the exhibition. The Cowboys series of rephotographs, the muscle cars, and the Girlfriends series serve as the artist’s high point in his ongoing deconstruction of American archetypes. Led by Jonathan Metzl, associate professor of psychiatry and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.

Thursday, April 10

Richard Prince: Spiritual America Tour, 6 pm

Poetry Reading
Free Verse: Kent Johnson, 7 pm

Cinema
Free tickets available from 6 pm at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk
Kent Johnson achieved notoriety when it was discovered that he had authored poems attributed to a Japanese Hiroshima survivor named Araki Yasusada. Far more than a hoax, his work was intended to provoke questions of authorship, translation, artistic sincerity, and cultural desire. In the wake of the controversy, Johnson has continued to needle readers’ notions about art and politics. In addition to Doubled Flowering, the supposed Yasusada poems, his books include A Nation of Poets: Writing from the Workshops of Nicaragua; Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry, edited with Craig Paulenich; Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry, edited with Stephen M. Ashby; and Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Nine Submissions to the War. Join us as Johnson reads from his work and discusses the intriguing issues related to authorship and originality that compel so much of contemporary art. Webcast on the Walker Channel (channel.walkerart.org).

Free Verse is copresented by Rain Taxi Review of Books.

Thursday, April 17

Year of Trisha
Exhibition Preview, Performance, and Reception: Trisha Brown, 7 pm

Cinema and Bazinet Garden Lobby
Free tickets available from 6 pm at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk
The Walker Art Center, Northrop Dance Season, and the University of Minnesota Dance Program honor the work of Trisha Brown, one of the founding innovators of postmodern dance, with an exhibition of her drawings and performance pieces; presentations of several early site-specific performance works; and an evening of dance. The centerpiece of the Year of Trisha festivities is the Walker exhibition Trisha Brown: So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing, on view April 18–July 20. Providing an in-depth look at the visual arts practice of an artist recognized primarily for her work in dance and opera, the installation features a survey of Brown’s drawings, a live early performance work in the gallery, and videos of seminal early performances.

For this Free Thursday program, Brown improvises movements across a large piece of paper placed on the Medtronic Gallery floor. Witness this drawing/performance as it is simulcast in the Cinema and online on the Walker Channel (channel.walkerart.org), then join a reception in the Bazinet Garden Lobby preceding the opening of the exhibition at 8 pm.

Thursday, April 24

Gallery Tour, 6 pm

Panel Discussion:
Next Exit: The Shifting Landscape of Suburbia, 7 pm

Cinema
Free tickets available from 6 pm at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk
In today’s expanding metropolitan areas, the lines between urban and suburban are rapidly blurring. Population growth, immigration, and transportation are among the many factors that city planners, designers, and developers confront as they prepare for the next million people to move into Minnesota’s suburbs. Join panelists Lance Nekar of the Metropolitan Design Center, Dan Bergin of Twin Cities Public Television, Michael Lander of Lander Group, and others for a discussion about the challenges and successes of new suburban design, how suburbs are becoming destination environments, and the cultural implications of these shifts. Moderated by Todd Melby.

Copresented by the Metropolitan Design Center.