Walker Art Center Announces Exhibition Highlights Through Fall 2026
MINNEAPOLIS, November 19, 2025—The Walker Art Center today announced highlights from its exhibition program through fall 2026. Among the upcoming openings is the major, collaborative presentation Show & Tell: An Exhibition for Kids, which opens this week and offers a compelling new model for engaging children in the joy and imagination of art. Show & Tell features artworks from the Walker’s renowned collection by artists including Katharina Fritsch, Jeffrey Gibson, Cas Holman, Jasper Johns, Caroline Kent, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Yinka Shonibare that connect with kid-friendly subjects such as animals, alphabets, food, miniature worlds, and imaginary creatures. Presented in a vibrant, specially designed environment, the exhibition emphasizes participatory, hands-on exploration and encourages kids to engage all their senses.
In 2026 the Walker will present two major survey exhibitions: Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, which the Walker co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love, which is co-organized with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. All Day All Night brings together works created between 2011 and the present, including drawings, site-specific murals, paintings, video installations, and sculptures that foreground the artist’s singular use of sound, language, and the complexities of communication. What Is Love explores Jackson’s dynamic, multi-decade career through more than 80 works of art that reflect her engagement with nature; her experiences as a dancer, poet, and theater designer; and her collaborations with radical artist communities.
Additionally, the Walker will unveil newly commissioned works by transdisciplinary, Twin Cities–based artist Rosy Simas (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron clan), including an in-gallery exhibition and a significant evening performance that she is creating as part of a two-year residency at the museum. The Walker will also present the significant, recently acquired four-channel video installation The Borrowed Lady (2016) by Martine Syms; an immersive environment of new works by architect and artist Olalekan Jeyifous; and will conclude 2026 with the opening of artist Abbas Akhavan’s first US museum survey, capturing his engagement with environmental justice, ecological change, and the preservation of cultural heritage, especially in conflict zones, over the course of 20 years. The exhibition will follow Akhavan’s representation of Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale.
These wide-ranging presentations follow the October 18 opening of Dyani White Hawk: Love Language, a major mid-career survey featuring nearly 100 works from the past 15 years of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. Co-organized with Remai Modern, Love Language freshly reveals the intricacy and singularity of White Hawk’s (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) practice, as she continues to embrace and evolve new aesthetic, conceptual, and technical possibilities across many mediums, including painting, sculpture, and moving image.
Further details about these exhibitions and other current and upcoming presentations follow below.
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
Show & Tell: An Exhibition for Kids
November 20, 2025–April 5, 2026
Rosy Simas: A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (I hope it will stir your mind)
February 12–July 5, 2026
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
March 28–August 30, 2026
May 14–August 23, 2026
Collection in Focus: Martine Syms
June 25, 2026–May 23, 2027
Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies
August 6, 2026–January 3, 2027
Abbas Akhavan: Variations on a Garden
November 12, 2026–April 18, 2027
CURRENTLY OPEN:
Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror
Through January 4, 2026
Dyani White Hawk: Love Language
Through February 15, 2026
Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy
Through May 24, 2026
Through August 30, 2026
This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection
Through April 29, 2029
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS:
Show & Tell: An Exhibition for Kids
November 20, 2025–April 5, 2026
Show & Tell is a dynamic, interactive exhibition designed specifically for kids. Featuring artworks and films from the Walker’s collection chosen for their kid-friendly subject matter—animals, alphabets, food, miniature worlds, and imaginary creatures—Show & Tell engages young visitors through zones that encourage looking, listening, making, climbing, and playing. With vibrant graphic and spatial design, the exhibition encourages children to engage their senses and imaginations and to be hands-on with installations and activities inspired by the works of artists such as Katharina Fritsch, Jeffrey Gibson, Cas Holman, Caroline Kent, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. Show & Tell is the result of cross-disciplinary collaboration across the Walker’s Visual Arts; Moving Image; Design; and Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact teams.
Curators: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts; Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; and Patricia Ledesma Villon, Assistant Curator of Moving Image
Show & Tell is organized jointly by the Walker’s Visual Arts; Moving Image; Design; and Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact staff including Amanda Hunt, Head of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact; Sarah Lampen, Associate Director of Learning and Accessibility; Megan Leafblad, Associate Director of Public Engagement; Janine DeFeo, Manager of Interpretation; La’Kayla Williams, Manager of School and Gallery Programs; and Hannah Novillo Erickson, Manager of Lifelong Learning and Accessibility.
Rosy Simas: A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (i hope it will stir your mind)
February 12–July 5, 2026
The exhibition Rosy Simas: A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (i hope it will stir your mind) is the first of two major commissions that artist Rosy Simas (Seneca Nation of Indians, Heron clan) is creating for the Walker as part of her ongoing two-year residency. Simas is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice embraces choreography and dance, moving image, sound, and object-making to explore her ancestors’ histories through the lens of contemporary experience. For A:gajë:gwah dësa’nigöëwë:nye:’ (i hope it will stir your mind), Simas is creating an immersive installation that centers Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca Nation) views about family, community, and living in a state of peace, which invites visitors into a space of personal reflection. The exhibition is among the first to center Simas’s object making as a visual arts practice distinct from her performance work. Themes explored in the presentation will be amplified with the premiere of her commissioned, evening-length performance in May 2026 in the Walker’s McGuire Theater.
Curators: Pablo de Ocampo, Director and Curator of Moving Image, and Philip Bither, McGuire Director and Senior Curator of Performing Arts
Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night
March 28–August 30, 2026
The exhibition is the artist’s first major museum survey. Co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art, the exhibition foregrounds how Christine Sun Kim (US, b. 1980) utilizes sound, language, and the complexities of communication in her wide-ranging approach to art-making. All Day All Night brings together works spanning 2011 to the present and features drawings, site-specific murals, paintings, video installations, and sculptures. Using musical notation, infographics, and language—both in her native American Sign Language (ASL) and written English—Kim has produced a body of work that is perceptive, poetic, humorous, and political. Inspired by similarly named works made at different moments in her career, the exhibition’s title points to the energy Kim brings to her artistic practice; she is relentlessly experimental, iterative, and dedicated to sharing her lived experiences.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center; Jennie Goldstein, Jennifer Rubio Associate Curator of the Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art; and Tom Finkelpearl, independent curator; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Walker Art Center, and Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant, Whitney Museum of American Art
May 14–August 23, 2026
What Is Love is the first major museum retrospective devoted to the work of painter Suzanne Jackson. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition celebrates Jackson’s multi-decade career through more than 80 works of art that reflect her singular vision and distinct use of color, light, and structure. Co-organized with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), What Is Love spans six decades, from Jackson’s early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of paint and depict figures intertwined with nature to recent three-dimensional paintings that suspend acrylic paint midair. Looking at influences beyond the artist’s studio, What Is Love examines how Jackson’s paintings have been informed by her engagement with nature; her experiences as a dancer, poet, and theater designer; and her collaborations with radical artist communities.
The exhibition is curated by Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator, Visual Art, Walker Art Center. Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, Curatorial Assistant, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Laurel Rand‐Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.
Collection in Focus: Martine Syms
June 25, 2026–May 23, 2027
This exhibition is part of an ongoing series focused on major works in the Walker’s growing collection and represents the first presentation of Martine Syms’s The Borrowed Lady (2016) since it was acquired in 2019. The installation includes a four-channel video presented in a space with purple window vinyl and wall paint. In the work, artist Diamond Stingily’s voice and image appear across four monitors. Edited to an accelerating cadence, each flick of the wrist or turn of her head moves spatially through the space. These staccato rhythms capture Syms’s interest in gesture as an everyday performance that is taught and learned. Attentive to ways that images of Black women have proliferated across the internet in reaction GIFs and memes, Syms isolates and multiplies Stingily’s presence so that she fills the room. The work speaks to the language of gesture as both feminized and transferred through constant acts of appropriation, or “borrowing.”
Curator: Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center
Olalekan Jeyifous: Hydricosmic Litanies
August 6, 2026–January 3, 2027
Olalekan Jeyifous (US, b. Nigeria, 1977) is an artist, architect, and designer whose practice merges speculative architecture and social commentary to imagine possible alternative futures for urban spaces. Through his work, Jeyifous explores how the construction of environments can address critical issues like displacement, social equity, and ecological justice. His exhibition at the Walker, which takes inspiration from the Mississippi River and the novel The Famished Road by Ben Okri, and treats the river as a site and symbol of memory, transformation, and human intervention into the natural world. Grounded in local and diasporic histories, the exhibition will feature CNC-milled reliefs, freestanding sculptures, printed and collaged wall works, and experimental videos to create an immersive visual and conceptual landscape. Within this environment, visitors are invited to consider the Mississippi as both a living archive and vital artery of life.
Curator: Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Associate Curator, Visual Arts
Abbas Akhavan: Variations on a Garden
November 12, 2026–April 18, 2027
Variations on a Garden is artist Abbas Akhavan’s (Canada, b. Tehran, 1977) first US museum survey. Spanning the course of his 20-year practice, the exhibition highlights recurring conceptual concerns, particularly human relations to the natural world, public and private space, and the conservation of heritage sites. Variations on a Garden will feature Akhavan’s work in sculpture and installation, drawing special attention to his use of organic and perishable matter such as soil, water, and plants. In his work, materials become conduits that carry ideas and produce meaning through their selection, manipulation, and contextual framing. The exhibition will emphasize the artist’s careful examinations of how particular historical and geographical conflicts, such as the Syrian and Iraq wars, have shaped cultural sites and impacted the environment. Akhavan’s work raises questions about how we remember the past given the pace of technological change and advancement as well as the ongoing geopolitical control of historical narratives. The exhibition will follow the unveiling of Akhavan’s representation of Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale.
Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant
CURRENTLY OPEN:
Jessi Reaves: process invented the mirror
Through January 4, 2026
Jessi Reaves’s (US, b. 1986) practice engages with the making and unmaking of objects, the interplay between functionality and absurdity, and the labor of creation. She often begins her works with found furniture, which she dismantles and modifies toward an uncomfortable adjacency with sculptural objects. The resulting works reflect the process of their production and capture the banality of consumerism with humor, nostalgia, and glimmers of optimism. The exhibition marks Reaves’s first museum solo exhibition and will include a new suite of works that span a range of media, including sculpture and video. The new body of work is informed by the artist’s research into murals made during the WPA (Works Progress Administration) of the 1930s and 1940s and will feature a large-scale mural and an artist-designed curtain that, together, emphasize the artist’s engagement with this history as well as accidental architecture.
Curators: Mary Ceruti, Executive Director; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
Dyani White Hawk: Love Language
Through February 15, 2026
Dyani White Hawk: Love Language is a major mid-career survey featuring nearly 100 works from the past 15 years of the artist’s wide-ranging practice. Co-organized with Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada), the expansive exhibition features painting, sculptures, works on paper, video installations, and objects that incorporate porcupine quillwork and lane stitch beadwork, as well as several new large-scale sculptures and mosaics making their debut in the exhibition. White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota, b. 1976) is recognized for her dynamic visual language and approach to image making. Grounded in a celebration of Lakota forms and motifs, White Hawk’s work challenges prevailing narratives and histories of abstraction and amplifies the influence of Indigenous cultural production on modern and contemporary art. Love Language engages viewers with White Hawk’s distinctive multimedia practice and examines the ways in which it has continually evolved to innovate new aesthetic, conceptual, and technical possibilities.
Curators: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts, Walker Art Center, and Tarah Hogue (Métis), Adjunct Curator of Indigenous Art, Remai Modern; with Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center
Trisha Brown and Robert Rauschenberg: Glacial Decoy
Through May 24, 2026
In 1979 the Walker premiered Trisha Brown’s (US, 1936–2017) Glacial Decoy, the choreographer and dancer’s first performance for a proscenium stage and thus the first with a set design. The groundbreaking piece included collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg (US, 1925–2008), who designed the costumes and set. The exhibition offers an opportunity to experience this performance through materials recently acquired by the Walker as well as a chance to explore Rauschenberg’s engagement with set design—a less considered aspect of his practice. The presentation is anchored by the immersive projection of 159 unique photographs taken by Rauschenberg, which served as décor and shifted across the stage in dialogue with Brown’s choreography. It also includes performance footage of Glacial Decoy, two sets of Rauschenberg-designed costumes, and related archival materials.
Curator: Brandon Eng, Curatorial Assistant, Visual Arts
Through August 30, 2026
Rendering the human form in three dimensions is among the oldest forms of artistic expression. With Sculpture Court, the Walker transforms a gallery into an environment akin to the courtyards that have housed dynamic collections of figurative sculpture—originally outdoors and later inside encyclopedic museums—beginning in the 16th century. The presentation draws on the Walker’s collection and feature artists such as Joan Miró, Oliver Laric, Bonnie Collura, Arlene Shechet, Rona Pondick, Mona Hatoum, and Jacques Lipchitz, establishing a continuity of artistic tradition into the present day. Many of the works are on view for the first time since entering the Walker’s collection and create a compelling connection to the expansive outdoor Sculpture Garden.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection
Through April 29, 2029
This Must Be the Place is a complete reinstallation of the Walker’s collection, offering new insights into the vision and development of the institution’s holdings through dynamic juxtapositions across media of iconic works, lesser-known objects, and recent acquisitions. The presentation is grounded in the many meanings and permutations of “home” and unfolds over three large galleries, with spotlight sections that give emphasis to beloved works and core ideas. The reinstallation incorporates visitor feedback gathered from a prior collection exhibition, Make Sense of This (2023), with special considerations to how works are presented and described to encourage public understanding and engagement.
Curators: Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs; with Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director, Visual Arts; Taylor Jasper, Assistant Curator, Visual Arts; and Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts
ABOUT THE WALKER ART CENTER
The Walker Art Center is a renowned multidisciplinary arts institution that presents, collects, and supports the creation of groundbreaking work across the visual and performing arts, moving image, and design. Guided by the belief that art has the power to bring joy and solace and the ability to unite people through dialogue and shared experiences, the Walker engages communities through a dynamic array of exhibitions, performances, screenings, events, and initiatives. Its multi-acre campus includes 65,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, the state-of-the-art McGuire Theater and Walker Cinema, and ample green space that connects with the adjoining Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The Garden, a partnership with the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board, is one of the first urban sculpture parks of its kind in the United States and home to the beloved Twin Cities landmark Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Recognized for its ambitious program and growing collection of more than 16,000 works, the Walker embraces emerging art forms and amplifies the work of artists from the Twin Cities and from across the country and the globe. Its broad spectrum of offerings makes it a lively and welcoming hub for artistic expression, creative innovation, learning, and community connection.
Visit walkerart.org for more information about upcoming presentations, programs, and opportunities to experience the art of our time.