Walker Art Center Announces Insights XL: Celebrating 40 Years of Design Leadership
The Walker Art Center announced today the speakers for Insights XL, a special anniversary edition of its acclaimed annual design lecture series. Marking 40 years of design leadership, Insights XL continues the Walker’s long-standing commitment to presenting influential voices whose work expands the role of design across art, culture, and society.
For four decades, Insights has brought together leading designers from around the world to explore new ways of thinking about form, authorship, identity, and cultural impact. The 2026 edition of the series foregrounds design as a cross-disciplinary practice—one that intersects with art, fashion, publishing, technology, and contemporary life—through lectures by globally recognized and locally rooted practitioners. All lectures will take place in person in the Walker Cinema.
The Insights XL speakers are celebrated for shaping visual identities for museums, biennales, cultural institutions, and major brands, reinforcing design’s role as a powerful cultural force.
Mark Owens, Walker Design Director, comments, “Over the past four decades, the Insights Design Lecture series has become an invaluable resource: both an archive of some of the most incredible work in the field and a record of the urgent issues impacting a discipline always in flux. This year, I am proud to celebrate this milestone with an incredible roster of speakers whose work has inspired the work of the Walker design studio and set the standard for the profession at large.”
INSIGHTS PROGRAMMING
Kirsty Carter & Emma Thomas (A Practice for Everyday Life)
Tuesday, March 4, 7 pm; Walker Cinema
$18 ($14 Walker members and seniors; $12 students)
Founded by Kirsty Carter and Emma Thomas in 2003, A Practice for Everyday Life (APFEL) is a London-based studio for creative direction, design, and type. The studio works across brand identities, campaigns, digital and editorial design, and type design for clients including Aesop, Erdem, JW Anderson, and Vitra, as well as cultural institutions such as the Barnes Foundation, Hammer Museum, ICA Boston, Shaker Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art. Launched in 2020, APFEL Type Foundry creates bespoke typefaces and publishes a collection of retail fonts.
Recent projects include the identity and campaign for the Venice Biennale 2022; branding for the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon; custom type design for Elle; and the design of major monographs including Lee Miller, Erdem, Alexey Brodovitch, Noah Davis, and Yoko Ono, alongside a recent comprehensive publication on the history of Vitra for Phaidon.
Carter and Thomas serve as co-presidents of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI) UK chapter and are working on the new brand identity for the British Museum.
Wednesday, March 11, 7 pm; Walker Cinema
$18 ($14 Walker members and seniors; $12 students)
Zak Kyes is a Swiss American creative director and the founder of Zak Group, a London-based design office working across fashion, art, sport, technology, and culture. His practice integrates strategic positioning, visual identity, spatial design, and cultural research into a single, research-led approach.
For over a decade, Kyes served as the art director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, and he has taught at ECAL in Lausanne, Switzerland. At Zak Group he leads projects for partners including Nike, Chanel, Prada, Frank Ocean, Anne Imhof, Virgil Abloh, and institutions such as MMK Frankfurt and Hartwig Art Foundation.
His work has been exhibited globally at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Leipzig, Tensta Konsthall, the Graham Foundation, and the Architectural Association. He is the co-author and editor of books including Forms of Inquiry (AA Publications), CryptoPunks: Free to Claim (Phaidon), and Zak Kyes Working With . . . (Sternberg Press).
Michael Cina (Cina Associates/Ghostly)
Wednesday, March 18, 7 pm; Walker Cinema
$18 ($14 Walker members and seniors; $12 students)
Michael Cina is a multidisciplinary designer and artist based in the Twin Cities working across branding, visual communication, custom-type design, and contemporary art. Cina Associates, the studio he founded in 2010, is the center of this practice, where experimentation and discipline converge in a visual language shaped by fine art, typography, branding, and design.
Over the past two decades, Cina has shaped identities for global clients, created hundreds of album covers with Ghostly International, and developed original typefaces through his foundry, Public Type. His design work has been nominated for a Grammy and won an Emmy. Cina’s art practice explores internal worlds, texture, perception, and the quiet narratives that emerge through process. Across all mediums, he is driven by curiosity and a commitment to making work that holds meaning over time.
Wednesday, March 25, 7 pm; Walker Cinema
$18 ($14 Walker members and seniors; $12 students)
Hassan Rahim is a creative director and high school dropout from Santa Ana, California, currently living and working in New York City. In opposition to culture’s obsession with speed, his output remains guarded, incubating as long as necessary while he continues to build a body of work dealing with memory, mortality, and monomania. Along with clients like the Safdie brothers (Uncut Gems) and Jordan Peele (Monkeypaw Productions), Rahim has worked with Netflix, Nike, Apple, Sony, Herman Miller, Adidas, Carhartt, and SSENSE, among others. He has also partnered with various high-profile musicians as a collaborator on album and single artwork, including Lorde (Solar Power, Melodrama) and Nine Inch Nails (Bad Witch). Hassan owns and operates the anti-disciplinary creative studio 12:01
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, events, and initiatives. Its multiacre 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, and community connection.