Dance Works II: Merce Cunningham / Ernesto Neto

The Dance Works exhibitions explore the legendary collaborations between choreographer Merce Cunningham and leading visual artists, drawing from the 2011 acquisition of more than 2,000 objects from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company collection—the single largest acquisition of visual art in the Walker’s history.

Rio de Janeiro–based Ernesto Neto is a leading figure in the international contemporary art scene, known for large-scale, abstract sculptural environments that are influenced by the human body and other living organisms. Neto created otheranimal, a monumental installation of suspended biomorphic forms above the dancers onstage, for Cunningham’s Views on Stage, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre in 2004. Made of translucent white fabric, its elements were intended as a kind of blank canvas to be illuminated by colored lights. Visitors experience the work in the Perlman Gallery, whose dramatically high ceilings approximate the fly space of a theater stage, bringing viewers into an otherworldly realm. A video excerpt of a performance of the dance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company accompanies the exhibition.

Curator: Siri Engberg