Displaying items by tag: walker art center

The Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, announced today it has acquired 200 new works through donation and purchase over the past year. The acquisitions include pieces by artists such as Trisha Brown, Beauford Delaney, Chuck Close, Joseph Kosuth, Liz Larner, Allen Ruppersberg, Barry Le Va, Danh Vo, and Akram Zaatari.

Deschenes’s piece Gallery 7 (2015) is a site-specific installation commissioned by the Walker, and an homage to the museum. A year-long production, it utilized the natural light from the gallery’s windows to expose a series of free-standing panels coated with photosensitive paper.

Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art announced today that it has tapped Eric Crosby, the associate curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, to be its new Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. He starts in the new role in October.

Crosby had been at the Walker since 2009, where his curatorial credits included Liz Deschenes’s first solo museum outing and a rehang of part of the Walker’s permanent collection that focused on its extensive Fluxus holdings.

The home where Abstract Expressionist giant Willem de Kooning had his first East Hampton’s studio in the leafy hamlet of Springs back in 1961 has opened its doors as part of an artist-in-residence program. A community of skilled creative types will live and create on the estate.

But the retreat, which began its fledgling residency this past May, is not exactly what you might expect when you hear the name de Kooning. The newest artist-in-residence program is not a visual-artists’ residency like the ones at UCLA’s Hammer Museum, the Walker Art Center, or Artpace.

Bartholomew Ryan, an Irish-born curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, will be the new Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum.

Mr. Ryan, 38, a native of Dublin, begins his duties here on May 18. He replaces Nicholas Chambers, who left in November to return to his native Australia.

Mr. Ryan earned a bachelor’s degree in drama and theater studies from Trinity College in Dublin. In 2002, he moved to New York City, where he waited tables while working as an actor, he said in a telephone interview.

Anyone who walks through the International Pop show at the Walker Art Center will come to a large white canvas marked with a number of black splotches.

It's not an ink blot test, but a portrait of President John F. Kennedy that demonstrates the power of pop art.

"There's no face," Walker Curator Bart Ryan said. "It's just a black silhouette with a tie and a finger pointing."

Yet, with the shape of the hair, and the set of the shoulders it's definitely the iconic president. The portrait by Italian artist Sergio Lombardo is classic pop art, an artistic image drawn from popular culture to pack a punch.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary as a public institution, the Walker Art Center will embark on a $75 million renovation of its rolling campus, the final stage of an expansion that began more than a decade ago with the addition of a new building by the architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The new project will restructure the museum’s grounds and add a highly visible entrance pavilion, and it will also tie the Walker more closely to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden across the street, home to “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” the sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen that has become a Minneapolis landmark.

The Walker Art Center, which is 75 years old this year, has acquired around 4,000 objects amassed by the late Chinese-American artist Martin Wong. The artist Danh Vo turned the hoard into an installation, "I M U U R 2," for a solo show at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2013 after winning its Hugo Boss Prize.

When the Walker bought the piece last September, it fulfilled Vo’s hope that the trove would enter a museum. The Danish-­Vietnamese artist made the work from the bric-a-brac that Wong had collected over four decades: Chinese teaware, calligraphy, Disney figurines, and assorted Americana alongside Wong’s own paintings.

Bright abstracts draw visitors' eyes to one wall, then life-like full sized figures tucked into a corner might startle them. On another wall, a full-sized truck is caught mid-slither. Such displays will continue to offer visual surprises during the Walker Art Center's 75th anniversary celebrations, especially tonight, when the center unwraps some birthday presents.

They are the fruits of an effort that began three years ago, when the Walker launched a campaign to seek donated art to mark the three-quarter-century milestone. Its new show, "75 Gifts for 75 years," gives insight into the importance donations play in a museum's collection.

A familiar face in the Southern California museum world will soon be returning to the area.

Elizabeth Armstrong has been named the new executive director of the Palm Springs Art Museum, leaders announced on Friday. Armstrong, who will begin her new job in January, comes from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which she joined in 2008 and where she held the title of founding curator of contemporary art.

Before that, Armstrong was the acting director and chief curator at the Orange County Museum of Art, where she initiated the California Biennial, and organized such popular shows as "Birth of the Cool: California Art."

She was also a senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and put in 14 years as a curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In the year 2015, the Walker Art Center will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its founding as a public art center with a series of WALKER@75 exhibitions and programs beginning with "Art at the Center: 75 Years of Walker Collections." The exhibition launched October 16, 2014 with an opening-night party and weekend-long Walktoberfest celebration. Curated by the Walker’s executive director Olga Viso and guest curator Joan Rothfuss, the exhibition looks at 75 years of collecting at the Walker—a history distinguished by bold and often prescient acquisitions that challenge prevailing artistic conventions and examine the social and political conditions of the day. Many of the works collected breach the boundaries of media and disciplines and reflect the Walker’s multidisciplinary programming, which includes film and video, design, visual art and performing arts. Art at the Center also traces how the collection was shaped by the respective visions and collecting philosophies of its five directors as well as the generosity of the Walker family and key patrons.