Today at the Walker Art Center

Walker After Hours/Preview Party : Exhibition Preview Party

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 03:00:00 GMT

Close encounters of another kind. Walker After Hours celebrates the reinstallation of the permanent collection with a party allowing you to view Event Horizon and Benches & Binoculars before the galleries open to the public. Join us to celebrate the exhibitions and to socialize with other Walker Art Center fans. Music, film screenings, Party People Pictures photo booth, snacks, drinks, art makingAfter Hours is a party not to miss.

After Hours Party Schedule
Friday, November 20th
Doors open at 9 pm.
Party ends at Midnight.
Music: 9:30 to11:30 pm DJ Scott Stulen in the Cargill Lounge
Music: 10:00 to 11:45 pm Lookbook in Gallery 8
Film: 9:30 and 10:30 pm Screenings of Scorpio Rising in the Lecture Room
Special Performance: 10 pm and 11 pm Dafnis Prieto and Judith Sanchez Ruiz in the Burnet Gallery
Art Making: 9:15 to 11:30 pm Art Making ActivityYoure the Curator
All evening: Cash bars, complimentary Wolfgang Puck snacks, Party People Pictures, all galleries open, Walker Shop open.

Tickets: 612.375.7600 or purchase online. New members receive one free party ticket (or other premiums) for joining, while supplies last. The Vineland Place ramp is available during this event at the standard $4 rate.

Dan Graham: Beyond : Exhibition

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:00:00 GMT

One of contemporary art's most innovative figures, Dan Graham has been at the forefront of numerous artistic developments since the 1960s, from the rise of conceptualism and minimalism to video and performance to explorations of architecture and the culture of rock and roll. His rejection of the high-seriousness of modern art emerged at the same moment as Pop art, and the fluid, democratic quality of his work continues to exert a powerful influence on younger generations.

This ground-breaking retrospective, the first in the U.S., showcases Grahams expansive body of workincluding his innovations with video and performance, glass-and-mirror pavilions that play off architecture and public spaces, and magazine projects, as well as media installations, prints, drawings, photographs, and writing. In tracing the evolution of Grahams work across its major stages, the exhibition highlights persistent underlying motifs and concernsmost notably, the changing relationship of individual to society, as filtered through American mass media and architecture.

Dan Graham: Beyond comes to the Walker following presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (February 15 - May 25, 2009) and New Yorks Whitney Museum of American Art (June 25 - October 11, 2009). A fully illustrated scholarly catalogue with major essays by exhibition co-curators Chrissie Iles (Whitney) and Bennett Simpson (MOCA), and many others, is available in the Walker Shop.

Haegue Yang: Integrity of the Insider : Exhibition

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

From mundane objects and materials such as venetian blinds, theatrical and decorative lights, infrared heaters, scent emitters, and fans, Haegue Yang creates complex and nuanced installations that are informed by poetry, politics, and human emotions. This solo exhibition, Yangs first in a U.S. museum, features a major installation, Yearning Melancholy Red, which the Walker co-commissioned with REDCAT, Los Angeles, as well as photos, videos, and sculptures.

Born in 1971, Yang lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. She represented the Republic of Korea in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Portikus, Frankfurt. She also participated in the 2006 Sao Paulo Biennial; the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); and the 2008 Turin Triennale. The Walkers 2007 exhibition Brave New Worlds was Yangs first U.S. exhibition.

Curator: Doryun Chong

Burrowing Inward: Short Films by Jacques Drouin and Guy Maddin : Screenings from the Collection

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 05:00:00 GMT

This selection of works from the Walkers Ruben/Bentson Film and Video Study Collection showcases two short pieces about artists entering the worlds depicted in their art. In Canadian Jacques Drouins brilliant pinscreen animation Mindscape (1976, 8 minutes), a painter saunters through the landscape on his canvas. Fellow Canadian Guy Maddins Odilon Redon (or The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity) (1995, 5 minutes) plays with the imagery of Redons famous drawing as a steam train hurtling about in a surreal scenario populated with grotesque and seductive characters.

Robert Irwin: Slant/Light/Volume : Exhibition

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Throughout his long career, Robert Irwin has pondered whether we ever have an absolutely pure or direct moment in front of a work of art. This installation, last on view 20 years ago, represents his effort to foster such an experience. Part of a series of powerfuland temporaryworks the artist created using oblique planes of translucent scrim fabric, it was commissioned by the Walker in 1971 as part of Works for New Spaces, the inaugural exhibition of its Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building. The untitled piece, which Irwins preparatory drawings and notes refer to as Slant/Light/Volume, was last on view 20 years ago; now, its installation in the Friedman Gallery provides an opportunity for a new generation to see this pivotal work.

Irwins transformative pieces in the 60s and 70s helped to define the aesthetics and conceptual issues of the West Coast Light and Space movement. Along with fellow artist James Turrell, he explored how phenomena are perceived and altered by consciousness, in effect orchestrating the act of perception. His seemingly simple architectural interventions are philosophically rich exercises in the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.

Dirt on Delight: Impulses That Form Clay : Exhibition

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 05:00:00 GMT

This exhibition presents significant work in clay by 22 artists spanning four generations. Ranging from modestly scaled pots to figurines to large sculptures, these objects cross a spectrum of conventional delineations among fine art, craft, and outsider practices. Collectively they suggest that clay appeals to basic impulses, starting with the delight of building form, coupled with the anxiety of completion. All of the works on view appear to be in some state of flux or growth. Clay is a base material. From potsherds to porcelain fixtures, clay is synonymous with the building of industries and cultures. At the same time, its very materialityits tactile malleability, earthen sensuousness, and humiditymakes it the medium of more elemental associations and expressions. The immediacy with which clay allows one to build form and create ornament underlies its appealespecially in relation to modes of fabrication that seem to take art increasingly out of artists hands. More specifically, this exhibition is an opportunity to examine not only clays appeal but craft in general. The artists in Dirt on Delight include the current generation (Nicole Cherubini, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Jeffry Mitchell, Sterling Ruby, and Paul Swenbeck), artists who emerged during the 1990s (Ann Agee, Kathy Butterly, Jane Irish, Arlene Shechet, and Beverly Semmes), those who established clay as a critical material during the 1960s and 70s (Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Ron Nagle, Ken Price, Adrian Saxe, Beatrice Wood, and Betty Woodman), and historic and outsider figures (Lucio Fontana, Peter Voulkos, and Rudolf Staffel, as well as George Ohr and Eugene Von Bruenchenhein).

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Elemental : Exhibition

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 05:00:00 GMT

By the mid-1960s, critics and artists heralded the arrival of Minimalism, an idea-based sensibility that seemed more in keeping with Americas embrace of its burgeoning space program and new technologies than the Abstract Expressionists mining or the subjective and the Pop artists adoption of banal material culture. Although the artists in this exhibition make use of many of the same formal devices and geometries, their differing or even opposing points of view with regard to influences, form, and content opened up the discourse surrounding the movement in later decades. Major works by Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Fred Sandback, and Richard Serra provide a foundation for the exhibition which showcases one of the strongest areas of the Walkers collection.