Today at the Walker Art Center

Rock Out! : Free First Saturday : Family Program

Sat, 7 Nov 2009 16:00:00 GMT

Families can see and be seen in a maze of reflective, sculptural pavilions in the exhibition Dan Graham: Beyond, at the Walker Art Centers Free First Saturday event Rock Out!, from 10 am3 pm Saturday, November 7. Participants will learn about this intriguing artist through a series of activities related to architecture and rock and roll. Highlights of the day include a performance by local pioneering punk band Suicide Commandos; two art-making activities where families construct 3-D forms with reflective materials; a story time about a five-piece punk band on Old MacDonalds Farm; and a self-guided activity sheet, I See You, filled with fun ideas for how to explore the Dan Graham exhibition.

Activities are free and available on a first-come, first-served basis from 10 am3 pm. Gallery admission is free from 10 am5 pm on Free First Saturday.

Performance: Suicide Commandos
Cinema, 11 am and 1 pm
Join Minnesotas pioneers of punk as they school families in the history of rock in this family-friendly performance and sharing session.

Story Time: Punk Farm by Jarret Krosoczka
Lecture Room, 10:30 am
Follow the story of a truly wild five-piece band, as Cow, Goat, Pig, Sheep, and Chicken make raucous music after Farmer Joe heads to bed.

Gallery Activity: I See You
Galleries 4, 5, 6, 10 am3 pm
Explore the exhibition Dan Graham: Beyond with a family activity sheet filled with a set of fun looking, drawing, and writing exercises. A tour guide will be in the galleries to answer questions about the artworks.

Art-Making for the Entire Family: Mirror, Mirror
Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab, 10 am3 pm
Design a 3-D model using transparent and reflective materials. Led by Ilene Krug Mojsilov.

Art-Making for the Entire Family: Puzzle Pavilion
Cargill Lounge, 10 am3 pm
Help construct an ongoing installation with mirror board throughout the day.

Little Red Flowers (Kan shang qu hen mei) : Directed by Zhang Yuan : Film

Sun, 8 Nov 2009 01:30:00 GMT

Four-year-old Qiang is sent to a kindergarten boarding school not long after the 1949 liberation. After failed attempts to win the coveted red flowers doled out for good behavior, he turns to rebellion. With Qiangs trials and tribulations serving as a microcosm of the confusion and conformity in post-revolution Chinese life, this heart-rending, beautiful film features a first-rate performance by its diminutive star, who achingly displays a loss of childhood innocence. 2006, 35mm, 92 minutes.

Final Fantasy + The Mountain Goats : Music

Sun, 8 Nov 2009 02:00:00 GMT

[Final Fantasys live shows] . . . compress all the wonder and virtuosity of an illusionists routine into three-and-a-half minute pop song New York Times

Join us at the Cedar for an intriguing double bill celebrating two of todays most distinctive voices. Canadian singer/composer/arranger Owen Pallett (Final Fantasy) creates infectious violin-based experimental pop that explores the lush, lovely, and highly processed sonic spaces between contemporary composition and unconventional rock. His intricately looping polyphonic songs, startling knack for string arrangements (Arcade Fire), and unabashedly pretty melodies have earned him international acclaim. The Mountain Goats, the long-running lo-fi/highbrow project of indie-rock icon John Darnielle, inhabits a candid and clever world where dark subjects and desperate characters are elucidated by prickly lyrics and strangely sunny melodies.

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

Working with non-traditional materials such as customized venetian blinds and sensory devices including lights, infrared heaters, scent emitters, and fans, Haegue Yang (b. 1971; lives and works in Berlin and Seoul) constructs complex and nuanced installations that collapse the space between the concrete and the fleeting. Yangs recent works explore the real and metaphorical relationships between her material surroundings and emotional responses, attempting to give form and meaning to experiences that exist outside conventional order. Her recent work has gravitated toward her thinking about historical figures, including the French novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras, whose work explored conditions of colonialism and reflected her commitment to the resistance movement, as well as the underground Korean revolutionary Kim San and the American journalist Nym Wales, whose encounters with Kim under life-threatening circumstances led to the publication of his biography. Yangs first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. features a major installation, Yearning Melancholy Red (2008), co-commissioned by REDCAT, Los Angeles, and the Walker, along with selections from the artists work from the past few years.

Haegue Yang was recently selected to represent the Republic of Korea in the 53rd Venice Biennale, opening in June 2009. Her recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao; REDCAT, Los Angeles; and Portikus, Frankfurt. She has also participated in important international exhibitions, including the 2006 Sao Paulo Biennial (2006); 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.