Show & Tell @ Walker Art Center, Minneapolis - An interactive exhibition designed specifically for children

Show & Tell

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

November 20, 2025 – April 5, 2026

The Walker Art Center will open an interactive exhibition designed specifically for children ages four to nine, inviting one-of-a-kind play and learning among some of the museum’s youngest visitors. Titled Show & Tell, the exhibition features artworks from the Walker’s renowned collection that connect with kid-friendly subjects such as animals, alphabets, food, miniature worlds, and imaginary creatures. Among the artists included are Fischli/Weiss, Katharina Fritsch, Jeffrey Gibson, Cas Holman, Caroline Kent, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Yinka Shonibare, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. Presented in a vibrant, specially designed environment, the exhibition emphasizes participatory, hands-on exploration and encourages kids to engage their senses and imaginations. 

Show & Tell continues the Walker’s approach to leveraging its growing collection to engage audiences in new and compelling ways. It follows the institution’s multi-part presentation Make Sense of This, which featured collection works and invited visitors to provide feedback on content that they might like to see in the galleries, and the complete reimagining of the Walker’s collection galleries, under the title This Must be the Place. The new collection galleries, which opened last summer, took learnings from Make Sense of This and grounded the presentation in accessible and resonant themes relating to the idea of “home.” Show & Tell also reflects the Walker’s commitment to cross-disciplinary collaboration, with the exhibition resulting from the joint efforts of the institution’s Visual Arts, Moving Image, Design, and Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact teams.

Show & Tell engages young visitors through distinct zones, designated by lively graphics that empower kids to have fun and create meaning on their own terms:

● FIND: This zone is anchored by a bespoke wall, which invites visitors to discover artworks by peering through an array of porthole windows, behind which artworks are installed in cavities within the wall. The wall engages with surprise and gameplay, allowing kids to move between the portholes to encounter a range of works, including sculptures, videos, and sound works by artists, including Mark Bradford, Katharina Fritsch, Claes Oldenburg, Yinka Shonibare, and Daniel Spoerri.

● READ: This zone focuses on the power of storytelling. Featuring comfortable seating, READ includes a selection of illustrated children’s books that families can listen to or read together. Interactive activities in the space as well as artworks by Julie Buffalohead, Andrea Carlson, Amy Cutler, and Jacob Lawrence encourage families to imagine and tell their own stories.

● PLAY: This zone focuses on hands-on interaction through two major installations: Mama Critter (2024) by Cas Holman and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled 2006 (pavilion, table, and puzzle representing the famous painting by Delacroix La Liberté Guidant le Peuple, 1830). Mama Critter is an arched structure that invites crawling, sliding, and building, as well as engagement with smaller elements called “Baby Critters” and “Thingies” that are moveable and alter the playscape in real time. Tiravanija’s large-scale work allows families to sit together at a picnic style table to work on a monumental jigsaw puzzle.

● MAKE: Taking a cue from colorful abstract works in the exhibition by such artists as Jeffrey Gibson and Caroline Kent, this zone includes a play table with color transparencies that allow kids to experiment with composition, color, and light. An interactive projector in the space makes it possible for the young artists to project their creations onto the gallery walls. Additionally, this zone features an interactive installation, in which visitors, inspired by the artist Erwin Wurm’s drawings, are invited to transform themselves into “one-minute sculptures” by donning colorful, oversized sweaters and using their bodies and the clothing to create new forms and poses.

● WATCH: This section offers a kid-friendly cinema space with a curated selection of films from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentsen Moving Image Collection, which includes more than 1,000 titles. With generous seating for children and their adults, the space offers a place to relax and engage in family-friendly films that range from short narratives to animations. 

Access and comfort ground the experience of Show & Tell. The majority of artworks are presented at low heights, and multi-sensory discovery is prioritized. Ample seating, an open floorplan, and phone charging locations consider the needs of parents and caregivers within the space. An audio guide narrated by local elementary school students offers a unique exploration of the exhibition, while the labels and family activity guide help prompt kids to connect their own experiences to the artworks on view. Label copy is also offered in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Somali to accommodate different family needs.

CURATORIAL TEAM:

Visual Arts: Siri Engberg, Senior Curator and Director of Visual Arts, and Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy; Moving Image; Patricia Ledesma Villon, Assistant Curator of Moving Image.

Show & Tell is organized jointly by the Walker’s Visual Arts, Moving Image and Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact staff members including Amanda Hunt, Head of Public Engagement, Learning, and Impact, Sarah Lampen, Associate Director of Learning and Accessibility, Janine DeFeo, Manager of Interpretation, La’Kayla Williams, Manager of School and Gallery Programs, Hannah Novillo Erickson, Manager of Lifelong Learning and Accessibility.

WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS

walkerart.org

Contemporary Korean Art Exhibition @ Mia, Minneapolis - Minneapolis Institute of Art - The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 

Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia)

March 23 - June 23, 2024

Jae Woo Oh 

(South Korean, born 1983)

Let’s Do National Gymnastics!, 2011

Single channel video 

Collection of the artist

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presents a new exhibition of contemporary Korean Art. The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989, organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, covers five themes: Dissonance, Reinvention, Coexistence, Being Seen, and Portraying Anxiety. The exhibition is on view in the museum’s Target Galleries.

The year 1989 marked a major shift in the world order, with Eastern European countries breaking away from the Soviet Union even as pro-democracy protests were crushed in China. It’s also the year the World Wide Web was invented, jumpstarting the modern era of interconnectivity. South Korea, in the wake of the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, transitioned from a long-standing military dictatorship to a legitimate democracy. An international travel ban was lifted, creating opportunities for global engagement, powerful economic growth, and cultural exchange. South Korean artists began to connect in earnest to the global art scene.

“The works in this serve as a snapshot of an important moment in Korean history, and global history,” said Katie Luber, Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President of Mia. “The diversity of feelings and experiences shared by these artists is profound. I hope that visitors will leave the exhibition with new insights into the ways this historical moment echoes today.”

Using a variety of mediums, including ceramics, painting, fiber, photography, lacquer, installation, metalwork, mixed media, embroidery, and video, these artists explore themes like conformity, displacement, gender and sexuality, coexistence, and dissonance, making universal connections that offer a deeper understanding of South Korea, its history, and its culture.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Dissonance

Ongoing tensions with North Korea and the effects of unprecedented economic growth have long been a part of daily life for South Koreans. The artists in this section reflect on South Korea’s past and present, the foundations of Korean society, and the paradoxes of a divided Korea. Dissonance abounds in works such as Hayoun Kwon’s single-channel video 489 years (2016). The viewer occupies the role of a soldier undertaking a daylong patrol of the demilitarized zone (DMZ), a strip of land separating North and South Korea along the 38th parallel. The work’s title, 489 Years, references the amount of time experts anticipate it would take to clear the one million mines in the area. Yet in the 11-minute single-channel video, the DMZ appears lush and filled with wildlife, the destructive potential of the area hidden.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989  - Reinvention

In the 1990s, South Korean artists began re-engaging with traditional arts and culture, infusing long-established aesthetics with a contemporary sensibility. Some of them employ centuries-old hand processes, materials, and narratives. All of them re-examine the past, addressing notions of resilience and transformation that are at once specific to their experiences and transcend geographical boundaries. Suki Seokyeong KANG’s vibrantly woven mats from 2018 and 2019, made to be used in the Chunaengmu royal dance, are inspired by Hwamunseok, a handcrafted straw mat tradition dating to the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392). These large-scale, abstracted weavings—made with Hwanmunseok thread, painted steel, and leather scraps—feature vibrant colors and abstract patterns that bridge contemporary practice with historic craft traditions.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Coexistence

As Korea participated in a new level of exchange, artists embraced the coexistence of new ideas and existing Korean values and artistic traditions, imbuing them with new meaning. Yoo Eui-jeong’s Treasures of Daily Life (2018) expresses this fusion of ideas in his series of recognizable corporate logos for companies including McDonald’s, Louis Vuitton, and Hello Kitty. Created in valuable materials such as ceramic, gold, and porcelain and presented as dishes served at a banquet, these cultural icons of today are presented as valuable treasures for the future.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Being Seen

The artworks on view in this section reflect the reality of the present and express hope for the future. Challenging patriarchal power structures and cultural standards, the artists center experiences that are often marginalized, silenced, or erased. Ultimately, they celebrate their resilience and that of their communities. An Attack by Green Horns, by Sang-hee Yun, is a pair of lacquered and gold dagger-like spikes worn on the front torso and back shoulder, protruding like horns. Drawing on experiences from her childhood, Yun created these spikes as a form of protection for the wearer, simultaneously ornate and ominous.

The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 - Portraying Anxiety

Responding to the tensions of being part of a collective and expressing individual identities, artists have turned to alternative ways of approaching, discussing, and challenging social mores. The works in this section raise questions about group participation and the acts of looking and being looked at, while touching on larger societal challenges in Korea and elsewhere. In Let’s do National Gymnastics, Oh Jaewoo fuses nostalgia and the messaging of collectivity and its continued impact on South Korean society. In this ten-minute, single-channel video, Oh evokes the compulsory exercise program prevalent in Korean schools between 1977 and 1999. The video is set to the militaristic beat of the Korean National Stretch Anthem in a commentary on the ubiquitous pressure to conform and the associated anxiety pervasive across Korean culture.

Works from Mia’s permanent collection are added to the exhibition in Minneapolis, including Do Ho Suh’s Some/One, a 2005 sculpture based on a coat of traditional armor. Composed from thousands of polished military dog tags, the work juxtaposes the collective (represented by the armored sculpture) with the individual (symbolized by the dog tags, each representing a single soldier). Also featured is a selection from Byron Kim’s ongoing Synecdoche portraiture project, currently comprised of more than 400 panels, each approximating the skin color of a person Kim has met.

“The artworks in this exhibition respond to South Korea’s complex history and culture, which have been marked by the division of a country, political upheaval, and economic growth, all within a few short decades,” said Leslie Ureña, Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art. “The exhibition has gathered artists who have made dynamic works that are deeply imbued with their shared artistic and social contexts. They invite us to consider the experience of exploring the past, present, and potential future.”

“The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989” is organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

MIA - MINNEAPOLIS INSTITUTE OF ART

2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404

artsmia.org

Michaela Eichwald @ Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Michaela Eichwald

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

November 14, 2020 – May 16, 2021

MICHAELA EICHWALD

Hermetic Order of the Golden Privation, 2016

Acrylic, graphite, oil crayon, varnish and tempera on pleather

51-3/16 x 41-5/16 in.

Private Collection, Berlin

MICHAELA EICHWALD

Steinzeit, 2015

Acrylic, oil, lacquer, and graphite on pleather

53 1/2 x 93 1/4 in / 136 x 237 cm

Private Collection, Minneapolis

Berlin-based artist and writer MICHAELA EICHWALD (Germany, b. 1967) maintains a restless and fearless belief in the possibility of painting. Bringing together pieces made over the last 15 years, this first US museum exhibition reveals the wide variety of references in her work, drawing on references to theology, philosophy, and art history, while also reflecting on her own life: her surroundings, thinking, reading, and friends.

Following studies in philosophy, history, art history, and German philology in Cologne, Michaela Eichwald emerged as an artist, with her first exhibition held at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in 1997. The context of Cologne—at the time, an undisputed center of European contemporary art—proved formative for Michaela Eichwald, a place where she maintained a lively exchange of ideas with many intellectuals and fellow artists, including Kai Althoff, Jutta Koether, Michael Krebber, Josef Strau, and Charline von Heyl, among others. In 2006, Michaela Eichwald began episodically blogging on uhutrust.com, providing a logbook with insight into her practice, everyday musings, and contemplations of current affairs.

MICHAELA EICHWALD

Die Neuen Bestimmungen Sind Da, 2013

Oil on canvas

27 x 73 in.

Private collection, Minneapolis

MICHAELA EICHWALD

Die Unsrigen sind fortgezogen, 2014

Acrylic, spray paint, lacquer and ball paint on pleather

330 x 138 cm / 130 x 54.3 in

Private Collection, Minneapolis

Bridging abstraction and figuration, Michaela Eichwald’s densely layered paintings—often made on unconventional surfaces such as printed canvas or imitation leather—bear an alchemical combination of acrylic, oil, tempera, spray paint, mordant, graphite, varnish, and lacquer. Whether in large- or small-scale formats, her works combine smooth paint strokes and quick smudges, at times revealing figurative forms and snippets of text. Discussing her preference for pleather, the artist notes, “artificial leather has something repulsive, inelegant, something that cannot be easily classified in art history.” This sense of refusing to fall within conventions underscores Michaela Eichwald’s practice. While her works are part of a lineage of abstraction, they resist any direct connection to a particular movement or period, instead churning through a history of painterly styles and combining them in surprising ways.

MICHAELA EICHWALD

Bulli, 2009

Mixed media in epoxy resin on plinth

10.5 x 7 x 9 cm | 4 1/4 x 2 3/4 x 3 1/

Private Collection, New York

MICHAELA EICHWALD 

1. Preis, 2008 

Resin, glass, plastic and steel 

18.5 x 9.5 x 9.5 cm 

7 1/4 x 3 3/4 x 3 3/4 inches 

To create her sculptures, Michaela Eichwald pours resin into bags, rubber gloves, and plastic bottles, in which she collects—like objects captured in amber—uncommon and dissonant materials, such as chicken bones, erasers, jewelry, mushrooms, fishing tackle, needles, candy, small drawings, and hard-boiled eggs. At once repulsive and alluring, grotesque and seductive, these pieces bring to mind associations ranging from trophies and time capsules to the human digestive system.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition is a newly commissioned long-form poem by her friend, writer Ulf Stolterfoht, created especially in response to the selection of works on view.

Curator: Pavel Pyś, curator, Visual Arts

WALKER ART CENTER

725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403

walkerart.org

Kenneth Tam @ Minneapolis Institute of Art - Mia

Kenneth Tam: Cold Open 
Minneapolis Institute of Art
December 23, 2017 - April 8, 2018

KENNETH TAM

sump (still), 2015

Single-channel HD video projection, sound; 7:37 min.

Courtesy of the artist

The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) presents an exhibition of video work by New York-­based artist KENNETH TAM (born 1982). “Kenneth Tam: Cold Open” challenges societal norms and assumptions regarding the male body as it explores themes of physical intimacy, sexuality, and vulnerability.

Tam’s practice involves the participation of strangers—often recruited through online message boards and forums such as Craigslist and Reddit—in situations orchestrated by the artist that range from tender to awkward to absurd. In his video work, Tam creates spaces for men to play, express their feelings, and bond with one another while questioning accepted behavior in heteronormative male culture. For his exhibition at Mia, Kenneth Tam presents a selection of three video works created over the past six years, including The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force (2011), sump (2015), and Breakfast in Bed (2016).

“Kenneth Tam uses the framework of reality television, role-playing, and team-building exercises to question how men are expected to interact with one another in contemporary society,” said Gabriel Ritter, Mia’s curator of contemporary art. “Through staged play, Tam examines the constructed identities that men come to rely on in group settings while enabling and facilitating their performance of self in front of the camera.”

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force (11:26 min.) documents an encounter between the artist and an unseen man sitting in a cardboard box—a continuation of a negotiation that began online where the two first met. Taking place in a suburban basement, sump (7:37 min.) explores the unspoken intimacies and tensions between father and son by documenting a series of physical interactions between the artist and his father. These invented rituals range from playful to strange. Part social experiment, part absurdist theater, Breakfast in Bed (32 min.) examines perceptions of masculinity and the male body through role-playing, team-building exercises, and improvised actions that were developed with seven participants throughout the filming, under the artist’s loose direction.

The compression is not subservient to the explosion; it gives it increased force and sump are played in sequence on a continuous loop daily; Breakfast in Bed is on view Thursdays and Sundays.

KENNETH TAM

Kenneth Tam was born in Queens, New York, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He works primarily in video, sculpture, and photography. He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City and his MFA from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. His work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions including Made in LA: a, the, though, only at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; List Projects: Kenneth Tam at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Mass.; and Core Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston.

Minneapolis Institute of Art - Mia
2400 Third Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55404
www.artsmia.org

Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis + Other Venues - House of Oracles

House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

October 16, 2005 - January 15, 2006

Celebrating an artist who offers alternatives to a Eurocentric world view, the exhibition House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective navigates the divide between East and West, tradition and the avant-garde. The first retrospective of this Chinese-born, Paris-based artist premieres at the Walker Art Center, before traveling to Massachusetts next year and to international venues to be announced. House of Oracles showcases drawings, sculptural objects, and installations from 1985 to the present, including the Walker-commissioned Bat Project IV, a re-creation of a section of the U.S. surveillance plane that set off an international controversy in 2001 when it collided with a Chinese fighter jet.

Working across diverse traditions and media, Huang Yong Ping has created an artistic universe comprised of provocative installations that challenge the viewer to reconsider everything from the idea of art to national identity to recent history. Once the leading figure of the mid-1980s Xiamen Dada movement—a collective of artists interested in creating a new Chinese cultural identity by bridging trends in Western modernism with Chinese traditions of Zen and Taoism as well as contemporary reality—Huang continues to confront established definitions of history and aesthetics. His sculptures and installations—drawing on the Western legacies of Joseph Beuys, Arte Povera, and John Cage, among others, as well as traditional Chinese art and philosophy—routinely juxtapose traditional objects or iconic images with modern references.

An important presence in the global art world since he participated in the groundbreaking 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre (Magicians of the Earth) at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Huang has shown his often breathtaking sculptures and installations in major contemporary art venues and at prestigious festivals in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. He was invited to the 2004 São Paulo Biennale, the 2003 Venice Biennale, the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, and the 1997 Gwangju and Johannes Biennales. He has been included in group exhibitions at, among many others, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, P.S. 1 and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. He represented France (with Jean-Pierre Bertrand) at the 1999 Venice Biennale and was a finalist in the biennial Hugo Boss Prize, held at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1998. Huang is represented in the Walker’s collection and was included in its 1998 exhibition Unfinished History.

The Walker’s retrospective exhibition began to take shape following deputy director and chief curator Philippe Vergne’s visit to Huang’s studio three years ago. There, Vergne paged through notebooks that meticulously catalogued ideas, commentaries, and documentation of two decades of the artist’s work. This visit was “an overwhelming experience, revealing the extent to which the work was consistent, ambitious, sarcastic and humorous, and sharply subversive,” recalls Vergne. “It also confirmed that Huang’s work, which seems to question all my certitudes about art and artmaking, was not geared towards easily achieved success or recognition, but aimed at changing, shifting the nature of aesthetic discourse.”

The resulting exhibition, House of Oracles, was conceived as a “total work of art,” a singular, immersive sculptural environment that is a hybrid of fun house, diorama, and menagerie. Realized in collaboration with Vergne and assistant curator Doryun Chong, the exhibition was designed by Huang as a metaphorical—and sometimes literal—journey through the “belly of the beast.” One of the first works viewers come upon is a monumental sculpture of an elephant mounted by a snarling tiger, a commentary on hunting safaris of bygone colonial days. Following this are passages formed by cages once inhabited by lions, with routes marked by light boxes reminiscent of an airport immigration checkpoint: “National” and ”Other.” The “spine” of the installation, a 50-foot wood python suspended from the ceiling, leads viewers to a replica of a Beaux Arts-style bank building from 1920s Shanghai, molded from 40,000 pounds of sand and concrete and slowly disintegrating during the exhibition’s run. The final section is dominated by the Walker-commissioned Bat Project IV, a 40-foot tunnel made from the cockpit of a decommissioned military plane—adorned inside with 300 stuffed bats—bamboo scaffolding, and plastic construction fences.

At the core of Huang’s work is a challenge to the accepted notions of art and what it does. The exhibition’s title, shared by one of the works on view, suggests the stimulating and awe-inspiring—perhaps even unsettling—experience the viewer might have. For when one enters a house of oracles, one does not exit without being profoundly changed by the experience.

House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective will be accompanied by a 250-page fully illustrated catalogue, the first to address the full range of Huang Yong Ping’s artistic accomplishments. Included will be an anthology of the artist’s writings translated for the first time into English; essays by Vergne and critic-curators Hou Hanru and Fei Dawei; and a conceptual map and dictionary on the artist’s work by Chong.

WALKER ART CENTER

725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403

walkerart.org

McKnight Photography Fellowship Exhibition at Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

McKnight Photography Fellowship Exhibition 

Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota

August 29 - September 22, 2000

Katherine E. Nash Gallery at University of Minnesota presents an exhibition featuring work from the 1999 University of Minnesota/McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowships for Photographers Program.

Funded by the McKnight Foundation and administered by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art, the purpose of the McKnight Fellowship Program is to support emerging and established Minnesota photographers whose work demonstrates excellence. The program is committed to encouraging and supporting a broad range of artistic sensibilities and approaches, thus enriching the quality and diversity of photographic art in the region.

These are the six 1999 Fellows featured in the exhibition:

WING YOUNG HUIE, a native of Duluth, presents selections from his black-and-white photographs of Minnesota neighborhoods. Included are images from his Lake Street Project, currently installed along the length of this Minneapolis thoroughfare, and from smaller projects undertaken in the Red River cities of Fargo and Moorhead.

JOHN C. JOHNSTON, a 1995 recipient of an M.F.A. degree from the University of Minnesota, makes color photographs of domestic landscapes. Unassuming at first glance, these carefully controlled views transform everyday objects into enigmatic, autobiographical narratives.

LYNN LUKKAS, a native and current resident of Minneapolis, is a new media artist with a special interest in photography’s capacity for describing place and time. Her project "Oculus: Tibet" combines modern technologies and the ancient desire to see and experience new places.

ROGER MERTIN, a St. Paul resident whose photographs have been collected and presented by scores of institutions worldwide, presents the latest chapter of a decade-long project documenting North American libraries funded by Andrew Carnegie. His large format color images consider the relationships between architecture, bibliography, and whimsy.

DEIRDRE MONK describes herself as a frustrated painter. With black-and-white prints as a foundation, Monk expressively and intuitively applies color and text, both enhancing what was in the original negative and adding new material. The pieces reflect Monk’s interest in the three-way relationship between author, audience, and subject.

ALEC SOTH, another Minneapolis native and resident, used his Fellowship to support a stream-of-consciousness exploration he has titled "From Here to There." Soth likens this photographic meandering, which produced both color prints and colorful captions, to Internet surfing, wherein one flashing interest dreamily segues into another.

University of Minnesota/McKnight Foundation Artist Fellowships for Photographers are available to Minnesota photographers at any stage of their career development. Fellowship applications are reviewed and funding decisions made by a review panel of three photography professionals from outside the state. Fellowships are awarded for a twelve-month period.

The exhibition will travel to Winona State University in November, and to Bemidji State University in January. An illustrated publication, available for no charge, accompanies the exhibition.

1998 McKnight Photography Fellows

Sheila Farrell ~ Inna Valin ~ David Goldes ~ Wayne Gudmundson ~ Richard Sennott ~ Keith Holmes

The Katherine E. Nash Gallery is located on the lower concourse of Willey Hall on the University of Minnesota’s west bank campus, Minneapolis.

www.mcknightphoto.umn.edu

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson 
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 
April 11 - July 11, 1999

Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson, who has used photography, text, and most recently, narrative film to raise complex social issues, is the subject of a Walker Art Center exhibition to be on view in Minneapolis April 11 July 11, 1999. Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson, curated by Walker Assistant Curator Siri Engberg, features the artist's most recent single- and multiple-projection film installations, including a work commissioned by the Walker, as well as photographic pieces related to the film projects. Photographs made by the artist during the shooting of the films will accompany each film installation, as will photographically based large-scale works printed on felt, a medium the artist has increasingly employed in her work. A gallery brochure with text will accompany the exhibition.

Lorna Simpson has been well known since the mid-1980s for her provocative photographs, paired with text, that address issues ranging from racial and sexual identity to notions of the body, to interpersonal communication and relationships. Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she received her M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied film and fine arts. She began her career as a documentary photographer but soon found herself, as she has said, "tired of the viewer's approach to looking at documentary images." Interested in the way a photograph is "read" she began to create conceptual compositions pairing minimalist black-and-white images with text. 

In Lorna Simpson's earliest works she used an African-American model, often wearing a simple white dress. Lorna Simpson removed all information that would allow the subject to be identified as a particular individual, thereby inviting the viewer's own experience as a means of interpreting the image and its text. In the mid-1990s Simpson began creating editions whose photographic imagery and texts were printed on panels of felt of the sort used on printing press beds. Often hung in groupings to create large-scale images or multi-image tableaux, the visual fragments combined to create an identity or narrative.

What began as an interest in the figure has given way in Simpson's more recent work to an interest in space and narrative, a shift coinciding with her recent explorations in the medium of film. In 1996, during a residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, she used the Wexner's Art and Technology Lab to create Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, a seven-projection film piece screened simultaneously on three walls. Each projection presents differing narratives delivered by characters who move in and out of what may or may not be an interlinking story. The following year Simpson made Call Waiting , a short black-and-white single-projection work that centers around notions of communication and relationships, presenting characters whose lives are woven together through a series of telephone conversations and interrupted calls.

In 1997-1998, Lorna Simpson participated in the Walker's Artist-In-Residence program working with Twin Cities community members and actors to create the film Recollection . Commissioned by the Walker, and first screened as part of the Hugo Boss Prize: 1998 at the Guggenheim Soho in New York, Recollection focuses on the characters' use of fragmented narrative memories to reconstruct past events. The film is accompanied by a new 18-foot-long felt piece incorporating photographs taken on location in Minneapolis. 

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson is made possible by generous support from the Arthur and Alice Kramer Foundation. Lorna Simpson's 1997-98 Artist Residency was part of the Walker Art Center's "New Definitions/New Audiences" initiative, a museum-wide project to engage visitors in a reexamination of 20th century art, made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The film Recollection was commissioned by the Walker Art Center through the Artist-in-Residence program, with additional support from the Penny McCall Foundation, New York.

WALKER ART MUSEUM
Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
www.walkerart.org

Updated 23.06.2019

Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
December 13, 1998 - March 7, 1999

More than any other postwar Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama (b.1929, Japan) has influenced the form and direction of artistic production in the United States. Between 1958, when she arrived in New York City, and the late 1960s, when performance began to dominate her art, she created a body of work that made a widely known and highly significant contribution to the contemporary scene. A comprehensive exhibition of works from this period, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 is co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Japan Foundation, in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition is the first at a U.S. museum to focus on Yayoi Kusama's work. It includes more than 50 paintings, collages, and sculptures from Yayoi Kusama's New York period, as well as reconstructions of three of the artist's precedent-setting environmental installations.

"Kusama's work has been dominated by a marathon dance of production that obliterates any separation between art and life," said Lynn Zelevansky, co-curator of the exhibition. "She and her art are wedded so inextricably that it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. In confronting the depth and breadth of her work one encounters an unusually raw form of invention."

Combining aspects of surrealism and abstract expressionism with elements from minimalism and pop art, Yayoi Kusama's work proved remarkably prescient of post-minimalism in the United States, a nascent trend that would not fully emerge until the latter half of the 1960s. It also set precedents for artwork focusing on the body that has been produced by some of today's most influential younger artists. Yet up until very recently Yayoi Kusama remained little known in the West, her vital contribution to contemporary art largely overlooked. Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958-1968 explores the decade that Yayoi Kusama lived and worked in New York. The exhibition premiered at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in March 1998 followed by a stop at The Museum of Modern Art. Following its showing in Minneapolis, it will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (April 29 July 4, 1999).

Yayoi Kusama gained attention shortly after arriving in New York by producing a series of paintings of the late 1950s and early 1960s that are covered with all-over "nets" of pattern. These almost monochromatic paintings, which she called Infinity Nets, are made up of a single element that is repeated to cover an entire, often very large, canvas, edge to edge. In the early 1960s, Yayoi Kusama began working in other media. Collages of air-mail and file-folder labels constitute a visual pun on the new minimal art that is unusual in its mix of elegance and humor.

Her sculpture consists of household furniture and mundane objects covered with stuffed phallus-like protrusions, forecasting a preoccupation with the body. Her first sculpture, Accumulation No. 1 (1962) was made using a frame of an old armchair as a support covered with stuffed phallic protrusions sewn from canvas. Yayoi Kusama's sculptures from this period were handmade and extremely labor-intensive. In Ironing Board (1963) a steam iron sits, face down, threatening to scorch a sea of phalluses covering the surface.

By 1965 she had introduced a profusion of color into her sculpture through the use of dotted and striped fabrics. Red Stripes (1965) consists of phallic forms sewn from red and white striped fabric, stuffed and mounted onto a wood backing. In her food obsession sculptures Yayoi Kusama applied dried macaroni to the surfaces of clothing and accessories. Macaroni Handbag (1965) is a simple purse covered with pasta, and then painted gold.

The exhibition includes reconstructions of three of Yayoi Kusama's installations: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1964), Infinity Mirror Room (1965), and Narcissus Garden (1966). In Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show , a protrusion-covered rowboat sits within a room papered with thousands of black-and-white reproductions of the same boat. Infinity Mirror Room consists of a four-sided mirrored room in which the floor has been taken over by red and white dotted phalluses. These are endlessly reflected and multiplied, along with the viewer, creating a dazzling and seemingly infinite space.

Yayoi Kusama's Narcissus Garden marks a pivotal moment in the artist's transition from installation to performance. It was created at the Venice Biennale in 1966. She was neither invited to show nor given permission to present her art that year at the Biennale, but her outdoor installation garnered a great deal of attention. The "garden" consisted of 1,500 identical mirrored balls spread across the lawns outside the Italian pavilion. At the Walker this work will be installed in the South house of the Cowles Conservatory in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

YAYOI KUSAMA was born in 1929 in Japan and arrived in New York in 1958 at the age of 29. During the period in review, her work was shown extensively in the United States and Europe. In New York, she exhibited with major painters and sculptors of the time, among them Claes Oldenburg, Robert Morris, and Andy Warhol. Abroad, she was included in exhibitions of the Nul and Zero groups, together with such figures as Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. After her return to Japan in the early 1970s, Yayoi Kusama was largely forgotten in this country. Recently, however, she has regained prominence, largely due to renewed interest and enthusiasm from a younger generation of artists.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 192-page catalogue with essays by co-curators Lynn Zelevansky, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Laura Hoptman, Assistant Curator, Department of Drawing, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and by two noted scholars of contemporary Japanese art, Alexandra Munroe and Akira Tatehata. The volume, published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, contains 94 color and 52 black-and-white illustrations.

WALKER ART MUSEUM
Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
www.walkerart.org

Updated 23.06.2019

Robert Colescott, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis - Recent Paintings - Touring Exhibition following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

January 24 - April 5, 1998

"There's a comic-maniac edge to these paintings produced by gross exaggerations and crazy juxtapositions. It's expressive of the insane collage of relationships I'm dealing with." -Robert Colescott

Following its premiere at the 47th Venice Biennale, the exhibition Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins a two-year United States tour at the Walker Art Center. Organized by independent curator Miriam Roberts for SITE Santa Fe, the exhibition honors Arizona-based artist ROBERT COLESCOTT, the first painter to represent the United States at the Biennale since Jasper Johns in 1988, and the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the prestigious festival.

On view in the exhibition are 20 paintings from the past decade that employ a figurative vocabulary that challenges stereotypes and engenders debate on the state of human relations in the United States. Now 72, the Arizona-based Robert Colescott continues to produce vitally significant work and is an important role model for a younger generation of artists exploring issues of racialization, identity, power, and gender. Employing a highly personal combination of narrative figuration blended with an ironic viewpoint to address the major social issues of his time, Robert Colescott has created one of the most powerful bodies of work in recent American art.

According to curator Miriam Roberts, "Like the world they depict, Colescott's polyrhythmic, improvisational paintings are full of surprises--in juxtapositions of forms and colors, in distortions of scale, in inventions and interplays of space and structure. They are filled with diverse references to the history of art itself, not only in homages to specific paintings, but to the traditional conventions of his chosen medium - history painting, portraiture, landscape, still life and allegory.

"Simultaneously seductive, hilarious and disturbing, the paintings of Robert Colescott depict a world of contradictions and dichotomies--between art and life, tragedy and comedy, men and women, black and white, oppressor and victim, Europe and Africa, past and present. It is a world of exploitation, missed opportunities, unfulfilled potential and lost love. Above all, it is a world of ironies, where people, things and events are never quite what they first seem."

Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings begins with works from 1987, a year that marked a turning point in the artist's career. Though he continued to use satire and narrative figuration, he moved beyond the controversial images of racial stereotypes for which he had become known. Colescott expanded his range and began exploring universal themes, venturing into the realm of mythological and religious allegory and sophisticated literary allusions. Writing in Arts magazine in 1988, Linda McGreevy said: "Colescott proves himself a moralist, a history painter in the deepest sense, whose webs of cultural cause and effect have come full circle to illuminate the present."

Born in Oakland, California, in 1925, ROBERT COLESCOTT studied at the University of California at Berkeley and with Fernand Léger in Paris before participating in the resurgence of figurative art on the West Coast during the 1950s. But it was his sojourn in Cairo, Egypt, in the 1960s that compelled the artist to infuse his work with a dynamic blend of color, historical reference, and style. Three thousand years of non-European art, a strong narrative tradition, formal qualities such as the fluidity of the graphic line, monumentality of scale, vivid color, and a sense of pattern--all these elements had a profound, immediate, and lasting impact on his work. Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Colescott has received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for Creative Painting and Drawing (1985).

An illustrated catalogue published in conjunction with the exhibition contains essays by Miriam Roberts and Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and a leading Colescott scholar; a poem by Peabody Award and American Book Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe; a photographic portrait by photographer and conceptual artist Carrie Mae Weems; an exhibition checklist; and selected biographical information.

The exhibition is an official presentation of the U.S. Government and was organized by Miriam Roberts for the U.S. Pavilion at the 47th Venice Biennale in association with SITE Santa Fe.

WALKER ART CENTER

Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403

www.walkerart.org