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

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love - Retrospective Exhibition @ SFMOMA, San Francisco + Walker Art Center, Minneapolis + Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love

SFMOMA, San Francisco 

September 27, 2025 – March 1, 2026 

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

May 14 – August 23, 2026

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

September 26, 2026 – February 7, 2027

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Wind and Water, 1975

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

acquired through the generosity of the Modern Women’s Fund, 

Alice and Tom Tisch, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz, 

Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Michael S. Ovitz, 

Ronnie F. Heyman, and Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Photo: Ruben Diaz

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announces the first major museum retrospective devoted to the full breadth of the work of painter Suzanne Jackson, on view from September 27, 2025, to March 1, 2026. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love celebrates Jackson’s groundbreaking artistic vision through more than 80 lyrical paintings and drawings from the 1960s to the present that explore her use of color, light and structure to expand the parameters of painting and illuminate the persistence of peace, love and beauty.

Debuting at SFMOMA and co-organized with the Walker Art Center, this comprehensive survey spans six decades, from Jackson’s early ethereal compositions on canvas that layer luminous washes of paint and depict figures intertwined with nature to recent three-dimensional paintings that suspend acrylic paint midair. SFMOMA will also premiere a new large-scale commission by the artist, inspired by her longstanding close observations of the natural world. Looking at influences beyond the artist’s studio, What Is Love examines how Jackson’s paintings have been informed by her experiences as a dancer, poet and theater designer, as well as her collaborations with radical artist communities.

Following its presentation at SFMOMA, the exhibition will travel to the Walker Art Center (May 14–August 23, 2026) and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027).

“Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love promises to be a groundbreaking exhibition, bringing much-deserved attention to Jackson’s achievements as an influential painter who has created awe-inspiring compositions informed by her deep respect for ancestral traditions and the natural world,” said Christopher Bedford, SFMOMA Helen and Charles Schwab Director. “In the sixth decade of her career, Jackson continues to innovate by extending paint into three dimensions and embedding it with found materials to reflect on personal and cultural histories.”

“Suzanne Jackson’s life has been driven by an insistent search for creative freedom and a bohemian spirit that is indebted to the San Francisco ethos in which she was raised,” said Jenny Gheith, curator of the exhibition and SFMOMA Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture. “What Is Love captures the curiosity, wonder and resilience of Jackson’s life’s work, which is marked by adventurous experimentation, a dedication to supporting other artists and a persistent belief in the connection between all living things.”

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

For decades, my figurative forms and challenged shapes have pushed paint beyond the expected. With intentional reflective layers and floating luminous pigment, my work pursues alternative ways of seeing and interpreting spatial relationships of historical events, the lives of Black, Indigenous, and all global people, existing as “environmental abstractions” of our world.

—Suzanne Jackson, 2025

Suzanne Jackson was born in 1944 in St. Louis and shortly thereafter moved with her family to San Francisco, where she would spend the first eight years of her childhood. Her family relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1952, and the remote natural landscape inspired her to learn to paint. In 1961, Jackson returned to San Francisco and spent her formative college years among the bohemian counterculture, studying art and theater at San Francisco State University and dancing with the Pacific Ballet. In 1967 she moved to Los Angeles, where she studied drawing with artist Charles White and became part of a radical artist community.

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Cover of Suzanne Jackson’s publication 

What I Love: Paintings, Poetry, and a Drawing, 1972 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

From 1968 to 1970, she ran Gallery 32, a self-funded exhibition space, out of her Los Angeles studio. At Gallery 32, Betye Saar and Senga Nengudi were among the artists featured in The Sapphire Show: You’ve Come A Long Way Baby (1970), credited as the first survey of African American women artists in Los Angeles. What Is Love brings together several artworks originally shown at Gallery 32 by Saar, Nengudi, David Hammons, Timothy Washington, Dan Concholar, John Outterbridge and Emory Douglas, among others, and will surface new research on its exhibition history. Jackson has reflected, “Gallery 32 functioned as a meeting space for its members to question history, culture and risky improvisations.”

In 1971, Suzanne Jackson gave birth to her son, a major life event that sparked tremendous creative growth. The following year, she self-published her first book of poems and paintings, titled What I Love. More than 50 years later, the title for Jackson’s retrospective turns “What I Love” to “What Is Love,” a provocation that broadens the understanding of the creativity that Jackson has pursued throughout her career.

Organized chronologically, Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love begins with Jackson’s first mature paintings and drawings that she made during the late 1960s and the early 1970s, many of which are the largest she has made to date. In these paintings, Suzanne Jackson treats acrylic paint like watercolor by setting down layers of washy pigment to create an ethereal, translucent quality. Depicting images from her dreams, Jackson’s lyrical symbolism often includes animals, plants, hearts and hands that communicate human connections to nature, universal love and unity. Jackson’s deep respect for ecology, continual study of dance and movement, and belief in her ancestors’ integration with the natural world can be seen in her most ambitious painting on canvas, In A Black Man’s Garden (1973), a large-scale triptych. Suzanne Jackson exhibited these early paintings at Ankrum Gallery, an important Los Angeles space for African American artists, along with Brockman gallery and Heritage Gallery.

Outside of the studio, Suzanne Jackson continued her advocacy for other artists, bringing together nearly 180 artists for the 1972 Black Expo in San Francisco. She also served alongside Ruth Asawa, Noah Purifoy, Gary Snyder and Peter Coyote on the California Arts Council (formed in 1976) and helped secure funding for public artworks through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), including two of her own murals, Wind (1978) and Spirit (1977–79).

In the 1980s, Suzanne Jackson moved between Los Angeles, the small mountain town of Idyllwild, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In Idyllwild, where she taught painting and dance, she created small-scale studies of leaves, trees and the mountains that surrounded her. This section of the exhibition brings together rarely seen paintings, works on paper and handmade books. After the unexpected death of her father in 1981, she began El Paradiso (1981–84)—a quintessential composition from this period—named after the bird of paradise, a symbol of freedom for the artist.

Suzanne Jackson stretched her artistic practice further when she earned an MFA in design at Yale University in 1990 and continued to work full-time designing costumes and sets for the theater. With limited resources and time for her studio practice, she began to experiment with leftover scenic Bogus paper (thick sheets of paper that cover the floor when sets are painted). Jackson’s paintings on this material often feature sculptural textures, a darker palette and rougher edges, with forms that bridge abstraction and figuration, as in Sapphire & Tunis (2010–11).

In 1996, Suzanne Jackson moved to Savannah, Georgia, where she continues to live and work. The charged Southern landscape prompted Jackson to further research her ancestral history and to work again in nature, often bringing her students from the Savannah College of Art and Design to sketch in locations with histories significant to enslavement. During this time, she began creating otherworldly paintings that suspend acrylic paint in midair, embedding the surfaces with personal ephemera and various found and sourced materials. These awe-inspiring, three-dimensional paintings are the most experimental of her career, with a focus on structure, light and the environment that relate to her background in theater and dance. Crossing Ebenezer (2017), which includes red netting from fire log bags that suggests both spilled blood and a distressed flag, memorializes a Civil War–era massacre of emancipated African Americans who were drowned in Ebenezer Creek, a tributary of the Savannah River.

SUZANNE JACKSON 

Hers and His, 2018 

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchase, by 

exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim 

© Suzanne Jackson, courtesy Ortuzar, New York

Photo: Timothy Doyon

Jackson’s recent paintings also convey reflections on spirituality and aspects of her autobiography. Hers and His (2018), one of her most personal paintings, is dedicated to her parents and incorporates “his and hers” pillowcases and segments of her mother’s quilt block patterns. Created nearly 10 years after her mother’s passing, this work was inspired by a lecture by artist Faith Ringgold, who said that if your mother left unfinished quilts, it is your responsibility to complete them.

The exhibition concludes with ¿What Feeds Us? (2025), a new commission that reflects on the global environmental crisis. This large-scale installation, integrating organic materials such as moss and tree bark with plastic and trash, is built around a central sculptural component. Additional hanging elements combine acrylic paint with found materials, such as African fabric scraps, Indian sari curtains, Korean and Japanese papers. Addressing themes of migration and improvisation, this new work honors connections that exist across all living things.

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - PUBLICATION

The exhibition will be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue that charts the full arc of Jackson’s life and multifaceted artistic vision. This 272-page monograph published by SFMOMA in association with Princeton University Press is edited by Jenny Gheith and includes essays and contributions by Kellie Jones, Paulina Pobocha, Tiffany E. Barber, Taylor Jasper, Molly Garfinkel and Jodi Waynberg, Taylor Renee Aldridge, and Meredith George Van Dyke. Jackson’s voice features prominently in a series of dialogues with fellow artists Senga Nengudi, Betye Saar, Fred Eversley and Richard Mayhew and a conversation about her process and new commission with SFMOMA paintings conservator Jennifer Hickey.

SUZANNE JACKSON: WHAT IS LOVE - CURATORS

Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. The exhibition is curated by Jenny Gheith, Curator and Interim Head of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Taylor Jasper, Susan and Rob White Assistant Curator, Visual Art at the Walker Art Center. Curatorial support is provided by Auriel Garza, curatorial assistant, San Francisco Museum of Art, and Laurel Rand-Lewis, curatorial fellow, Visual Arts, Walker Art Center.

SFMOMA 

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

151 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94103

www.sfmoma.org

Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody @ The Broad, Los Angeles + Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto + Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody

The Broad, Los Angeles

May 27 – October 8, 2023

KEITH HARING

Untitled, 1982 

Baked enamel on steel, 43 x 43 inches, 

The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection, Los Angeles

© Keith Haring Foundation

KEITH HARING

Red Room, 1988

Acrylic on canvas, 96 x 179 in. (243.8 x 454.7 cm) 

The Broad Art Foundation 

© Keith Haring Foundation

The Broad presents a special exhibition Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody. Organized by The Broad, this show is the first ever museum exhibition in Los Angeles to present Keith Haring’s expansive body of work and will feature over 120 artworks and archival materials. Known for his use of vibrant color, energetic linework and iconic characters like the barking dog and the radiant baby, Keith Haring’s work continues to dissolve barriers between art and life and spread joy, all while being rooted in the creative spirit and mission of his subway drawings and renowned public murals: art is for everybody.

Following its debut in Los Angeles, Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody will travel to the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, from November 11, 2023 to March 17, 2024, and then to the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, from April 27 to September 8, 2024.

Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Keith Haring moved to New York City in 1978 to study art. He quickly became a staple within the downtown New York arts community with the likes of artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol. Keith Haring’s output in the coming decade can be understood in the spirit of the countercultural and nightlife scenes of the 1980s, often organizing exhibitions at the Club 57 nightclub and other alternative venues. This sensibility is palpable in his subway drawings–of which he created over 5,000 throughout his career–where his visionary use of line could be experimented with in quick movements, available to the wide public who took the New York subway. Eli and Edythe Broad, who first began to collect contemporary art deeply in the 1980s, were drawn to the social and political nature of Keith Haring’s work early on, first entering the collection in 1982. Forty years later his legacy continues to garner international acclaim and recognition.

“Keith Haring’s global influence and enduring impact are profound, and The Broad is thrilled to bring our audience in Los Angeles this sweeping exhibition of his work,” said Joanne Heyler, Founding Director of The Broad. “It is our distinct pleasure to share a deep and varied representation of his emblematic visual language and to highlight the prolific ways he spoke through his art and activism about social issues while celebrating joy, solidarity, community and hope.”

Keith Haring: Art is for Everybody explores both his artistic practice and life, with much of the source material for the exhibition coming from his personal journals. Works presented span from the late-1970s when he was a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York up until 1988, just two years before the artist died from AIDS-related illness at the age of 31. Keith Haring’s participation in nuclear disarmament and anti-Apartheid movements are featured prominently in the show, as well as works that take on complex issues that remain crucial today from environmentalism, capitalism, and the proliferation of new technologies to religion, sexuality, and race. In the last gallery, significant works from the late 1980s is accompanied by framed posters illustrating the artist’s activism within the HIV/AIDS crisis. 

The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph catalog published by the museum in collaboration with DelMonico Books and features essays by The Broad’s Curator and Exhibitions Manager Sarah Loyer, Kimberly Drew and Tom Finkelpearl; a roundtable conversation with Patti Astor, Kenny Scharf, and Kermit Oswald; and reflections by George Condo, Ann Magnuson, Bill T Jones, Julia Gruen and Gil Vazquez.

“Keith Haring’s belief that art should be accessible to all is central to the exhibition and integral to The Broad’s mission,” said Sarah Loyer, Curator and Exhibitions Manager. “With this exhibition, our audience will have the opportunity to dive deep into Haring’s work, both as an artist and as an innovator who completely shifted the landscape of contemporary art to this day.”

Divided into ten galleries in total, the expansive exhibition will feature the breadth of mediums Keith Haring worked within, including video, sculpture, drawing, painting, and graphic works, as well as representations from the artist’s enormous output of public projects, from the subway drawings to his public murals. Major works held in the Broad collection such as Untitled, 1984 and Red Room, 1988 will be on view in addition to key loans from many institutional and private collections, including art, ephemera and documentation provided by the Keith Haring Foundation in New York, established by the artist in 1989. The show features immersive elements, such as a gallery lit by blacklight soundtracked by playlists created by the artist himself. Additionally, the Shop at The Broad will be transformed, taking inspiration from Keith Haring’s artistic retail space The Pop Shop, which first opened in 1986 in the SoHo neighborhood of New York. Much like its original format, The Broad uses this component of the exhibition to make Keith Haring’s line accessible to the widest possible audience.

“Much like the work of Keith Haring, his idea that Art Is for Everybody is as profound in its simplicity as it is in its complexity. We invite everyone to The Broad museum for a closer look at why his practice, activism, courage, and accessibility continue to resonate, perhaps now more than ever,” said Gil Vazquez, Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation.

Additionally on view for free in The Broad’s third-floor galleries throughout the exhibition will be works by contemporaries of Keith Haring including Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, and Andy Warhol, among others.

THE BROAD

221 S. Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012

www.thebroad.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

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

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