Lab Museum Design & Interpretation

Four willing parents--Lori Fhima, Marcus Harcus, Pamela Johnson, and Shannon Steven--took time to reflect on a few of their most cherished memories of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. What's a favorite moment you've had in the Garden? Marcus: I brought my three-year-old daughter to Arty Pants last year and tried to walk her through some exhibitions, but [...]

by Betsy Carpenter, Doryun Chong, Peter Eleey, Siri Engberg, and Yasmil Raymond, visual arts curators Philippe Vergne is a brilliant curator and that rare combination of sparkling intellect, humor, and grace. He has an infectious love of art and an incredible, innate gift for working with artists--understanding them, connecting with their creative process, and communicating that [...]

“Born in Flames [by Lizzie Borden] is already controversial as one of the least assimilatable films for male viewers (they hate it) due to its assumption of an all-woman nonracist universe.” –B. Ruby Rich, Women’s Independent Film Festival, Minneapolis, 1983 “Anyone outside its target demographic of Trotskyite black lesbian separatists should avoid [Born in Flames] [...]

Through the glories of viral marketing, Fox 9 News discovered the UnConvention project I Approve This Message. Here, Jaime Reese interviews Chuck Olsen from The UpTake and Allison Herrera from ECP on the lawn outside the Walker. Sarah Peters, baby Anna, cameraman Tim, and I enjoyed the time outside in [...]

— The 1999 Design Insights Lecture Series poster for the Walker Art Center (co-presented by AIGA Minnesota) is simply the most thorough and exhaustively produced poster I have seen in my day. Thus the poster is a deserving addition to our Flat Files collection. With the informational side of the poster designed by Daniel Eatock and [...]

A few days ago, Theatre de la Jeune Lune announced that they are closing the doors of their warehouse home forever. Though there is no doubt that the spirit of Jeune Lune will live on in many different ways, the theatrical landscape of the Twin Cities will be different. Over the years, the Walker co-presented [...]

    From the moment the Republican National Committee chose to coronate its 2008 presidential candidate in St. Paul, hundreds of strands of people mobilized to have a presence. Republican Party officials populate one of the spectrum; on the other, the broad swath of individuals and interest groups driven to protest the convention. Somewhere in between are [...]

In conjunction with The UpTake and The UnConvention, we have just launched a new video project: I Approve This Message. The project is similar in scope to the Tell Us a Story About the Suburbs video project we did for Worlds Away. We want you to tell us what questions you’d like to ask the [...]

On June 14, Allison Herrera and I went to the St. Paul Neighborhood Network (SPNN), a public access channel, to help publicize the kick off of the project I Approve This Message, sponsored by The Walker and The UnConvention. Chuck Olsen from TheUpTake.org was on hand to talk about the power of citizen [...]

Untitled from matt peiken on Vimeo. Here are sights and sounds Saturday from the sold-out Rock the Garden concert in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (well, technically, the median between the Garden and the Walker Art Center … but we didn’t think Rock the Median sounded as catchy). I posted this video through Vimeo because it was [...]

Now that everyone has hopefully recovered from Rock the Garden, it is no doubt time to upload all the photos from the show to your favorite photo management application. For many of us, that means Flickr. If you are a flickr user and you have photos from Rock the Garden or just your visits to [...]

Recently, after receiving the latest issue of Z/X, designer and Walker alumni Layla Tweedie-Cullen was kind enough to answer a few of my questions regarding the publication: What is Z/X? What is its history and mission? Z/X is a visual arts publication established in 2004 at Manukau School of Visual Arts, a South Auckland art school [...]

As Minneapolis inaugurates the third largest annual Pride Festival in the country this weekend, New York based artist Sharon Hayes is visiting the Twin Cities to launch Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy, a public performance that will involve 70-100 local participants coming together to publicly demonstrate the relationship between love and politics [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3y6mtzYlgw For 15 years or thereabouts, the Walker Art Center’s frame shop has held a one-day sale, open only to staffers, to clean house of the dozens of hand-built frames from exhibitions past that are no longer usable. The latest was Wednesday — and my first here on staff — and I was stunned to see [...]

We all know that summer in Minneapolis is like heaven on earth, and while this may have something to do with it's relativity to the soulless, nadir that is our 9 month winter, it has equally as much to do with the wealth of awesome outdoor film opportunities that pop up like the crocuses we [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qsLHOgMl0o The Walker Art Center isn’t just a home for the best in contemporary art — it’s also available for rent. One tenant is the annual Push Institute Conference. PUSH 2008 (tagline: “The Fertile Delta”) attracted business leaders, politicians, artists, economists and others for two of inspiration and future-gazing. The conference — or at least the [...]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bemMq4io2YI Former Walker director (and now director emeritus) Martin Friedman and his wife, Mickey, were at a reception in their honor Friday afternoon at the Gallery 8 Cafe. Just before the mass of staff poured in for free wine and crackers, Martin Friedman discussed his interactions 20 years ago with artists placing their works in the [...]

I finally have images from my exhibition at Franklin Art Works to post (there are more posted here). I didn't plan for this to be an exhibition for kids, but one day when I was working in my studio, my six-year-old came upstairs, said "wow!" and stood and stared. The sculptures are on tall platforms, with [...]

It’s Monday morning, and like many of you I’m sitting down to my computer for the day. I’ll check my email (office and GMail), see what’s new in the blogosphere (Google Reader), maybe catch up on the world a bit (Google News), and finally start my day of programming. (searching Google to see if [...]

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