The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the United States and, together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and the Cowles Conservatory, it has an annual attendance of around 700,000 visitors. The museum's permanent collection includes over 13,000 modern and contemporary art pieces including books, costumes, drawings, media works, paintings, photography, prints, and sculpture.
John Thomas Biggers was an African-American muralist who came to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance and toward the end of World War II. Biggers has worked on creating works critical of racial and economic injustice. He served as the founding chairman of the art department at Houston's Texas State University for Negroes.
Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, print-maker, installation artist, filmmaker, and professor who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. She is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Walker has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
Siah (Siavash) Armajani was an Iranian-American sculptor and architect known for his public art.
The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is an 11-acre (4.5 ha) park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. It is located near the Walker Art Center, which operates it in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. It reopened June 10, 2017 after a reconstruction that resulted with the Walker and Sculpture Garden being unified as one 19-acre campus. It is one of the largest urban sculpture gardens in the country, with 40 permanent art installations and several other temporary pieces that are moved in and out periodically.
Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores culture and politics, engaging subjects such as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism.
Bruce Charlesworth is an American artist, known primarily for his photographic, video and multimedia works.
Katharina Fritsch is a German sculptor. She lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Rock the Garden is an annual summer music festival organized by the Walker Art Center and Minnesota Public Radio held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Launched by the Walker in 1998, the event has been cosponsored by 89.3 The Current and Minnesota Public Radio since 2008, becoming more of an indie rock festival. Since its founding, Rock the Garden has highlighted national artists such as Wilco, Sonic Youth, David Byrne, MGMT, De La Soul, My Morning Jacket, Spoon, Bon Iver, and The Decemberists, and featured a diverse range of local bands like Low, Doomtree, Fog, Iffy, Cloud Cult, Howler, and Trampled By Turtles.
Nicole Eisenman is French-born American artist known for their oil paintings and sculptures. They have been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, they won a MacArthur Fellowship award for "restoring the representation of the human form a cultural significance that had waned during the ascendancy of abstraction in the 20th century."
Jacqueline "Jac" Leirner, is a Brazilian artist. Leirner is best known for the sculptures and installations she creates from mundane objects and ephemera, including devalued bank notes, used envelopes, promotional tickets, empty packs of cigarettes and plastic shopping bags.
A bronze bust of Martin Luther King Jr. was made by African-American artist Charles Alston in 1970, two years after King was assassinated. Alston received a commission from the Reverend Donald S. Harrington, of the Community Church of New York, to create a bust of King for $5,000. Five bronze busts were cast in 1970, each approximately 32 centimetres (13 in) high.
Standing Figure: Knife Edge is a bronze sculpture by the English artist Henry Moore. It was cast in two full-size versions: Standing Figure: Knife Edge in 1961, and a larger Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge in 1976. The sculpture also is sometimes known as Standing Figure (Bone) or Winged Figure.
Black Vessel for a Saint is sculptural piece commissioned and completed in 2017 by Theaster Gates for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The piece consists of a life-size statue of St. Laurence painted black and enclosed in a black cylinder, and served as Gates's first permanent outdoor commission.
Frank Big Bear is a Native American artist born in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota and is a member of the Anishinabe tribe. As a multimedia Native artist, Big Bear is known for his colorful, abstract display through his drawings, paintings, and photo collages that address various messages about Big Bear’s livelihood and worldly perception.
Seitu Jones is a multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer known for his large-scale public artworks and environmental design. Working both independently and in collaboration with other artists, Jones has created over forty large-scale public art works.
Martin Lee Friedman was a museum curator who spent the majority of his career as the director of the Walker Art Center and oversaw the opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1989.
Nyeema Morgan is an American interdisciplinary and conceptual artist. Working in drawing, sculpture and print media, her works focus on how meaning is constructed and communicated given complex socio-political systems. Born in Philadelphia, she earned her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art and her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She has held artist residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Smack Mellon. Morgan's works are in the permanent collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Menil Collection.
Malcolm Haynie Myers was an American painter, printmaker and professor known primarily for his Intaglio-style engravings. His work is included in numerous museum collections.