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 U.S.: together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and 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.
The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin, is a bronze sculpture situated atop a stone pedestal depicting a nude male figure of heroic size sitting on a rock. He is seen leaning over, his right elbow placed on his left thigh, holding the weight of his chin on the back of his right hand. The pose is one of deep thought and contemplation, and the statue is often used as an image to represent philosophy.
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 created works critical of racial and economic injustice. He also served as the founding chairman of the art department at Houston's Texas State University for Negroes, a historically black college.
Kara Elizabeth Walker is an American contemporary painter, silhouettist, printmaker, 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 was awarded a MacArthur fellowship in 1997, at the age of 28, becoming one of the youngest ever recipients of the award. She has been the Tepper Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University since 2015.
Siavash "Siah" Armajani was an Iranian-born 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.
Katharina Fritsch is a German sculptor. She lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Rock the Garden was an annual summer music festival organized by the Walker Art Center and Minnesota Public Radio held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that ran from 1998 - 2022. Launched by the Walker in 1998, the event was cosponsored by 89.3 The Current and Minnesota Public Radio after 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.
Spatial Concept: Nature is a series of bronze sculptures by Lucio Fontana designed between 1959 and 1960. A series of these sculptures cast in 1965 is installed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., United States, and a set cast in 1961 is owned by the Walker Art Center and installed in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in Minneapolis, United States.
Nicole Eisenman is a French-born American artist known for her oil paintings and sculptures. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship (1996), the Carnegie Prize (2013), and has thrice been included in the Whitney Biennial. On September 29, 2015, she 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.
Elyn Zimmerman is an American sculptor known for her emphasis on large scale, site specific projects and environmental art. Along with these works, Zimmerman has exhibited drawings and photographs since graduating with an MFA in painting and photography at University of California, Los Angeles in 1972. Her teachers included Robert Heineken, Robert Irwin, and Richard Diebenkorn.
Henriette Huldisch is a German-born American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to that, she was the Director of Exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Carissa Rodriguez is an American artist who lives and works in New York City.
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 Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Band. 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.
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.
Ta-coumba T. Aiken is a painter and public artist who identifies his work as superlative realism. He has created over 600 murals and public art works. A mural Aiken designed in 2013 using over 596,000 Lite Brite pegs holds the Guinness World Record for the largest picture made of Lite Brite. He has also taught and curated. He is sometimes referred to as the "mayor of Lowertown" for his neighborhood presence at his longtime studio in the Lowertown Lofts Artists Cooperative in the Lowertown neighborhood in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota.