Walker Art Center Annual Report 13 14 Contents Letter from the Executive Director 3 Measures of Success 9 Annual Fund 14 Acquisitions & Gifts 29 Financial Statement 37 Board of Trustees 41 Rock the Garden 2014 Photo: Lacey Criswell, ©Walker Art Center Year in Review Letter from the Executive Director BY OLGA VISO I believe the more ways people have to connect with each other, the more we are able to develop social capital. And the more social capital we have, the stronger community we have. Places such as the Walker are critical because they provide the space for people to witness each other’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences. –Onder Uluyol, Islamic Resource Group Director As we reflect on fiscal year 2014, our nation and the world continue to experience some very challenging times. From the streets of Ferguson and New York City to villages in Syria and Pakistan, we’re witnessing an array of social and political transformations that affect us all as societies and citizens of a larger globe. These times have reinforced as never before the critical role that cultural institutions such as the Walker can play in offering spaces and platforms for productive dialogue and debate around the many questions that shape us and inspire us as individuals, cultures, and commu- nities. In the spirit of the Walker’s mission to address such questions and to be a catalyst for the creative expressions of artists and the active engage- ment of audiences, we embrace that role as an active agent by supporting new artworks that cut across the diverse programmatic disciplines we host and by serving as an engaged community partner and convener around Olga Viso issues that affect our world and the communities in which we live. Photo: ©Walker Art Center In the weeks following the recent court decision surrounding Ferguson, artist Theaster Gates’s participatory artwork in the exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art became a platform for frank discussions about race in our country and our city as artists, ed- ucators, and politicians, including Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, hosted public dialogues at Gates’s conversation table. Embracing conver- sation online as well, we launched the Artist Op-Ed series this summer to invite artists to comment on the day’s headlines. Dread Scott offered an urgent commentary on Ferguson and the racial divide that persists. And a new partnership with the Islamic Resource Group forged in early 2014 led to our hosting Tracks in the Snow: The Minnesota Muslim Experience Since Choreographers Holding Court in the 1880, a project that combines photography and oral histories of the state’s exhibition Radical Presence, 2014 Muslim community. In addition to these ongoing efforts to foster exchange Photo: Erin Smith, ©Walker Art Center and mutual understanding as well as support racial and ethnic diversity in our state, the past fiscal year saw myriad programs that both blurred ar- tistic disciplines and embraced outside collaboration. It truly was a year of partnership within the Walker, throughout the community of local and na- tional artists as well as with our audiences. And, as Islamic Resource Group Director Onder Uluyol notes, these engagements led to the development of more social capital on which to build stronger communities. We welcomed more than 680,000 people to our campus this year, including some 400,000 who came to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden to take part in the conclusion of the Garden’s 25th anniversary, made possible with lead sponsorship from Target. Beyond our local audiences in Artist Op-Eds: Dread Scott: Minnesota, the Walker is proud to see its exhibitions and commissioned “Illegitimate” performances tour the globe. Last year, nearly 175,000 people viewed the Walker-organized exhibition Graphic Design: Now in Production at six different museums, while an additional 25,000 attended Walker- commissioned performances in 34 host venues and 7 countries. This 3 commitment to innovation and excellence continues to position the Walker as one of the top five most-visited modern and contemporary art museums nationally. We remain committed to accessibility with 77 percent of all vis- its to the Walker and Garden free of charge. Popular free admission days such as Target Free Thursday Nights and Free First Saturdays, sponsored by Ameriprise Financial and Medtronic Philanthropy, welcomed more than 72,000 people last year alone. The Walker continued its commitment to the artist through both retrospectives and group exhibitions. With support from lead sponsor U.S. Bank and supporting sponsor Dorsey & Whitney, the Walker galler- ies featured the monumental Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, organized by Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (MUMOK) in Vienna. The show, which included prized works from the Walker’s in-depth holdings of Spoonbridge and Cherry selfie his work, focused on the formative years of this important American artist, Photo: Cameron Wittig, ©Walker Art Center a pioneering figure in Pop art, performance art, and installation art. With support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, 9 Artists examined the changing role of the artist in contemporary culture and fea- tured some of the most provocative and engaged artists working today. The Andy Warhol Foundation also provided major underwriting for the mid-career retrospective of Jim Hodges, his first comprehensive survey to be organized in the United States. Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take premiered at the Dallas Museum of Art, which co-organized the show with the Walker. Following the Walker’s presentation, which was sponsored by BMO Private Bank, the exhibition traveled to ICA Boston. The presentation also inspired a commission—a new recording of avant-pop/hip-hop songs by Sisyphus, composer Sufjan Stevens’s new trio. The Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) also engaged with Hodges in a series of con- Free First Saturday art-making versations over a six-month span of time. The blurring of disciplines continued with joint projects between the Film/Video and Visual Arts departments. Album: Cinematheque Tangier, a project by Yto Barrada included films, artworks, and artifacts that address the artist’s connection with the social and political realities that shape her hometown in that Moroccan city. With support from RBC Wealth Management, Christian Marclay’s 24-hour montage The Clock opened in June with the citywide nuit blanche festival Northern Spark, offering audiences daily screenings as well as three overnight presenta- tions throughout the summer. Both projects received significant support from the Bentson Foundation. Installation view of the exhibition Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, 2013 These cross-disciplinary ventures have not only influenced ways that the Photo: ©Walker Art Center Walker works with artists but also how we work within our organization. In February 2014, we named our first-ever senior curator of cross-disciplinary platforms. Fionn Meade, a curator and writer, now serves as a key partner to me in shaping the artistic vision of the Walker across curatorial depart- ments. His diverse experience working in the arenas of film, performance, and museum practice makes him uniquely qualified to take on this new curatorial role at the Walker. In spring 2014, the Walker opened its most popular exhibition of the year, Hopper Drawing: A Painter’s Process, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. With generous sponsorship from RBC Wealth Management, the Walker’s presentation welcomed more than 53,000 peo- ple during the three-month run of the show. Together, the Education and Installation view of the exhibition Jim Visual Arts departments developed a fully functioning atelier-style drawing Hodges: Give More Than You Take, 2014 studio within the exhibition, called Old School Art School. Exploring the Photo: ©Walker Art Center hidden narratives of Hopper’s paintings proved a compelling basis for the Office at Night novella, written by Laird Hunt and Kate Bernheimer and co-commissioned by the Walker and Coffee House Press. 4 Another leap forward in digital publishing was the launch of On Performativity, the fi rst volume of the Living Collections Catalogue, a new online publishing platform dedicated to scholarly research on the Walker’s multidisciplinary collections, made possible by grants from the Getty Foundation as part of its Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI). Building the Walker collections is critical to our mission. This past year, we were privileged to receive more than 60 notable gifts of art, many of which come to us from some of the Walker’s most committed longtime supporters. Chief among these was a major bequest of Lillian S. “Babe” Davis, a former Honorary Trustee who passed away in November 2012 at the age of 95. During her 43 years of service on the Walker board, Davis Installation view of the exhibition Album: supported many initiatives, including the construction of the new Edward Cinematheque Tangier, a project by Yto Barrada, 2013 Larrabee Barnes building in 1971, the launch of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden in 1988, and the completion of the Herzog & de Meuron expansion in 2005. Together with her late husband, Julius, Davis donated and pur- chased more than 50 works of art for the Walker. Her substantial bequest includes some 32 additional key works. We are honored to be the benefi - ciary of the Davis’s extraordinary generosity and their decades of service. Tracking more recent developments in artistic practice, the curators have identifi ed a number of important moving-image works to enter the collection, refl ecting the global scope of their current research. Steve McQueen, an artist who was the subject of a Walker Dialogue and Retrospective and the recipient of an Academy Award for his fi lm12 Years a Slave, is now represented in the Walker’s collection with his slide-projec- View of the exhibition Hopper Drawing: tion piece Once Upon a Time (2002).