Walker Art Center Annual Report 14 15 Contents Letter from the Executive Director 3 Measures of Success 11 Annual Fund 16 Acquisitions & Gifts 33 Financial Statement 42 Board of Trustees 46 Miwa Matreyek, This World Made Itself Photo: Gayle Laird, ©Exploratorium Year in Review Letter from the Executive Director BY OLGA VISO The year 2015 marked a major milestone in the Walker Art Center’s history: for 75 years it has served as a public center dedicated to con - temporary art and culture. To celebrate, we invited artists and our community to come together and join us in a series of WALKER@75 exhibitions, programs, and events that launched in the fall of 2014 and culminated with the public announcement of a major campus renovation that commenced in August 2015. At the heart of our celebration was an examination of the many questions that have motivated and guided the Walker’s work during its 75-year history. The Walker is at its core about asking questions and has from its very beginning offered spaces and plat- forms for productive dialogue and debate. This long-standing institutional commitment to creative inquiry is grounded in the belief that providing a safe space for the exchange of ideas and open dialogue about the culture around us leads to a place where growth and mutual understanding be- come possible. Celebrating WALKER@75 With generous sponsorship from Target, we invited our community to join Olga Viso us in the act of questioning, with more than 100,000 participating in the Photo: ©Walker Art Center Walker’s 75th-anniversary celebration. Our festivities were supported by a transmedia exploration of the “questions that shape and inspire us.” More than 300 questions collected from Walker audiences, artists, and cura- tors informed this effort, with 75 chosen to be highlighted in a “Question Everything” website and anthem film featured both onsite and online. The Walker People’s Archive (WPA), a compendium of Walker history from our visitors’ viewpoints, was launched in tandem with the Question Everything campaign, attracting hundreds of photos, memories, and personal stories from the past 75 years. WPA selections and the campaign were highly visi- ble on billboards across the Twin Cities and extended through the Walker’s social media channels. Avant Garden 2015: The Walker Art The Walker’s 75th anniversary officially launched in September 2014 Center’s Annual Benefit with our annual benefit event Avant Garden, at which nearly 800 guests Photo: Lacey Criswell, ©Walker Art Center joined us for a late-summer soiree in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Co-chaired by Walker trustees Amy Kern and Wim Stocks, this festive eve- ning affair featured host Mark Wheat of 89.3 The Current, a performance by the New Standards, music by DJ Sye Young, and an art auction. Thanks to the generosity of our committee members, sponsors, and all who at- tended, it was the most successful Avant Garden to date, netting more than $625,000 in support of the Walker’s operations and programs. A series of three collection-based exhibitions were at the heart of WALKER@75 programming, starting with Art at the Center: 75 Years of Walker Collections. More than 17,000 people joined us for the open- ing-night party and weekend-long Walktoberfest celebration featuring free View of the exhibition Art at the Center: admission, family-friendly films, music performances, and a beer garden. 75 Years of Walker Collections, 2014 The exhibition examined 75 years of collecting at the Walker—a history Photo: Gene Pittman, ©Walker Art Center distinguished by bold and often prescient acquisitions that challenge pre- vailing artistic conventions and examine the social and political conditions of the day. Art at the Center also traced ways that the collection was 3 shaped by the respective visions and collecting philosophies of its fi ve di- rectors as well as the generosity of the Walker family and key patrons. Alongside Art at the Center, we presented Art Expanded, 1958–1978, an ambitious exhibition drawn from our collections, which examined a trans- formational phase in the history of 20th-century art when artists around the world collectively began to challenge, critique, and upend traditional media and disciplines. Combining iconic pieces with recent acquisitions and rarely seen works, Art Expanded allowed a deep exploration of this period’s unruly spirit of artistic innovation and reinvention. A companion to the exhibition was published as the second volume of the Living Collections Catalogue, the online platform dedicated to scholarly research on the Walker’s collections. Supported by the Getty Foundation, the catalogue Living Collections Catalogue Volume II: won the award for Best of the Web in Research/Collections Online at the Art Expanded 1958–1978 2015 Museums and the Web Conference. The third exhibition marking the Walker’s anniversary was 75 Gifts for 75 Years, which focused on the signifi cant impact gifts of art have made on the collection throughout its history. The exhibition’s February 2015 opening launched with Winter Walkerland, an eventful indoor/outdoor community weekend featuring free gallery admission and activities for the whole family, including a free ice-skating rink in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The exhibition highlighted a wide range of key gifts to a special three-year initiative on the occasion of the Walker’s 75th anniversary, in- cluding donations of painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, video, and prints. These gifts of art were made by nearly 100 patrons who generously supported the initiative, which ultimately bolstered the collection with View of the exhibition 75 Gifts for 75 more than 250 works of art, and added 50 artists not previously in the Years, 2015; (left to right): Tom Burr, collection, including Walead Beshty, Beauford Delaney, Lari Pittman, Zilia Bazaar Life, 2009; Erwin Wurm, Truck (Baltic), 2005 Sánchez, Luc Tuymans, and Charline von Heyl. We are deeply grateful to the many artists and donors who contributed, including seven households Photo: Gene Pittman, ©Walker Art Center who promised all or part of their private collections to the Walker. I am indebted to trustees Brian Pietsch and Marge Weiser for co-chairing this special effort, and I also want to thank Brian for co-chairing the Collectors’ Council last year with trustee Jan Breyer. Crossdisciplinary Experimentation Throughout our anniversary year, a series of highly visible exhibitions demonstrated the Walker’s commitment to supporting artistic experimen- tation and the blurring of disciplines. Beginning in July 2014, the Walker hosted Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, organized Jacolby Satterwhite performs at the by the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. This groundbreaking exhibi- opening of Radical Presence: Black Perfor- tion was the fi rst comprehensive survey of performance art by black artists mance in Contemporary Art, 2014 working from the perspective of the visual arts from the 1960s to the pres- Photo: Gene Pittman, ©Walker Art Center ent. Featuring more than 100 works by some 36 artists, the multimedia exhibition was accompanied by a dynamic range of performances, actions, and events, providing a platform for frank discussions about race in our community and country. Artist Ralph Lemon, a critical fi gure exploring intersections between the performing and visual arts, created a groundbreaking work called Scaffold Room. Perhaps Lemon’s boldest experiment to date, this Walker- commission is equal parts theater and gallery installation, merging performance, visual art, music, and text as it poses profound, sometimes disturbing questions about race and gender, memory and creativity in Ralph Lemon, Scaffold Room, 2014 America. Lemon invited Walker visitors to observe the installation and re- hearsals and hosted a range of public workshops and discussions; the fi nal Photo: courtesy Ryan Jenkins four performances played to sold-out audiences. As a companion to the 4 exhibition, Lemon’s immersive sound and film workMeditation , created in partnership with Jim Findlay, ran for two weeks in the McGuire Theater. Groundbreaking Exhibitions As part of an ongoing series of solo projects by artists who have not yet had exhibitions in US museums, the Walker hosted a yearlong presentation of new work commissioned by Liz Deschenes. In planning her ambitious installation, Deschenes studied the history of the Walker’s building and gal- lery space to design a photographic intervention that responds to the site’s unique features. Nearly four years in the making, our most popular exhi- bition of the year, International Pop, attracted more than 75,000 visitors. View of the exhibition Liz Deschenes: Organized by the Walker, the show examined one of the most recognized Gallery 7, 2015 moments of 20th-century art, when Pop burst onto the scene in the Photo: Gene Pittman, ©Walker Art Center 1960s, heralding a rise of a new consumer and media age. While Pop has primarily been identified as a movement that developed in Britain and the United States, this groundbreaking exhibition chronicled the global emer- gence of Pop through Japan, Latin America, and both Eastern and Western Europe. A series of Pop Remix programs on Target Free Thursday Nights accompanied the exhibition, drawing more than 1,000 visitors each night for music and film programs exploring the roving spirit of the Pop move- ment. International Pop received significant national press attention and support from an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities and major grants from the Henry Luce Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, along with generous contributions from many Walker trustees and friends. Following the Walker’s presentation, supported by lead spon- sor U.S. Bank, the exhibition traveled to the Dallas Museum of Art and will close at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2016.