Minneapolis' Walker Art Center Celebrates 75 Years

This is a celebratory year for one of the Midwest’s greatest cultural assets: Minneapolis Walker Art Center, which commemorates its 75th anniversary as a public institution. (Its origins, however, can be tracked back more than 125 years.) The festivities kick off this month with the show “75 Gifts for 75 Years,” on display from Feb. 5 to Aug. 2. In creating the exhibition, the institution solicited 75 works from the private collections of donors. The response, it turned out, was rather remarkable. Says curator Siri Engberg: “Several hundred works have come in, ranging form historical pieces to exciting, emerging art.” The show features a mix of mediums—such as painting, sculpture, installation, and works on paper—and artists, including Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol. Engberg’s choice to arrange rooms by medium and historical eras effectively creates both a timeline and a series of connected stories, once example being a room devoted to the conceptual artistic developments of the late ‘60s. The show is one of many milestone events, performances, and exhibitions taking place at the Walker Collections” (through Jan. 1, 2017) and “International Pop” (on view from April 11 to Sept. 6), the latter of which will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to see a large portion of our collection at one time,” Engberg says.