Walker Art Center

Welcome to Scratching the Surface.

For me, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota is right up there with MoMA and its famed architecture and design department as the American museum that has worked to make design central to their identity.

The museum's founding director, Daniel Dieffenbacher, was a trained architect and believed that design could be a way to make the museum more accessible to its surrounding neighbors.

Throughout its history, The Walker has had design-focused curators from Peter Seitz to Mildred Friedman to Andrew Blauvelt, who was on the show a couple years ago.

It's a show that explores the importance of spirituality, emotional connectedness, and communal engagement and what that has to do with contemporary design.

I traveled to Minneapolis to attend the opening and to talk to both Asley and Joseph about the show and the ideas behind it.

So this episode, in many ways, is the first part in a two-part series recorded inside the Walker Art Center around their biennial.

I sat down with Aslee to talk about her ambitions for the triennial, how it fits into the Walker's design legacy, and what design means to the Walker in 2026.

The freedom... somebody from Sotheby's approached me to would I have a client that would be interested in buying the collection and that client of mine wanted to I said I want two photographs he said no and the more I looked at the collection I realized that How is somebody ever going to get their hands on something like this? So I bought it myself.

I mean, it's been at the Walker Art Center, London, New York, San Francisco.

I mean, it's traveled around the country.

Tell me about Frida and why you have a connection.

You know, they're like, we're at the talent show and stuff.

And then that graduated to like choreographer's evening at the Walker Arts Center and putting our work on stage.

And we are the, you know, so people like Anika McMullin and Maya Maiden, Angel Adams, Brandy Phillips.

Those are, those are, these are my dance crew peoples who like, we're taking like street dance, if you will, and like bringing it to the concert halls in the universities.

Well, here's an interesting story.

The Walker Art Center did an exhibition and a catalog raisonne of all of Ed Ruscha's prints.

The curators there and they have some they have some Rouchet prints, but they're not they're mostly a painting and sculpture collection.

So they're not really a big print collection.

And so they weren't interested in trying to acquire the archive of Crown Point Press.

I mean, archive of Ed Rouchet's prints.

The exhibition that was at the Walker Art Center was going to go to the L.A. County Museum.

Well, L.A. has been an artist in Los Angeles for many decades, and so it would be logical that the Rouchet archive might be offered to the L.A. County Museum.

Diane's Place,

the restaurant, the Southern Theater, um so diane's place the restaurant was for lisa's benefit mona lisa's benefit the southern theater was for candy box um the luminary for fall forward festival uh the taste of minnesota um and the cole center for ananya dance theater's choreo lab um Oh, and the Walker Art Center for their Thursday nights.

So yeah, we've been all over the city.

Six tours, 12 overall performances.

He is best known for his paintings and short films derived from mass media and everyday life.

His works are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, and many others.

And to his left is Matt Schultz, the founder and artistic director of Unsound and one of the directors of Unsound Productions.

He has been involved in the development of commissioned projects for over 20 years and engaged in creating every single Unsound event globally.

I, I remember, um, when they first got here, I went to D'Amico & Sons with the three of them with, uh, one of our photographers at the Star Tribune, Jerry Holt, and did a big feature on the three of them together.

And then, but Gaborik actually brought, uh, Jerry and I back to his apartment when he lived by Walker Art Center.

And, uh, he lived in that cool building where if you take the elevator up, it opens up into your condo, essentially.

And I did a huge story from there.