Walker Art Center
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- This page is about the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Walker Art Gallery is in Liverpool.
The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. It was founded in 1879 by lumberman Thomas Barlow Walker and was formally established at its current location in 1927 as the first public art gallery in the Upper Midwest. The museum's focus on modern art began in the 1940s, when a gift from Mrs. Gilbert Walker made possible the acquisition of works by important artists of the day, including sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, and others.
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[edit] Campus
The Walker Art Center lives on a 17 acre (69,000 m²) urban campus that includes both buildings and parks. The north wing of the building opened in 1971 and was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes. In 2005 an expansion designed by Herzog & de Meuron opened that doubled the size of the museum and added new galleries, a restaurant and a 385-seat theater.
The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, a collaboration between the Walker and the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, is a sculpture park on the north side of the Walker campus. The park opened in 1988 and was expanded in 1992 to its current size of 11 acres (44,500 m²). Future plans call for a new 4 acre (16,000 m²) park to be created on the west side of the campus sometime in 2006.
[edit] Programs
The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary institution that includes programming in visual arts, performing arts, and film and video, as well as educational and community programs, design and new media. Its collection includes work from artists such as Matthew Barney, Chuck Close, Roy Lichtenstein, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol.
