The Walker Art Center ranks among the five most-visited modern/contemporary art museums in the USA and attracts more than 700,000 visitors per year.
The Art Center is also located on the "contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands" of the Dakota people. This site, which used to be an expanse of marshland and meadow, holds a very important meaning for the Indigenous people who still live in the community today and for this particular reason, most of the exhibitions are centered towards the histories and art of artists whose main purpose is to highlight the indigenous art.

A great examples of the exhibitions offered in the last few days relates the exuberant and different body of work of Pacita Abad (US, b. Philippines, 1946–2004) who has taken center stage in the first-ever retrospective spanning of her 32-year career.
Abad is renowned for her trapuntos, a unique form of quilted painting where she stitches and stuffs her canvases instead of stretching them over wooden frames. Throughout her prolific life, she created numerous artworks that explored a wide range of subjects, from vibrant masks to unique crafted underwater scenes and abstract compositions. Today the exhibition features over 100 works, most of which have never been publicly displayed before. Presented in collaboration with Abad's estate, the Walker Art Center organized this presentation to celebrate the multifaceted work of an artist whose vibrant visual, material, and conceptual concerns remain as relevant today as they were three decades ago.
The works from her Immigrant Experience series (1983–1995) highlight the growing multiculturalism of the 1990s. The series references a multitude of stories, including events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the Haitian refugee crisis. Despite becoming a US citizen in 1994, Abad lived in various countries around the world, including Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, Singapore, and Sudan. Being largely self-taught, she engaged with different artistic communities she encountered during her travels. Abad's global and peripatetic existence is reflected in the portability of her works and her use of textiles, a medium often associated with female and non-Western labor that has historically been marginalized as craft. In conjunction with the exhibition, the documentary film 'Wild at Art' (1995) offers an intimate portrait of Pacita Abad in Washington, DC, the film explores Abad's life and work, including her Immigrant Experience series and the installation of 'Masks from Six Continents' at the Metro Center subway station. The exhibition is accompanied by the first comprehensive publication on Abad's work, produced by the Walker Art Center. tThe volume not only provides the most extensive documentation of the artist's work but also includes texts by Victoria Sung, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Nancy Lim, Ruba Katrib, Xiaoyu Weng, and Matthew Villar Miranda.

Another great collection that has to be seen involves the significant artworks donated to the Walker's collection by Judy and Kenneth Dayton, philanthropists who made a profound impact, helping to establish Minnesota as a national arts hub. This exhibition serves as a tribute to the Daytons' generosity, as over the years they facilitated the acquisition of more than 500 artworks into the Walker's collection, including numerous sculptures displayed in the Sculpture Garden. On display in the current exhibition are significant paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by renowned artists such as Alexander Calder, Sam Gilliam, Philip Guston, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol.


To know more..
Kenneth Dayton (1923–2003) was one of five brothers who inherited Dayton's department store, which they grew into a retail powerhouse that now includes the present-day Target Corporation. In the 1940s, the Dayton family committed to giving 5 percent of their pretax profits to the community, a philanthropic philosophy that was soon embraced by other Minnesota corporations. Judy Dayton (1927–2021) joined the Walker's Board of Trustees in 1966 at the age of 39. She later assumed the role of board president in the early 1970s, becoming one of the first women to lead the board of a major cultural organization in Minnesota. She served as a trustee with distinction for 55 years. At the Walker, the legacy stands second only to that of the founder, T. B. Walker, who opened his art collection to the public 143 years ago. One of the Daytons' most significant contributions was the establishment of a trust in 1998 to support Walker operations and programs. This trust has made possible impactful visual arts exhibitions, groundbreaking dance, music, and theater performances, numerous film screenings, and innovative educational and community programs. Although the Daytons consistently declined public recognition for their foundational support, their legacy has undeniably transformed the Walker and will continue to shape the experiences of its visitors for generations to come.

Online Editorial Staff