WALKER ART CENTER

Two weekends ago, when Geri and I were in the Twin Cities to see her dad, we took time to visit the Walker Art Center, which is located on the west side of Minneapolis.  It was a bit of a disappointment.  Even so, I decided to post some of the photos that I took during our visit.

I guess we were disappointed for two reasons.  First, the collection was not particularly large.  After we had wandered through what we thought was most of the museum, we asked an employee what we had left out.  (Part of our confusion resulted from the "map" of the museum, which, frankly, was quite confusing.)  The employee confirmed that we had pretty much covered the collection.  Because of the inclement weather, we did not include the sculpture garden, which may have been interesting, but otherwise there wasn't much that we missed.  Second, the collection is nearly all contemporary art.  It's not that we are big fans of more traditional art, but it would have been nice to see more diversity.  Besides, a lot of the art escaped my understanding, I'm afraid.

The building itself was not particularly interesting.  From the outside it appeared to be a nondescript largely windowless not quite rectangular building that appeared taller than it was wide.  Here are a couple of shots from the interior.

This first shot illustrates that the lines of the building were not quite rectilinear.

It did have interesting wallpaper in places, as indicated in the following photos.

Some of the pieces at least approached mainstream art, at least from a contemporary point of view.

This last shot is not just a portion of the artwork like I often shoot; it is the whole thing.

I liked the following piece, not because of the "art" itself, but because of the colors generated by the lighting.

There was one exhibit that featured what I would describe as shadow puppets portraying very disturbing scenes involving what appeared to be a young slave girl and a slave owner in the antebellum South.  I think the following shot gives a good idea of the ominous quality.  We were not comfortable viewing this exhibit for very long.

One piece that I did like consisted of a rectangular box, perhaps five feet high, that had circular holes cut into the sides at seemingly random places.  It became apparent that the interior walls of the box consisted of mirrors.  Here is a shot I took through one of the holes.

The dark circle near the center was actually the lens of my camera which nearly filled the hole.

One of the museum attendants cautioned me not to put my camera close to the hole (which I could understand).  Here is a shot with my camera held back further from the side of the exhibit.

The one good thing about our visit was that it was the first Saturday of the month and admission was free.

Taken with my Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 24-120mm f/4 lens.