Design

Art and architecture merge with miniature golf in this open call to create holes for the next Walker in the Rough–" a new, temporary mini-golf course at the Walker Art Center.

Walker in the Rough, which debuted in 2004, returns in 2008 to the grass that will house the Walker’s future park, on the western edge of the museum. Your job, as a potential designer, is creating one of the 10 workable, playable holes that will dot the course. A panel of curators, artists, architects and one golf pro will judge the entries. Selected designers receive stipends of $3,000. Deadline for submissions is Jan. 14, 2008.

The course, which opens Memorial Day weekend and closes in early September, will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Organizers are encouraging designers to create tie-ins to the traveling exhibition Design for the Other 90%, which comes to the Walker in spring 2008. Proposals should also address issues such as water, communication, shelter, transportation, and sustainability. Extra consideration will be given to holes made of recycled materials or materials that can be recycled.

Print or download an application here. For more info, contact Christi Atkinson, associate director of Education and Community Programs, at (612) 375-7572 or christi.atkinson@walkerart.org.

So, we finally got our act together and decided that it was time for the Walker Design Department to blog, though we’re not really sure what that means yet. But don’t worry, we have a plan:

Bulletin Board: These posts will alert you to upcoming design programming at the Walker such as the Drawn Here architecture lecture series, the Insights design lecture series, and design exhibitions like Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. And you will respond en masse resulting in many ticket sales.

Flat Files: There are boxes and boxes full of postcards, flyers, brochures, posters, gallery guides, and other Walker ephemera that we would love to properly document and archive. Since we don’t have the time to do that, we’ll just pull out a few pieces each month and tell you who designed them, what the project brief was, and why we love them even after all this time.

Memos: Here we will call your attention to the history of our department, how our studio operates today, and design issues that we address on a daily basis. Like fonts and stuff.

Interviews: . . . with designers. Sample question: “If you were stranded on a desert island, which 10 typefaces would you take with you?”

Junk Drawer: A catchall category for link dumps.

Now what we’re especially excited about is our Guest Bloggers! We’ve invited a whole slew of former Walker designers to contribute whenever and whatever they feel like—reporting from places as far as England, Holland, and Korea, as well as places more close to home like MCAD. We want to hear what they’re working on now, what is interesting to them, who they think is stroking it, seriously downloading the uploader. Who knows what they’ll write about. Not we.

If nothing else, we hope to give you a better idea of what we do, and why we can do it at the Walker.