Education and Community Programs

People are getting introspective about questions raised by Kara Walker’s work in the exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. This is the third installment of reponses written or drawn on postcards created by the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council. We asked people to think about one of three prompts:

What are you suppressing?

What does power look like?

Retell a history

When the project was first concieved, we thought it likely that people would respond visually, since Kara Walker’s most immediately arresting pieces are her visually stunning silhouettes. Interestingly enough, though, almost everyone has chosen to respond in writing, perhaps highlighting the fact that it is in Kara Walker’s text (incorporated throughout her work and on the gallery walls) that her most direct message truly lies.

Below are more postcard responses:

Pedro Martinez

Larissa Donovan

Annie M

In conjunction with the Walker Art Center’s exhibition, Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) created a postcard project to encourage visitors to respond to Kara Walker’s challenging work. The postcard invites visitors to reply verbally or visually to one of three prompts:

What are you suppressing?

What does power look like?

Retell a history

To weigh in on the exhibition and share your musings, pick up a postcard outside the gallery or in the Bazinet Lobby and create your reply on the back. Responses will be selected by WACTAC and posted on the Walker blog.

By Norma Hanlon

By Amy Frantti

By Judith Hardim

In conjunction with the Walker Art Center’s newly opened exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) created a postcard project to encourage visitors to respond to Kara Walker’s challenging work. The postcard invites visitors to reply verbally or visually to one of three prompts:

What are you suppressing?

What does power look like?

Retell a history

To weigh in on the exhibition and share your musings, pick up a postcard from the Bazinet Lobby and create your reply on the back. Responses will be selected by WACTAC and posted on the Walker blog.

Many of the responses in this installment are from a 1-3 grade Art Lab from Whittier Elementary School. Although they didn’t see the Kara Walker exhibition, they were able to relate to the questions on the postcards.

By Arnaundia

By Terrance Berglund

By Elizabeth Gonzales

By Minnie

By Don Siegel

In conjunction with the Walker Art Center’s newly opened exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love, the Walker Art Center Teen Arts Council (WACTAC) created a postcard project to encourage visitors to respond to Kara Walker’s challenging work. The postcard invites visitors to reply verbally or visually to one of three prompts:

• What are you suppressing?
• What does power look like?
• Retell a history

To weigh in on the exhibition and share your musings, pick up a postcard from the Bazinet Lobby and create your reply on the back. Responses will be selected by WACTAC and posted on the Walker blog.

Here’s what people have said so far:

Anonymous

Blue Delliquanti

Katherine Rochester

Katherine Rochester

Lynda McDonnell

Pearl Madryga

Raina Belleau

From within the chic, intellectual veneer of the Walker Art Center, a group of 14 Walker staff, bonded together by undeniable athletic prowess and an insatiable hunger for victory, united to form a broomball team. Representing the Walker Art Center in the City of Minneapolis Broomball League, the Lumber Barons (named in fond memory of Walker Art Center father T.B. Walker) have already battled against such worthy rivals as Friends with Benefits, the Badgers, and that team Monday night who took it all way too seriously and wore numbered, green hockey jerseys. Wish us luck as we prepare to head into the playoffs next week against Liquor Lyles, where we expect our true fire to carry us home.

I recently returned from Brussels, where I visisted Le Grand Hornu, an artfully rennovated, defunct coal mine-turned contemporary art venue. Since this was proabably my 7th trip to Belgium, but the first time I’d ever heard of Hornu, I wanted to share the revelation in order to guarantee that anyone with a yen to visit the lands of Memling, Horta, and Magritte, also appreciates Belgium for its contemporary art.

The show on view, Sisyphe: le jour se leve (Sisyphus: Day Breaks) was made all the more enjoyable for its inclusion of artists I see on a daily basis in the Walker’s permanent collection installation, The Shape of Time. To see On Kawara, Luciano Fabro, and Guilio Paolini in a small show (eight artists total) with a specific trajectory provided an entirely different perspective on their work. I had never previously associated Sysyphus–the ultimate existential image adopted by Sartre–with Arte Povera, the Italian movement in which both Fabro and Paolini took part. Now, however, when I look at Mimesi (Mimesis) I see the possibility for a darker exchange between the classically sculpted, white plaster models–an exchange more in the vein of Greek tragedy than comedy. Netiher, had Kawara’s meticulously sequential work ever so acutely suggested futility. One Million Years (Past), featured in the show at Hornu, consists of the last one million years printed on paper and bound into volumes encyclopeadia-style. Currently on show in The Shape of Time is Kawara’s TODAY Series, which I have always interpreted as meditative and ritualistic, but which is now opened up as a possible critique of pointless repitition. The existential tenor of the show at Grand Hornu was an interesting contrast to the luminous and airy gallery space, and particularly poignant in the context of a failed coal mine.