Education and Community Programs

Playwright Kira Obolensky is known for her keen intellect and vibrant imagination that has led her to write about topics as far ranging as American garage culture and a hermaphrodite in the Victorian era in both books and plays.

She was kind enough to answer a few questions about her role in the collaborative endeavor Permanence Collection, an in-gallery play she co-wrote with Ed Bok Lee for a project with the Walker and the Playwrights’ Center. Her responses below channel some of our internal Walker meetings, where programmers sit around to discuss how visitors respond to the permanent collection, the act of looking and the meaning of creativity. Needless to say, our conversations are far less clear and poetic than Obolensky’s.

Were you familiar with the Walker’s Permanent Collection prior to this project?

Yes, I’ve been a regular Walker-goer for years.

Has working on Permanence Collection changed or shifted your thoughts about the Collection or the current installation?

Writing the piece has really changed the way I view the installation–simply because the process of creatively engaging with a work of art is different than simply viewing it. One of the questions the play asks is why is there such a difference? How can the act of viewing art be in itself creative? “Art is a conversation”--someone famous said that--and in our play I think we finally get to really talk to the art work. The process of writing the play has coalesced some more nebulous feelings I’ve had as a museum goer, walking through the Permanent Collection. For example, I’ve always been aware of the shift in feeling/emotion I get as I progress through the collection. We used that shift in feeling as a starting point.

What was the process of writing a play based on a roomful of art like? How did you work together to draft the script?

The process of writing a play that is about art, without being ABOUT art in a didactic way was challenging. I think we both knew we didn’t want the piece to feel like a skit which is the easy way to do something like this. We wanted something more layered, more mysterious, slightly ambiguous but also entertaining to watch. In many ways I think it was slightly intimidating for both of us to face the innovation and masterful work of the collection and to attempt to stand next to it.

We wrote the piece in its first draft as an exquisite corpse. I started it, then Ed wrote the next scene, and then I wrote the next one and so forth. That said, once it was in its first draft form there was a lot of hands-on collaboration between us and Hayley [Finn], getting the themes to surface, and attempting to find action in each scene. We also realized on our first rehearsal that there were far too many words. Because of the marble surfaces, acoustics are difficult and it became clear that each scene needed to be cut in half. So a fair amount of writing and editing has happened on our feet.

What artworks were particularly interesting to you and why?

I love the David Smith piece (The Royal Bird) in the mid-century room. It is as if something is being born from the abstraction and color fields. It struggles to take flight--a kind of representation even as the paintings in the room resist.

The Jasper Johns set piece in the Pop Art room is a reminder to me of how theatre is at its core spectacle and visual.

The Bruce Nauman video is compelling to me as a work of theatre.

The Gober chair is so layered and narrative…it’s meaning shifts constantly for me. It tells a story that evokes irony and paradox. It is in a room filled with ironic works of art. It itself has irony to it--but it’s not a one-liner. It reminds me of how nuanced irony can be.

In the Mythologies room, I’m particularly fond of the scale of the scale of the artwork. I love how big and challenging the pieces are, and yet how delicate they are up close. The Mehretu painting has such a fine line in it and yet it maps something enormous.

Tell us how you came up with the title for the play.

One of the ideas in the piece is about permanence. In the first scene Harry says, “It’s not fair they (the art work) gets to stay put and we grow old.” It strikes me that this idea of the artwork as permanent is true it doesn’t change in its being, although it’s interpretation can be in constant flux. The viewers of the artwork age and move and change, and the theatre they unwittingly create in the galleries is entirely impermanent.

Permanence Collection is performed again on Thursday, May 15 at 7 and 8 pm in the Walker galleries.

Tonight is the first performance of Permanence Collection, a short play written by Ed Bok Lee and Kira Obolensky that meanders through the Walker’s Permanent Collection installation. Yes, I know we have a state of the art theater for performance work, but the galleries have always been the intended stage for this collaboration between the Walker and the Playwrights’ Center.

The project started over a year ago at a brainstorming lunch between myself and Todd Boss, Director of External Affairs at the Playwrights’ Center. I was interested in a project the center did with the Minnesota History Center where playwrights penned monologues inspired by objects in the MHS collection. We thought that model could translate well to contemporary art and that actors in the galleries could create a new, if not surprising, kind of interpretation for visitors.

A year later, we have Permanence Collection. Performed by actors Annie Enneking, Stephen Cartmell, Kurt Kwan, and Ariel Dumas, with sound design by Craig Harris and direction by Playwrights’ Center Artistic Associate Hayley Finn, this site-specific play muses on the very experience of museum-going. There is a lot packed into the 30 minute piece: ideas about the passage of time, permanence, and nostalgia wrapped up in a meditation on the practice of both looking at art and writing plays.

To provide insight into the artistic process of the folks who put this together, I’ve asked the writers and director a few questions about the project. I’ll be posting their answers over the next several days, but to entice readers for now, here is Ed Bok Lee’s take on the project:

“Many of the Walker's permanent collection pieces have been around longer than the viewers who come to see them, and all, unless destroyed, will probably outlive everyone alive now. But eventually even those will move on...

The passage of time and eras was an especially interesting challenge in this play. At one point, I tried to see the project through one giant imaginary Walker security camera--a century's worth of footage--time-lapsed over one hyper hour, with all the different artworks, shows, gallery visitors, and renovations that have taken place since the museum was founded. And I began to see the whole place and human endeavor to preserve art as a kind of giant metaphysical clock whereby a museum's visitors are like the ever-moving seconds hand; the actual walls, rooms, and structures containing the art in sum make up the less transient minute hand; and the art on its eternal journey comprises the slowest-moving hour hand.

From the first gallery to the last in the permanent collection, you can wander through a century or so of Western aesthetic consciousness in a matter of minutes. And then you step out of the lobby doors and it's gone. How to articulate this abstract, rather bemusing sense of history and time-passing, dramatically, on the most human levels possible, (and very succinctly, in non-subtle ways due to the conditions of the venue), was a particular challenge for me.”

The performances take place TONIGHT and next week, Thursday, May 15 at 7 and 8 pm here at the Walker. Come see it!

Picasso is obviously the titan of twentieth century visual art, but who knew he was a writer! Jerome Rothenberg, that’s who. Along with fellow poet/editor Pierre Joris, Rothenberg has edited and assembled an English translation of Picasso’s writing into a book, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz and Other Poems. Lest one think that these writings are mere dabblings, consider that Picasso himself said they were an essential part of his work: “Everything you find in these poems, you can also find in my paintings.”

In advance of his appearance at the Walker, Rothenberg answers a few questions from Rain Taxi Review of Books editor Eric Lorberer. Catch Rothenberg live on Thursday Sept. 6, when he reads from and discusses Picasso’s writing in a special Free Verse presentation, co-sponsored by Rain Taxi.

Picasso’s writing is no doubt going to take many of his admirers by surprise. How did you come upon the project of researching and assembling this aspect of his work?

In the 1990s, when I was assembling Poems for the Millennium as an anthology of twentieth-century poetry, I was impressed by the amount of verbal material, mostly from newspapers, that went into Picasso's cubist collages. I was also impressed by how meaningful some of it was - the reports or stories that he was bringing together - and I was aware too of his close relationship to important poets then living in Paris: Gertrude Stein, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Pierre Reverdy, and so on. So Pierre Joris & I decided that we would present one of those collages as a kind of experimental poem. But the next big surprise was that, thirty years or so after analytical cubism, Picasso got into writing at full blast - a kind of writing, though it used prose as its medium, that couldn't be thought of as anything other than poetry. In 1994 Gallimard in Paris brought out those writings - both French & Spanish - in a gorgeous, richly visual edition, maybe too gorgeous and visual in fact because the emphasis on the written or hand drawn text (all very painterly) obscured the fact that he was, for a period of twenty or so years, an extraordinary, greatly gifted, and highly experimental poet. He was also, and very much in tune with his other work, an incredibly prolific writer, going at it on a day-by-day basis and with no holds barred.

Did critics or fellow artists at the time appreciate his written output any differently than audiences today?

The best known response was Gertrude Stein's - very negative or negative enough to end their already badly fraying friendship. (Viz: “Of course he who could write, write so well with drawings and with colors, knew very well that to write with words was, for him, not to write at all.”) But the younger ones of that time - the Surrealists in particular - became his de facto companions in poetry, having already recognized him as their dominant predecessor in painting. And if his poetry gave the impression of automatic writing (the key to surrealism, according to Andre Breton, but actually denied in his own case by Picasso), the form that he used - wall to wall prose without punctuation or capital letters - was unprecedented at the time of the writing. (The explicit & sometimes brutal sexuality of the work also goes beyond most of the Surrealists, with Artaud the notable exception.) As for the poetry over all, Breton wrote enthusiastically about it in an essay called “Picasso poète,” and a number of the younger writers joined in amateur performances of Picasso's play, Desire Trapped by the Tail, which did in fact become a standard piece in the experimental European repertory. And there was also a remarkable tribute from the Surrealist poet and intellectual Michel Leiris who compared Picasso's late poem, “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz,” to James Joyce's “Finnegans Wake” - a little over the top perhaps, but a clear indication of Picasso's standing as a poet.

What’s the relationship between his painting and his writing?

The poetry, it seems to me, brings back a sense of how strong his work was - both existential and political intensities that are sometimes obscured or trivialized by the recent tendency to reduce so much of it to responses to his marriages and the various women in his life, and so on (= art as gossip.) Just as a point of interest: Picasso began to write poetry in earnest at a time when one of his marriages was ending disastrously but also when Spain was on the verge of civil war and Europe was careening toward World War II. One of his most remarkable poems from that time, “The Dream & Lie of Franco,” coincides with the iconic Guernica painting, and throughout his work, both as a poet and painter, the stronger motifs (for me at least) are social and deeply psychological. In the poetry, because it’s still fresh for us, the ferocity of his approach is unmistakable.

You’ve translated dozens of literary luminaries. Were there any unusual challenges to translating a major figure from the art world?

The only real difficulty was not to be overawed by Picasso’s art world reputation and to plunge happily into his dense prose & quick changes of voice and perspective. Aside from that, the virtues of the work - the rapid shifts and the lack of punctuation that I mentioned - made it a difficult work to go through, but I was assisted on my part of it by a Spanish friend & editor/critic, Manuel Brito from Las Canarias, who checked my texts and helped me with idioms that weren't otherwise easy to interpret. I gave myself a fair amount of leeway, as I do with other translations, while sticking close to the text and what I took to be the spirit of the work. Some of the specific sound effects (internal rhymings & such) were of my own devising, but I thought that Picasso’s words gave me an indication of how far I might want to go with those. I don’t know if I always caught the meaning (nor if Picasso always did, as far as that goes) but I think I was able to give a sense of his energy and the speed of thought that seemed to characterize the work.

How do you feel Picasso’s writing might be regarded by those who seek to engage with his art–or for that matter, by those who engage with modern and contemporary poetry?

For me it furthered a reengagement with Picasso’s art - the language work playing off against the paintings and allowing me to see the art anew. In its relation to modern and contemporary poetry, I think the writing reflects some of the more radical impulses from earlier in the twentieth-century and foreshadows much that’s current now. The extreme nature of modern art is well enough known, that of poetry much less so. To find, then, a comparable extremity of language in as visible an artist as Picasso offers a chance to underscore the common project shared by many artists and poets over the last 200 years - as often as not with the poets in the lead. And still another important point that may be missed when dealing with Picasso in isolation is that the crossover between language art and visual art was shared by a number of other artist-poets of his generation: Schwitters, Arp, Picabia, Kandinsky, to name the most prominent among them. Picasso, while he largely held back from publishing his poetry during his lifetime, had like those others a strong if somewhat guarded sense of his accomplishments as a poet. So there’s the playful statement attributed to him that we repeat in our Picasso book: “Picasso once told a friend that long after his death his writing would gain recognition and encyclopedias would say: ‘”Picasso, Pablo Ruiz - Spanish poet who dabbled in painting, drawing and sculpture.”‘ (Miguel Acoca, “Picasso Turns a Busy 90 Today,” International Herald Tribune, October 25, 1971) It won't happen that way, of course, but through no fault whatsoever of the writing.

If you can’t make it to Rothenberg’s talk on September 6, tune in from home on the Walker Channel. His reading will be webcast live and later archived on the site.

The doors to galleries 4, 5 and 6 are tightly closed this week as Walker curators, registrars and installation crew carefully unpack and hang the precious Pollocks, Lichtensteins, de Koonings and Picassos that make up the Picasso and American Art exhibition which opens this Saturday.

To honor the occasion of having Picasso and friends in the house, we thought we'd dive into the phenomenon of the artist and ask:

Just why is this guy so famous?

To steer us through this inquiry, we've invited scholar Joli Jensen to the Walker to share her thoughts from a media studies perspective. A professor of communications at the University of Tulsa, Jensen studies mass media and popular culture and has done a lot of thinking on fans and fandom and other topics ranging from country music, to the history of spas. Her most recent book, Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life questions our taken-for-granted assumptions about the transformational power of high culture.

She took the time to respond to a few questions, in which she discloses her personal opinion of the “master,” and admits her obsession with Law and Order, plus other thoughts about fandom and the value of the arts. Her free talk entitled, Why Is Picasso Famous? Art, Celebrity and Becoming a Fan, takes place on Thursday, June 21 at 7 pm in the Walker Cinema.

What attracts you to Picasso? Why write about him?

I’m interested in art, mass media, popular culture and celebrity. Picasso is a great example of a mass-mediated artist — a celebrity AND an integral part of popular culture.

After all of your thinking on the subject, what is your verdict? Are YOU a fan of Picasso or his work?

Picasso is fascinating as a phenomenon, but I’m not really a fan. But I’ve met plenty of people who have discovered or developed a love of art through Picasso, and who are fascinated by his life as well as his work.

Do you have any fan-like obsessions? Sports? Politics? Nautical fiction?

I get obsessed pretty easily, and then turn it into scholarship. So over the years I’ve become obsessively interested in things like Patsy Cline’s recording career, William James, neurasthenia, the history of spas, Lewis Mumford, false prophets, and Hannah Arendt. I am also a recovering chronic viewer of Law & Order (all iterations).

What other artists or forms of art are you interested in?

I love live theatre (my husband is an actor); I’m interested in all forms of textiles; and in another life, I’d design furniture and jewelry.

You’ve written on a wide variety of subjects from country music to the social history of the typewriter. Is there a thread that connects these interests?

My interests seem to revolve around one question: How do cultural objects have meaning for people? When something matters to someone else, I want to understand what’s going on.

What are you currently working on?

A series of essays on media and culture. I’m also reading all I can by and about Hannah Arendt. And I’m going back to early 20th century Progressive thinkers to find out what they thought about war and cosmopolitanism.

What is on your summer reading list?

The Iron Whim (about the social history of the typewriter); The Human Condition (by Hannah Arendt); Experience and Nature (by John Dewey).

You are involved in a public conversation about how we should communicate the value of art with your book Is Art Good for Us? Beliefs about High Culture in American Life and other publications. You argue that we should move away from talking about how the arts are good for us and to focus on why art is just plain GOOD. This stance creates an interesting juxtaposition to all this buzz about civic engagement and using the art to stimulate social change. What do you make of this trend?

Arts advocates like to use what I call instrumental arguments to encourage economic support for the arts. To claim that we need art to stimulate social change or to enhance civic engagement is to evade our own responsibility for both. We can change the world, artfully. But we can’t just “do art” and expect good things to happen.

In other words, art is a human activity, not a magic elixir. I think it is much better to think and talk about art from an expressive, not an instrumental, perspective. Art IS good but whatever good it does in the world is through the people who create, interpret, understand and respond to it. The arts are cultural forms, but so are the mass media and all the things you can buy at Wal-mart. You can’t fix the world, or uplift people, or reduce crime, or enhance aging, or increase voting just by adding more art.�

Claiming that we need art for social improvement turns art into medicine something imposed on us to make us better. I’d much rather we just shared art forms that matter to us, while finding out more about forms of art that matter to other people.

Those of us who read Beloved by Toni Morrison for the Artist’s Bookshelf discussion that was snowed-out last week, were so captivated by the book that we are re-scheduling the discussion.

Please join us this Saturday, March 10 at 1 pm at the Loring Park Dunn Brothers, 329 West 15th St., right across from the park. Our usual meeting space at the Walker is booked that afternoon, so find us in the back room of Dunn Brothers, with tattered copies of the book in hand.

We hope to see you there!

We’re all eyes on the weather channel here at the Walker and have decided to cancel tonight’s discussion of Beloved. Rather than risk traveling in the predicted blizzard, stay at home and curl up with a good book. It can’t hurt to start early on The Known World by Edward P. Jones which we’ll discuss on Thursday, April 5th, at 7 pm after the 6 pm tour of Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love with exhibition curators Philippe Vergne and Yasmil Raymond.

We may sneak in a few comments about Beloved at the April discussion, so your reading will not be in vain!

Happy snow,

The Artist’s Bookshelf

In my excitement for the discussion of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home this Thursday at the Artist’s Bookshelf bookclub, I came across this video on Powell’s.com of the author in her studio describing her process. I have long been obsessed by Bechdel’s drawings and writing. As a major fan of Dykes to Watch Out For, I have been following the development of her style for about a decade. (I have been known to refer to the DTWOF characters as my “friends.”) Whether you are a seasoned reader or a new comer to Bechdel’s work, the slow down-load time of the video is worth it.

Well, the conference in Bilbao is now over, but I’m still chewing on all of the ideas people tossed around over the course of the three days. I’m happy to report that my talk on our civic engagement work went over very well. (The translator only told me to slow down ONCE, and that was when I deviated from my script to explain what Capture the Flag is since I cited OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement) as an example program. I got a little carried away.) I wasn’t sure how our ideas about the town square and our definition of civic engagement would play out in Europe, since I am picking up on a different approach to these concepts from over there.

None of the European museum people addressed the term civic engagement directly, but we did spend a lot of time talking about access, which is a primary concern for several of the musuems present and it seems to fall under the broad category of civic. Lisa Moran, Curator of Education at the Irish Museum of American Art talked about issues they have with access and funding that are quite different from ours. IMMA is almost entirely publicly funded and thus all of their programs are free, including gallery admission. This is fantastic for accessibility, but aparently this money comes with strings attached. Those strings are the social service agendas of the Irish government which seeks, rightfully, to give arts access to underpriviledged individuals. This relationship drives programs that serve only particular audiences, rather than funding arts access for everyone, including people that don’t fall into a category of “underprivileged.”

Another difference between the Walker’s work and that of several European institutions that this conference cemented is in our definition of “civic engagement.” At the American Association of Museums Conference this spring in Boston I attended a panel on European examples of civic engagement, which is how I first learned about the programs of IMMA. While the programs presented in that panel were excellent, I was curious to hear that the core of them was the engagement of so called “excluded audiences” rather than an effort to drive attention to civic issues. At the Walker we are striving to use art to encourage engagement with social, political, and cultural issues of RIGHT NOW. Access to the museum and the creation of a welcoming enviornment is also part of our town square concept, but a major component of our c.e. work relates to social and political concerns.

I came away from this conference wondering if that is a particularly American concern. We are all accutely aware of the current divisions in American politics and opinion, and indeed these frictions were part of the motivation for the civic engagement process in the first place. As I explained to my Spanish colleagues, there is an anxiety in the States right now that one feels no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. Everyone thinks the country is going in the wrong direction and these opinions are causing trouble from the family dinner table to the Senate. Every place in the world has political struggle, the Basque region certainly included, so it strikes me as curious that connecting people to political issues through art was not a concern I heard at the conference from my European colleagues.

I’m off for a little vacation now after the conference, which will include a lot of museums visits so stay tuned for more reports.

It is rainy and cloudy in the northern Spanish city of Bilbao where I am for a conference on artists, museums, and interpretation held at the Guggenheim. Tomorrow I’m speaking on the Walker’s Civic Engagement Initiative, which I hope will be a good follow-up to today’s discussion about the gallery as a civic space, presented by museum historian and sociologist Tony Bennett. He was the first speaker of the day, bright and early (well not bright, but gray with drizzle) and it was a power punch to start the day.

Among many things, he talked about how the civic function of museums shifted in the late 19th century from centering on the civic improvement of all social classes (this is still a classist notion–the goal was apparently to make better citizens out of the rowdy lower classses by introducing them to rational thinking through science and other objects) to social sites for the new European middle class. (This is discussed at length in his book The Birth of the Museum.) He used this historical analysis to talk about how the civic function of museums today have shifted to include “technologies of tolerance,” or all of our aims to draw in racially and culturally diverse audiences.

His ultimate argument (and I’m skipping over a great number of points here) is that while musuems have done a lot of work to expand audiences to include racial diversity, this diversity mainly comes out of the middle, upper, and professional classes. He presented research where white British citizens and British citizens of Indian, Pakistani and Afro-Carribbean ethnicity were interviewed about their professions and their likelihood to visit museums. The findings showed that people mostly likely to visit museums worked in “professional” jobs, or, jobs that depend on knowledge rather than labor, or people from weathly families. Class was much more of a dividing line than race.

Hmmm. Something we sorta already know, right?

He left us with a big question: “What civic value can be derived from museums that serve only half of the population?” I’ll make no attempt to answer this tomorrow, but I´m hoping that our discussion about civic engagement and inclusion in the museum might creep us closer to ideas on how answer it.

Stay tuned…

PS: Sorry there aren’t many pictures or links to entertain readers in this post. There are a great many things I can’t figure out with this Spanish-language keyboard; cutting and pasting and saving images to the desktop are some of these things! Thanks for your text-only patience.

Before the new Walker opened, there as a lot of talk internally about what our open hours should be. We looked at all the numbers of when people tended to visit the museum and discussed being open later, or earlier, etc. But I don’t think anyone suggested being open until midnight on Saturdays like the British Museum is doing during their run of Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master. In order to give all of their interested viewers access to the show, the museum is staying open every Saturday until midnight throughout the exhibition.

Of course, this decision was made for this special circumstance, to meet a huge audience demand. But it brings back the conversation about when audiences use museums, and when they would like too if we were open. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris is open from noon to midnight everyday except Monday. Are their galleries packed at 10:30 at night? Would people hang out at the Walker at 11 pm on a Saturday night without the lure of a preview party or cocktails at the bar? Maybe, maybe not. I’d go to see Michelangelo at midnight—I’d even come here to see Diane Arbus at midnight. Would you?

After tonight’s screening of The Night of Truth, our guest speaker Dr. Victoria Coifman recommended a PBS documetary called Ghosts of Rwanda as a necessary follow-up to Fanta Regina Nacro’s universal story of African civil strife, genocide and healing. Find the documentary and related analysis, interviews and discussion here.

I have always disliked this question. I find it impossible to pick and choose between everything I have read in my lifetime in order to reduce all of my literary joys, disappointments, frustrations, and amazements to ONE best-liked read. It just can’t be done. But this is my opinion, which is apparently not shared by the New York Times who dared ask several prominent authors, editors and literary critics to select “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

The contest caught my eye, not because of the difficultly of it’s charge (which Times critic A.O. Scott details in a long essay about the contest), but because of the winner. Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987), took first place. I was immediately pleased to see that a woman of color made it into the top 5 with all the other middle-aged white men, and intrigued because I happen to be reading Beloved right now in preparation for our forthcoming Kara Walker exhibition.
I don’t know why I avoided this novel, or this author, for so long. (This is the first Morrison book I’ve read.) But now that I am deep into the middle of it, loosing sleep to its slowly unraveling plot and haunting characters on a nightly basis, I can understand how it would make a best-of-something list. As I read and my mind draws images of Sethe, Denver, Beloved and their house in newly post Civil War Cincinatti, Walker’s crisp drawings and black paper cut-outs flitter in my imagination.

I highly recommend the book, and not just because a panel of experts decided that it is better than most other books published in the last quarter century. Until I’ve reached the end, that’s all I’ll say for now.

Here in Public Programs we are gearing up for a summer of books at the Artist’s Bookshelf. Moderator Roger Nieboer and I have emerged from the long winter with this list of fun, and perhaps adventuresome, summertime reading. Here is a preview:

June 1: Colors Insulting to Nature by Cintra Wilson
Roger picked this book to mirror Sharon Lockhart’s exhibition of photographs and film installations called Pine Flat on view in the Medtronic Gallery. Lockhart’s project is about kids growing up in a semi-rural town at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. The book is about a girl growing up in Marin County, CA with movie-star amibitions in the 1980’s. Read it and come ready to discuss the trials of childhood.

July 6: Dracula by Bram Stoker.
No joke! This session is related to the exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations and is one of the books in the “libraries” section of the show. The “libraries” are rooms full of the artist’s contact sheets, cameras, letters, notebooks, other writings and books from her personal library. Dracula is on the shelf, so we decided to give it a try. We’ll see how it goes– reading a book published in 1897 is a bit outside of our mandate to explore “contemporary” literature, but the vampire theme went over well when we read Fledgling, and besides, Dracula is making a come-back anyway. Viking Books is putting out a new illustrated version with drawings by acclaimed Marvel comic artist Jae Lee. Unfortunately, it won’t be in stores until September, so for the July discussion check out a copy from the library. Or, you could read the entire thing online, but that seems like it would only give you a headache.

August 3: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffery Eugenides
If you’re someone who read Middlesex but only got around to watching the movie adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, its time to pick up the book. The suggestion for this novel came from ECP’s voracious reader (and blogger) Morgan Wylie who called it “gritty and inescapable,” much like the month of August itself. This book was selected for its thematic likeness to the work of Cameron Jamie, who will have a solo exhibition here starting in mid-July. His interest in American suburban culture, mythology and backyard rituals should be a facinating pair with the story of the Lisbon sisters and their admirers.
All sessions of The Artist’s Bookshelf meet in the Star Tribune Foundation Art Lab at the Walker at 7 pm. To register (don’t worry, its free) call 612.375.7600. We hope to see you there!

Or, “Sometimes Things Don’t Go as Planned.”

This is the story with Thursday’s scheduled Contemporary Art in Conversation with filmmaker Jem Cohen and musician Vic Chesnutt. I’m sad to write that Vic is unable to get to Minneapolis for the talk due to some medical problems that have him in the hospital. But, we’re flexible around here so we’ve restructured the evening as an artist talk with Jem, and an interview with Walker Film/Video Curator Dean Otto. The talk will be packed with film clips from works older projects such as Lost Book Found, Buried in Light and Benjamin Smoke, and new works like NYC Weights and Measures and Blessed are the Dreams of Men, plus maybe some of his music-oriented projects. The playlist isn’t final, but these are among the contenders.
While we’ll miss Vic’s musical contribution to the program, his stories of working collaboratively with Jem and writing music for films, the program is still not-to-be missed. In addition to everything mentioned above, Jem is planning to screen his very first film, a rarely seen 3 minute silent short of Coney Island and Dean is sure to present insightful thoughts and questions.

Lastly, for those Chesnutt fans out there, we’ll provide an opportunity at the program for you to send your get-well wishes to Vic, but you have to show up to participate!

One week and a few hours from now, Chrissie Iles from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker’s own Philippe Vergne will be in the house to talk about curating the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This is the show that everyone loves to hate, or at least loves to criticize. Well, get ready because this will all be rolled into the act. As part of their presentation, Iles and Vergne plan to respond directly to some of the published criticism of the show. Here in Public Programs we’ve spent the past few days culling articles and highlighting quotes from the likes of Michael Kimmelman, Jerry Saltz and of course Tyler Green in preparation for the talk.

It all happens on Monday, April 3 at 7 pm. Tickets are $5–that’s cheaper than a movie for just as much drama and action! If you can’t physically manifest yourself at the Walker on that day, catch the whole thing online at the Walker Channel.

Want to learn more? Read an interview with Iles and Vergne in the March issue of Walker.