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Salon-Style Exhibition Benches & Binoculars Showcases Walker Art Center’s Paintings Collection

A sweeping look at the Walker Art Center’s paintings collection, displayed floor to ceiling in a salon style inspired by the 1920s galleries of museum founder Thomas Barlow Walker, will be presented in Benches & Binoculars, on view November 21, 2009–August 15, 2010. In a large-scale and densely hung installation, organized by chief curator Darsie Alexander and curator Elizabeth Carpenter, visitors will encounter unpredictable juxtapositions and side-by-side pairings of more than 120 works mirroring the twists and eccentricities found in T.B. Walker’s personal collection as well as the serendipity and uncanny coincidences that emerge in the present-day storage areas housing the collection. Many works have not been seen for decades, and a number of surprises (as well as a few old friends) make their 21st-century debut here. Some have served as centerpieces of key monographic exhibitions, and are locally as well as internationally renowned. Others are more modest in appearance, subject to the tides of changing taste and practice. All were, at least once, contemporary.

Franz Marc
Franz Marc, “The Large Blue Horses”, 1911. Collection Walker Art Center, Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, Gilbert M. Walker Fund, 1942

Highlighting the exhibition is the return of Franz Marc’s Die grossen blauen Pferde (The Large Blue Horses) (1911), long considered a masterpiece of the Walker’s collection, and Edward Hopper’s mysterious Office at Night (1940), one of the artist’s best-known works. Included among the many works exhibited will be Jim Dine’s My Studio # One: The Vagaries of Painting “These are sadder pictures” (1978); Chuck Close’s Big Self-Portrait (1967–1968); Georgia O’Keeffe’s Lake George Barns (1926); Eleanore de Laittre’s Squares (1946); Louis Eilshemius’ Hymn to Nature (1919); Lyonel Feininger’s Barfüsserkirche II (Church of the Minorites II) (1926); Saul Fletcher’s Untitled (painting II) (2005); Sherrie Levine’s Untitled (after Egon Schiele) (1984); Alice Neel’s Charlotte Willard (1967); Charles Sheeler’s Midwest (1954); Andy Warhol’s Self-Portrait (1978); and Carl L. Boeckman’s Portrait of Thomas Barlow Walker (circa 1915).

Displaying artworks salon style is markedly different from the minimalist aesthetic that defines the look of today’s contemporary and modern museums. This is a style the Walker has also at times adopted, but just as frequently contradicted or subverted. Recent solo exhibitions like The Quick and the Dead and Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, for example, revealed strategies that turned the galleries into immersive environments for both artworks and ideas.

Choosing salon style as a mode of exhibition is something of an homage to the nature of the institution itself—one of a few places where autonomous works and programs, with different audiences and disparate histories, coexist and frequently overlap. The Walker’s mix of live performing arts events, film and video screenings, and gallery exhibitions, in addition to various educational programs, sets up a plethora of opportunities that keeps the offerings fresh and unpredictable. Benches & Binoculars seeks to create a similarly divergent platform for discovering new relationships between works in the collection. Over the course of the exhibition, programs and activities will offer opportunities to investigate ideas at play within the exhibition, delving into the ways in which personal impressions assign kinships and distinctions among works on view. The gallery space of the exhibition will feature platform seating and viewing binoculars as well as an interactive touch-screen map where visitors can select works from a digital version of the installation to access more information.

As an extension of the concurrently running cross-disciplinary collections exhibition Event Horizon, whose content will rotate during its three-year run, Benches & Binoculars will also change over time. As new works appear and others return to the vaults, return visits are important—and probably necessary. And yet even with a single visit, browsing provides its own kind of pleasure and freedom, as well as a distinctive view of the Walker’s history—as it no doubt did in T.B. Walker’s own day.

Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55403

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