ArtsConnectEd.org Comments

ilenemojsilov on Art and Architecture: Looking at Materials and Construction in Contemporary Art

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:04:43 -0400

Many thanks to Walker Art Center Registrar, Joe King, for answering my questions about the mechanics and conservation of artworks in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden!

cassidyschneider on S

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:07:31 -0400

It has alot of texture, by having the fur loook like its real and a good color for the tiger.

Abbie Anderson on

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 00:38:14 -0400

File under STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics)

Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller (July 12, 1895 July 1, 1983) was an American architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor, and visionary, sometimes called the Leonardo Divinci of our time. In 2010, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized an exhibition about Fuller. See the Whitney's exhibition trailer here: http://youtu.be/f1Rq0fpdjS0

Abbie Anderson on Pouring

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:45:56 -0400

File under STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics)

Artist David Goldes says "My interest is science is very experiential, rooted in childhood experiments." For more information about the artist who draws from his science background and finds inspiration in physical phenomena, watch the profile produced by MNoriginal: http://youtu.be/Y-acZRDxjW8

Abbie Anderson on Le rayon vert (The Green Light)

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:30:25 -0400

File under STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics)

This artwork's title refers to:

an optical phenomena known as a "green flash" that occurs at sunset when the Earth's atmosphere functions as a prism, separating light into its constituent colors.
A Jules Verne novel from 1882.

kathys on My Life as an Architect/Designer

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:48:08 -0400

This is a great set. Really well thought-out and uses wonderful examples from the MIA and Walker collections.

smcguire on Join the Band

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 14:01:14 -0400

As museum policy, we are unable to ascribe a value to your photograph. You might want to look at auction results online to see if other, similar photographs have sold at auction recently.

smcguire on Celestial Horse

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 13:52:05 -0400

I agree that this is a very interesting horse -- amazing degree of realism. In addition to the fact that the original color of the bronze (it was constructed from 9 separately cast sections) is visible on parts of the horse, the traces of paint--black, red, and white--around the eyes, mouth, neck, mane, and belly contribute to its realistic appearance. It looks so alive!

Dana Barton on "

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:57:11 -0400

Beautiful little Music Box. I own one but, it has lost a leg and a few brass balls over the years. Music still plays beautifully and the clown still dances. I wish I could find another one!

Msmelissa on Join the Band

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:41:53 -0500

I have this photo . Cn you tell me what it is worth? It is titled and signed and framed under glass.

Abbie Anderson on Transformation Mask

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 12:19:24 -0500

Thanks for the suggestion, Catherine! Get more information about Frog Girl here, on Paul Owen Lewis' website: http://www.paulowenlewis.com/books/froggirl.html.

Catherine Luebke on Transformation Mask

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 16:44:37 -0500

Frog Girl by Paul Owen Lewis is a great story to use while training. The art work is very simlar and it really tied it all together for the kids. We read to all classes grades K-5.

JOneil13 on "

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 09:30:32 -0500

only real person on here lolz

Abbie Anderson on Coyote

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:05:48 -0500

The following is an article from the Walker Art Center magazine (January/February 2009 issue):

In early 2008, as Walker curator Yasmil Raymond was preparing the installation of the current exhibition Statements: Beuys, Flavin, Judd, a light went on in her head. She remembered having glimpsed a screened projection in Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof in 2005—specifically, while browsing through that museum’s collection of works by German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). She got in touch with Eva Beuys, the artist’s widow, who helped her contact filmmaker Helmut Weitz, the artist’s good friend and frequent documentarian. After a few exchanges with these two obliging, art-centric octogenarians, Raymond had acquired for the Walker a copy of Weitz’s 37-minute, 16mm black-and-white film I Like America and America Likes Me (1974). The only visual documentation of one of Beuys’ most significant “actions” (and the only one to take place in the United States), this work has rarely been exhibited. Weitz’s seminal documentary is on view on DVD in the Walker exhibition galleries through June 12.

Beuys conceived one of the most compelling—and still provocative—aesthetic programs of the postwar period. His sculptures, performances, lectures, and political activism were all part of a grand, enormous goal: the transformation of Western culture into a more peaceful, democratic, and positive system. His famous slogan, “Everyone is an artist,” proposed that this could be achieved if only human beings would apply their innate creative energies to their current fields of endeavor. These were highly utopian aspirations, no doubt, but Beuys dedicated himself to them, hoping to reinvigorate society. While he counted debate, discussion, and teaching as part of his expanded definition of art, he also made objects, installations, multiples, and performances, which he called actions. His charismatic presence, his urgent and public calls for reform of all kinds, and his unconventional artistic style gained him international notoriety as well as strong skepticism during his lifetime. “That’s a funny thing about contemporary art,” Raymond says. “Sometimes the brilliance of artworks pass before our eyes like splatters of light, and sometimes they’re so far away that we need a telescope to see them. It’s a hard balance, but [curators] struggle every day to see, with the right distance, what needs to be seen at a given moment.”

Beuys was introduced to performance art in 1962 and soon viewed it as a medium with the potential for self-healing and social transformation. Though Fluxus artists and those creating Happenings often didn’t record their performances, Beuys understood that this early example of a durational piece needed to be documented. The action Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me began the minute he arrived at New York City’s JFK airport. His feet barely touched American soil—he had himself wrapped in felt, put into an ambulance, and taken directly to the René Block Gallery in Soho, where he spent three days in a room with a coyote. Watching the evolving relationship between the artist and the animal, Raymond says, is “almost like going on a journey. A photograph wouldn’t show that; it’s fascinating to think of Beuys’ action as a situation ‘constructed’ for the camera.”

Raymond calls this piece Beuys’ “gift to America.” Though the title may be tongue-in-cheek, he was always serious about his work. Since this particular action was to take place in the United States, Beuys chose an animal native to this country, with the larger implication of representing its first people. The coyote was the symbol that helped him enter into a historical conversation where he could find a moment of reconciliation. “It’s strange, the levels where art takes you,” Raymond says. “Everybody has different reactions to this piece, but I can only speak about my cathartic experience when I consider the questions he investigated in the work. A man and animal coexisting, negotiating a common space, respecting their own individuality. That’s the reason it lingered in my head as a work that deserves attention. It’s very special.”

Eduardo on Nine Squares

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:29:37 -0500

I see the nine big squares around the big square

Abbie Anderson on Beauty

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 11:54:35 -0500

I noticed Beauty one Tuesday morning on the way to my office. Just a day earlier, the polished plaster wall had been bare. Then suddenly, Beauty appeared, spelling out its red message as I advanced down the hall. An Oscar Wilde quote about beauty, ugliness, prettiness, flickered in my mind, its perfect phrasing clumsily misremembered. Arriving at my computer, first task of the day: look up that quote.

But why stop at Wilde? What do other writers, artists, figures from history, and philosophers have to say about beauty?

Abbie Anderson on Beauty

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 11:54:03 -0500

"The beauty of things must be that they end."

Jack Kerouac

Claes-Oldenburg69 on Spoonbridge and Cherry

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 19:01:57 -0500

Lol i rmembr makin dis :p

erinmegan on How do music and art communicate a story?

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:14:09 -0500

Author's Purpose- Why do you think the composer created this piece of music?

kayla on What are some ways teachers can use ArtsConnectEd with an interactive whiteboard?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:03:03 -0500

thanks

kayla on What are some ways teachers can use ArtsConnectEd with an interactive whiteboard?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:00:57 -0500

Abbie Anderson on Office at Night

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:44:27 -0400

A quote by the artist, Edward Hopper: "The picture was probably first suggested by many rides on the 'L' trains in New York City after dark and glimpses of office interiors that were so fleeting as to leave fresh and vivid impressions on my mind.

My aim was to try to give the sense of an isolated and lonely office interior rather high in the air with the office furniture which has a very definite meaning for me.

There are three sources of light in the picture: indirect lighting from above, the desk light and the light coming through the window. The light coming from outside and falling on the wall in back made a difficult problem, as it is almost painting white on white; it also made a strong accent of the edge of the filing cabinet which was difficult to subordinate to the figure of the girl.

I was also interested in the sombre richness of the furniture against the white walls. Any more than this, the picture will have to tell, but I hope it will not tell any obvious anecdote, for none is intended."

Source: http://www.walkerart.org/archive/D/B9738186898B24666167.htm

Johnathan on Guardian figure, one of a pair

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:07:42 -0400

This guardian figure is a work of art. It shows us that the buddah religion has many beliefs. I wonder what this sculpture would look like if it was standing in front of a temple

Johnathan on Epitaph Tablet of Prince Cheng Ching (Yuan Mi)

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:04:18 -0400

This tablet is a very neat representation of how we can carve what we want to. I think that the words on the tablet describe what cheng ching was like and how he did good for china.

WalkerResources on The Living Years: Time

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:15:49 -0400

This Art Collector Set was written by Walker Art Center tour guides Kathy S and Judy B, and borrows from an original Set by Susan R.. It was created to accompany the "Time" tour theme, developed by tour guide Judy B..

To schedule your tour of the Walker Art Center, contact us using the Tour Request Form: walkerart.org/tourrequestform.

WalkerResources on The Living Years: Seeing Art With All Five Senses

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:12:48 -0400

This Art Collector Set was written by Walker Art Center tour guide Kathy S with additional assistance from Walker education staff. It was created to accompany the "Seeing Art With All Five Senses" tour theme, developed by tour guide Rhonda B. with props by fellow guide Bianka P..

To schedule your tour of the Walker Art Center, contact us using the Tour Request Form: walkerart.org/tourrequestform.

Johnathan on Sarcophagus of Prince Yuan Mi

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:33:49 -0400

This coffin is fit for a king. Well in this case, a Prince. The elegant carvings on the side show many things. I wonder what they are. The stone makes it seem erie though.

Johnathan on Celestial Horse

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:29:58 -0400

This horse is very... lets say interesting. The way the artist made it makes it seems like its neighing. Weird. The rock that was carved to make this has a certain quality that makes it seem like a real horse.

Johnathan on Jade Mountain Illustrating the Gathering of Poets at the Lan T'ing Pavilion: Gallery Label - Current

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:26:03 -0400

This piece is very detailed and it must have taken alot of time to finish. I wonder what the inscription on the top means.

Tyrone T. Aiken on Combined Wisdom

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 02:42:59 -0400

I love this style called " Rhythm Patterns, I teach this at most schools as an ice breaker.

Abbie Anderson on Tombstone for Phùng Vo from All your deeds shall in water be writ, but this in marble

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 12:09:37 -0400

Another work by Danh Vo, titled We The People, is on view outside the Art Institute of Chicago. Here's a link to a New York Times article about that artwork: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/arts/design/danh-vos-we-the-people-project-in-chicago.html?smid=pl-share

WalkerResources on untitled [Folks and Places Abroad] from Narratives

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:08:17 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

For this portfolio of prints, Glenn Ligon references the typographic style of frontispieces from 19th-century slave narratives. Published by white abolitionists, these often recounted the lives of slaves and tales of their escapes. The artist has replaced the Bible verses and anti-slavery poems that sometimes appeared on these with quotations by contemporary authors he admires, while the narratives tell the story of his own life. “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essential notions of black identity,” Ligon writes. “The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.”

WalkerResources on untitled [Black Like Me] from Narratives

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:07:59 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

WalkerResources on untitled [To Disembark] from Narratives

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:07:17 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

WalkerResources on untitled [The Narrative of the Life and Uncommon Suffering] from Narratives

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:06:55 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

WalkerResources on untitled [The Life and Adventures of Glenn Ligon] from Narratives

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 13:06:23 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

WalkerResources on DeLuxe

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:53:56 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Ellen Gallagher collects popular magazines published for a black audience, such as Ebony, Black Digest, and Our World—most of them dating from the years before the civil rights era. She is drawn to vintage advertisements that promise physical transformation, including those for skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and wigs. The artist meticulously replicates the ads with printmaking techniques, then, as she says, “reactivates” the surfaces by adhering unusual elements, from plasticine and hair pomade to glitter and plastic eyes. In so doing, she modifies the idealized human beings into bizarre apparitions that call into question attitudes about fashion, mass media, and race prevalent in mid-century America.

WalkerResources on Fort Ridgely State Monument, Minnesota

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:50:57 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Sam Durant grew up in Massachusetts not far from Plymouth Rock, where he was introduced to white/Native American political relationships at an early age. The “Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions” was inspired by Minnesota monuments erected in remembrance of the massacres that took place in the Dakota Conflict of 1862. He developed the project through a residency at the Walker in 2002 with Heart of the Earth and Four Directions Native American schools. “The monuments ... commemorate deaths in the conflicts between the Indigenous people and settlers, from their arrival on the continent to the beginning of the 20th century. I saw turning things upside down as a kind of politicizing, a kind of acknowledgment of a world that for Native Americans is turned upside down.”

WalkerResources on Series of Vulnerable Arrangement - The Blind Room

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:48:33 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"Most of my materials are not traditional art materials, and I take them as they are without modifying them or alienating them from their original forms and states. My treatment of material is grounded in my belief in people and the magic of everyday life, as well as in modesty and a down-to-earth attitude. This consitutes a large part of me as an artist, yet another part of me is directed toward madness, hysteria, drama, and a pathetic nature."—Haegue Yang

WalkerResources on 8 Possible Beginnings or: The Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:45:51 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"There's always a beginning and there's never a conclusion. I like the 'once upon a time' part of a story. I'm also very interested in the range of narratives that we tell ourselves (I'm thinking of the African-American community) that define who we are and how we got here. The idea of there being a place called 'African-America' is the heart of the need for this narrative."—Kara Walker

WalkerResources on From Hand to Ear

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:43:16 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"The hands and the ears are essential to play a musical instrument. Subtle hand gestures translate into music, which is always under the scrutiny of the ears. The playing of an instrument is a delicate balance between moving and listening. . .. As a deejay I can disrupt the listening of a record by touching it, changing its speed, or its spinning direction, and completely alter what the ear was perceiving a second earlier. The ears are the silent witness of our daily gestures. From Hand to Ear is a cast part of my body."—Christian Marclay

WalkerResources on As the Crow Flies/How I Miss the Avant-garde

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:38:03 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Please feel free to investigate and reorder the posters in any way you choose. (They may be moved from one hook to another.) According to the artist, your decisions about how to arrange these are part of the piece.

WalkerResources on Demolished

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:36:40 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

When Rachel Whiteread’s acclaimed sculpture House (1993)—a full-size plaster cast of the interior space of a row house in London’s East End—was torn down, she made this series of prints depicting the leveling of three low-income housing complexes. Like her sculptures, which are often casts of the empty spaces between, under, or around objects and architecture, she has here memorialized these undistinguished, generic buildings as cultural remains.

WalkerResources on Four Part Butter-Scene N'Ganga

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:33:29 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles–based artist who recently passed away at age 57, is much admired for his rowdy, subversive, and transgressive art, which calls attention to repressed aspects of our collective psyche and questions the conservative mores of American society. In Four Part Butter-Scene N’Ganga, four washtubs filled with a strange plastic stew are suspended from the ceiling, connected by pipes and wires. At the base of each, speakers emit a cacophony of grunts and gasps—taken from the soundtrack of the notorious “butter scene” in the 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando. For Kelley, the tubs in this work are estimations of “n’ganga pots,” cauldrons containing a fetid mixture of body parts and other materials used in West African Santeria rituals. He wrote, “The n’ganga is the pot which gives chaos its form and, in doing so, limits it.”

WalkerResources on Embutidinho (Small Embedded)

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:22:09 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"This project deals with practical solutions for a small, single domestic space, which can be modified depending on the requirements of those who occupy it. Contemporary subspaces were the source: shacks, huts, cardboard cities of the homeless, cubicles, palafittes, improvised living. . .. The poetics of survival, concrete reality, inequality, the nécessaire, work tools, street vendors, adaptations for the human body, resistance, weight, volume, preoccupations, solutions for the collective popular universe, and architect Lina Bo Bardi can all be found within this work."—Marepe

WalkerResources on WTC

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 12:01:26 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

In 2001, JoAnn Verburg took this photograph on the Sunday after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Her husband, poet Jim Moore, holds the newspaper showing an image of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. “It wasn’t that I wanted to capitalize on a great headline; [I used it] because I was devastated,” says the artist. “My way of working my way out of deep emotional traumas is looking out through the [camera’s] ground glass at the world.”

WalkerResources on Untitled

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:58:31 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

“The felts are stolen death metal logos and are to me about the abstraction of text as a sculptural form. On the other hand, they are about growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, which I guess could be considered nostalgic. But when I lived there, I could always feel an underlying presence of something sinister and I was always expecting something bad to happen.” —Jay Heikes

WalkerResources on Analog

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:53:43 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Mark Bradford’s studio is in an old beauty salon his mother owned in Leimert Park, South Central LA. Like many of his works, this painting incorporates permanent-wave end papers used in the salon, which he collages with scraps of billboards, posters, and signs that he gathers from the neighborhood. The materials are torn, layered, erased, and sanded to become the painting. The artist describes himself as a “postmodern flâneur”—riffing off poet Charles Baudelaire’s 1860s description of the “idle man about town” strolling through the Paris streets. Bradford applies this practice to the contemporary urban landscape with its shifting demographics and economies.

WalkerResources on Wigs (portfolio)

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:50:58 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Lorna Simpson compiled these images printed on tactile felt as a way, she says, “to indicate the body rather than actually using the body itself.” Her photographs of 21 individual hair pieces, ranging from black and braided to blonde and wavy, offer a taxonomy of styles that suggest differences of gender, race, age, and class. Like much of Simpson’s work, the accompanying texts circle around the subjects of identification and misidentification, appearances and stereotypes.

WalkerResources on TODAY series

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 11:49:22 -0400

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Since January 1966, On Kawara has made a series of paintings, each presenting the date on which the work was executed in simple white lettering against a solid background. One painting takes the artist between eight and nine hours to finish—a literal representation of a day in his life. Those that are not completed within a day are destroyed; completed works are stored with the front page of that day’s newspaper. Kawara produced this series during five days spent in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1989.