The Walker Art Center is a contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn. It was founded in 1879 by lumberman Thomas Barlow Walker and which he formally established at its current location in 1927 as the first public art gallery in the Upper Midwest. Directly across from the museum are the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1988, and the Cowles Conservatory. The Walker Art Center completed a renovation and expansion in April 2005.
Famous quotes containing the words walker, art and/or center:
“Old Molly Means was a hag and a witch;
Chile of the devil, the dark, and sitch.”
—Margaret Abigail Walker (b. 1915)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)