Cultivating the Garden

How does a sculpture garden grow?

After extensive renovations and a reimagined landscape, the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden reopens in June 2017. With the addition of 18 new sculptures, you can now interact with some 60 artworks as you explore the grounds. The works featured in this exhibition highlight a larger celebration of the entire Garden, which is a nearly 30-year partnership between the Walker Art Center and the Minneapolis Park & Recreation Board.

Organized around themes of icon, growth, and passage, this display revisits the fountain-sculpture centerpiece—Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–1988)—to see how and where the piece began. In addition, it offers a sneak peek at another monumental work soon to enter the landscape: Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock (2013/2017), a monumental blue rooster. Also presented are images of Joseph Beuys’s 1974 lecture tour in Minneapolis as well as documentation of Siah Armajani’s creation of the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988), at once a sculpture and an important passageway between the Garden and Loring Park.

Changing displays in the Best Buy Aperture highlight materials from the Walker’s collections and Archives & Library that foreground the institution’s exhibition history and thematic strands in its holdings. Integrating archival materials with moving image technology, this unique space encourages a media rich and innovative approach toward archival displays.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website