More than a year before the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis implemented a major rehang of its permanent collection—titled This Must Be the Place and opening on 20 June—it laid the groundwork by reaching out directly to its audience. During the run of its four-part exhibition series Make Sense of This: Visitors Respond to the Walker’s Collection (which ended on 5 May), it asked the public to comment on works from the collection chosen around certain themes—such as portraiture, music, memory and boundary-pushing—through a short questionnaire taken on a tablet. Their answers were displayed in real time on a monitor in the gallery.
“In the first two weeks, I think we had 2,200 impressions on the tablet,” Amanda Hunt—the museum’s head of public engagement, learning and impact—tells The Art Newspaper. She points out that this does not mean the questionnaire was necessarily filled out by 2,200 people, but that visitors likely “gamified” the process, submitting multiple answers in an urge to engage. “What we were seeing immediately was that people really wanted to give feedback in a whole spectrum of ways,” Hunt says. “They wanted to see their feedback on the walls, quite literally.”
“I think that was maybe our biggest takeaway,” agrees Henriette Huldisch, the Walker’s chief curator and director of curatorial affairs, who has taken that public feedback into account in helping to organise the rehang. “In fact, I think there might be a certain generational shift in that too; a lot of younger people expect to be able to comment on things.” By the end of the project, the Walker had received more than 28,000 unique responses to its survey, which was offered in the four most-used languages in the region: English, Spanish, Somali and Hmong.
This public input led the curatorial team to include a dedicated engagement space on the fifth floor in the middle of the rehang, which takes over the top three galleries of the museum’s main brick tower building. With a small reading section as well as tables and chairs, the engagement space is somewhere visitors can recharge (mentally and technologically, with phone chargers provided) and reflect on the themes of This Must Be the Place.
The show is roughly built around what “home” means for different people—like “Kith and Kin”, featuring works centred on friendship, family and community; “The City”, based on urban environments; and “The Land”, which examines settlement and displacement. A fourth section, “Light, Water, Space”, includes abstract and minimalist works that explore modes of perception.
Written prompts provided in the engagement space encourage discussion among groups, and visitors are able to respond to these on comment cards that can be attached to a display wall in the gallery. But mostly, people are able to “sit down, have a conversation or just quietly read a book and peruse and be in these ideas in a museum context”, Hunt says.
The curators saw similar urges during the recent installation of The New Eagle Creek Saloon (2019-ongoing) by the Oakland, California-based artist Sadie Barnette, which closed on 19 May. The project is named after a venue operated by the artist’s father in the early 1990s, the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. At the Walker, it included a functioning bar on the ground floor and a reading room with texts on LGBTQ+ history, as well as phone chargers. It was a hit with the public, Huldisch says.
The writing on the wall
Visitor feedback has also influenced how the museum now treats its wall labels. People were evenly split about the types of labels they preferred, Huldisch says, when offered the option between a neutral third-person “museum voice” and a first-person perspective—although both versions were carefully crafted to avoid jargon. “It does speak to the fact that people like plain language,” Huldisch says.
The Walker sticks to its standard institutional labels for This Must Be the Place, but the museum is also producing audio content for its Bloomberg Connects app that draws on stories from a variety of museum staff, such as registrars, librarians and designers, as well as artists. “We’re going to have very subjective, idiosyncratic accounts by people within the institutions that are not curators, and community partners who might be experiencing the show,” Huldisch says.
Another piece of feedback visitors consistently provided was the desire to see a photograph of the artist who made the work on view, but this has been a complicated request for curators to implement. “It’s quite tricky, because we know a lot of contemporary artists don’t necessarily want their work to be read along the lens of their personal biography,” Huldisch says.
One way the museum has tried to solve this is by revising its artist questionnaire, which is filled out when a work of art enters the collection; it now includes self-identifiers of nationality, gender and other biographical information as well as a “prefer not to say” option. “There are artists who certainly feel their lived experience and identity is very key to their work,” Huldisch says. “And then there are others who don’t necessarily want that foregrounded interpretation.”
A key element of the Walker’s reinstallation is its flexibility, with plans to rotate works in the main galleries after two or three years, and some of the smaller spaces set aside for more frequent changes—every 12 months or so. Collection favourites, such as Franz Marc’s Die grossen blauen Pferde (the large blue horses, 1911) and Edward Hopper’s Office at Night (1940), are either on display in a gallery that serves as a bookend to the rehang or integrated into one of the thematic sections.
“One of the core ideas was that we wanted to situate the collection more recognisably in a certain part of the building, so that would be an anchor people would come back to,” Huldisch says, “but then there would be a certain amount of dynamism within that, to enable us to refresh the installation with recent acquisitions or maybe address a different topic.”
This sense of relevance is also something the Walker’s public specifically asked for. “People repeatedly said that they want the Walker to get engaged with critical, topical content and present works that engage with serious, political, social and cultural questions,” Huldisch says. “That was really interesting for us to hear explicitly—and perhaps somewhat validating.”
• This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, until 29 April 2029