Walker Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis – Autumn 2019

Back to a local treasure, the Walker Sculpture Garden. It’s been a long while since we’ve visited and I’ve been wanting to go since it reopened in June 2017 after a renovation. We went on a sunny, early October day a little over two years since its reopening. Hey, at least we finally got there!

I enjoyed our walk about but I’m not so sure I like the changes. It seems that it’s not laid out as well as it previously was and that’s hard to describe. Sculptures are mostly arranged in various squares with other sculptures surrounding the squares. So, you enter one side of the square to get a close up view of the sculpture in there.  When you exit you only get to see that side’s sculptures making it a long walk to see the other sculptures on the other two sides?  Yea, like I said, hard to describe.  There is one Alexander Calder mobile on the western edge that felt like it took a long time to walk to. There also used to be a green house and that is gone.  There are, however, nice gardens that probably looked better in spring and summer but I tried to capture some of those. There still was some beauty to behold gardenwise and several flowers still blooming.

The Walker Sculpture Garden opened in 1988 but the history actually goes back to 1906 when the land that would become the sculpture garden was donated to the Minneapolis park board by Thomas Lowry. Lowry was a real estate magnate and head of the Minneapolis Street Railway Co.  His home was where the Walker Art Center now stands, adjacent to the sculpture garden.  There is the Lowry tunnel as part of interstate 94 close by and now I know who that tunnel was named for. Interesting!  The gardens contain more than 40 works of art on 11 acres and is the largest urban sculpture garden in the country.  I learned most of this from the Minneapolis Parks website.  Check out more interesting stuff at this link.  At the Walker Art Center’s website is a page containing photos of all of the sculptures as well as the layout. I grabbed the names of the pieces and the artists’ names from this site.

I was also curious how the Walker Art Center got is name.  Instead of summarizing here I will direct you to this link for some interesting history of Thomas Barlow (T. B.) Walker, a Minneapolis lumber baron who loved art.

I hope you’ll enjoy this photo tour of our day in the sculpture garden. I didn’t capture all of the sculptures but I’m happy with my samples. And it was a perfect, sunny day with gorgeous blue skies.

Spoonbridge and Cherry – Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (Walker Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis)

The Spinner – Alexander Calder (Walker Sculpture Garden)

Two Way Mirror – Dan Graham

Woodrow – Deborah Butterfield

Black vessel for a saint – Theaster Gates

The saint inside the black vessel

Hare on Bell on Portland Stone Piers – Barry Flanagan (Walker Sculpture Garden)

For Whom – Kris Martin

I love this grass in the fall

coneflowers still in bloom

Arikidea – Mark di Suvero

Hahn/Cock – Katharina Fritsch

Sagacious Head 6 or 7(there are two) – Magdalena Abakanowicz

Love – Robert Indiana

La soledad – Kcho

Walking Man – George Segal

Hephaestus – Matthew Monahan

Bronze Woman IV – Thomas Schütte

Rapture – Kiki Smith

Level Head – Tony Cragg(Walker Sculpture Garden)

September room – Mark Manders

X – Liz Larner