"I should have worn jeans for this, but I've got another meeting later so I couldn't," said Olga Viso, Walker Art Center's new director, welcoming visitors on a recent afternoon to her spacious white office in the museum's new wing.

She was dressed in museum-director casual: a trim black pantsuit with white piping and slingback heels that added a couple inches to her lean, 5-foot-11-inch frame. It was a tad formal for the date we had proposed -- an hour or two of spelunking in the museum's subterranean storage rooms.

Viso earned a national reputation for her fresh approach to contemporary art and special interest in Latin American artists during her 12 years at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the last three as director. With the Walker collection now at her disposal, the Star Tribune was curious about what surprises she might unearth.

Like most museums, the Walker is structurally an iceberg, with a crown of gleaming galleries atop a labyrinth of stairways, frame shops, archives and storage rooms. Joe King, the museum's assistant registrar, led the expedition through a warren of back corridors and security doors to a freight elevator that plunged eight stories.

Behind more locked doors, the storage rooms with their concrete floors and cinder-block walls are glamour-free and spartan. Low-wattage motion-activated lights flick on as visitors enter, but the high-ceilinged spaces remain dim and a little gloomy.

There are separate rooms for sculpture (the most crowded), art on paper (10,000 prints, drawings and photos in immense rolling cabinets) and paintings (clipped willy-nilly to tall metal-mesh sliding racks).

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Olga Viso

"Isn't this a dream space?" gushed Viso about a room that, to anyone but a museum director, might look like an especially clean and well-ordered warehouse. There's no need to organize anything by theme or subject; every object, painting and piece of paper has a radio-frequency identity tag attached.

"Look at this wacky, wonderful thing," she said, crouching beside what appeared to be a chrome lamp topped by a ball of amber lightbulbs that flickered on and off in odd patterns. Called "Electric Flower," it's a 1967 Pop sculpture by Otto Piene, a now-obscure German whose work is enjoying a resurgence of attention, Viso said.

Nearby stood a tall rectangular black box with chrome edges, a 1966 light sculpture by Argentina's Julio Le Parc -- "another one of these forgotten artists who, all of a sudden, is of tremendous interest," Viso said. "Lots of L.A. collectors are acquiring his work."

A few aisles away, she spotted an 8-foot-long rowboat made of Cuban textbooks. A 1994 sculpture by the Cuban-born Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado), the piece struck a chord with Viso, who is of Cuban heritage. From Marxist tracts to Socialist economics, all the volumes were endorsed by Communist officials, she said, while the boat, of course, suggests Cuban refugees.

Then she rolled from under a table a scruffy lump that looked like a basketball-sized Milk Dud.

"This is one of my favorite pieces," she said, explaining that the ball is a 1992 conceptual self-portrait by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. Made of modeling clay, it weighs about 150 pounds -- roughly the same as Orozco -- and is encrusted with dirt and detritus that accrued as the artist rolled it through the streets of New York.

The ball literally embodies "his own biography and experiences in a city where he was absorbing influences and human experience," Viso said.

Curios and a provocative icon

Oddities crowd the narrow aisles: 28 obsolete TV sets stocked for installations by media artist Nam June Paik; a lime-green umbrella by sculptor Katharina Fritsch; an overstuffed garbage bag carved from white Carrara marble by former Minnesotan Jud Nelson.

One of the oddest is seemingly innocuous: documents for Jana Sterbak's 1987 "Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic," which looks like an ordinary sewing pattern but with very strange instructions. The dress requires 60 pounds of half-inch-thick flank steak to be sewn into a garment on a dressmaker's dummy. The salt-cured beef gradually shrinks until it assumes the contours of the wooden manikin, a metaphorical play on the notion that people "grow into their skins."

It has to be made up fresh every time it's exhibited, which isn't often. It was last shown in 1998. Would Viso consider showing it again?

"Absolutely! I think it's one of the really iconic pieces in the Walker's collection," she said. "It's emblematic of those artists who were dealing with issues of the body. It's dated 1987, but it was not widely exhibited until the early 1990s, and Walker acquired it in 1993. That's what's been particularly fun for me -- seeing what's in the collection and when Walker acquired it."

Later she observed, "When you're a contemporary institution, you don't settle on a canon; you're constantly revising and reassessing the collection. Being smart, agile and opportunistic has allowed the Walker to get really stellar examples, whether it's 500 multiples by Joseph Beuys or all the prints of Jasper Johns. When you can't be encyclopedic, you can be strong in depth."

Beuys, in fact, will be featured along with Dan Flavin and Donald Judd in an exhibit opening May 15 called "Statements." While it was planned long before she arrived, Viso is enthusiastic because "it showcases one of the strengths of our collection -- the holy trinity of post-1960s artists who have been important touchstones for so many artists."

From a Maya Deren film first screened in 1946 to the extensive holdings by Judd, Matthew Barney and Kara Walker, Viso said the Walker has been "making prescient choices about styles and movements that were outside the mainstream for a long time but that have proven to be very significant."

Although she plunged enthusiastically into the archives, Viso made a point of insisting that the Walker is, as its name and motto claim, "more than a museum." She's passionately committed to continuing the multidisciplinary culture that highlights films, performances and other media. A major reinstallation, opening in fall 2009, will combine "all different aspects of the collection from film to sculptural objects" and performance relics, she said.

Getting life back in balance

Soon it was back to the office, and then a reception hosted by a Walker board member. Since arriving in January, Viso has spent long days at the Walker, often attending performances, films and other events after hours.

She expects her life to "regain its balance" in May when her partner, artist Cameron Gainer, moves here from Brooklyn. A Colorado native, Gainer is a sculptor and videographer who does public artwork. At present he has a double post teaching at the University of South Florida in Tampa and being resident artist at the university's Institute for Research in Art.

Coming from Colorado, Gainer understood Minnesota's climate and "outfitted me with all my survival gear before I came here," said Viso, who grew up in Florida.

"I got through the winter because of him."

Mary Abbe • 612-673-4431