Walker Art Center gets $1 million from Mellon Foundation to foster artistic collaborations

The Walker Art Center announced Tuesday that it had received $1 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support nine new artistic commissions and a national conference.

As is typical at the Walker, the commissions will be a cross-disciplinary mix of music, performances and visual art, including video and installations. The programs are intended to serve as national models of collaboration between institutional departments that are traditionally separate but that increasingly work together, because that's what artists do these days.

"The grant really fits within the Walker's strategic plan and what we saw as a gaping need within the fields we serve nationally," said performing arts curator Philip Bither.

Program planning will begin this month and play out over the next 3½ years. Three artists already have committed to deliver new work.

Maria Hassabi, a Cyprus-born, New York-based dancer and choreographer featured in the 2013 Venice Biennale, will perform a piece called "Stagings" in conjunction with a dance-themed Merce Cunningham exhibit that opens Feb. 8.

Using what Bither calls a "slow-movement vocabulary," Hassabi is expected to perform in the Walker's galleries, entrance lobby or other public areas during the first 10 days of the Cunningham show.

"She is really an artist whose work lives in this gray zone between these two worlds of theater and museum," Bither said.

The events will premiere in January 2018 as part of the Walker's annual "Out There" fest. Though widely exhibited in Europe, she is largely unknown in the U.S., aside from an installation in Los Angeles in February.

Houston-born jazz pianist and composer Jason Moran will return to the Walker in spring 2018 to stage an exhibition and performance. Known for his prolific recordings and multimedia installations, Moran has done gigs at the Whitney Biennial, Documenta and other international venues. He previously collaborated with Walker exhibit veteran Glenn Ligon and Theaster Gates, who is designing a new piece for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden.

Part of the grant will be spent on a 2019 conference involving about 50 artists, curators, programmers and scholars. Some of the money will pay salaries for two curatorial "fellows" — one each in exhibitions and performing arts — for two years. And part will go for travel and commissions to six additional artists.

"We have a small think tank of people who will be meeting this fall and will be doing a lot of research travel to seek out artists who might be right for this program," Bither said.