The Walker’s Dilemma

Discussing the Walker Art Center is an endeavor steeped in paradox. Many consider it a museum, but it’s more than a repository of visual art. It’s a multidisciplinary center of multiple art forms executed primarily by living artists, yet that core is dwarfed in attendance by the rather static Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which the Walker curates. The Walker presents work that even its advocates acknowledge is, by design, “niche” and “challenging”—yet it’s probably better known locally for rooftop mini golf and summer alt-rock concerts.

The Walker is the region’s most prestigious and influential arts institution. It’s the antithesis of a business, really—occasionally dipping into populism to ring the cash registers—but with a mission that bends toward niche. “Art has gotten a lot more arbitrary,” explains Lyndel King, the longtime (now retired) director of the Weisman Art Museum on the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus. “Art has become more symbolic and inscrutable and intellectual. It’s a secret language. [Artists] use words designed for insiders or those who aspire to be insiders.”

Another challenge is that, unlike much of the 20th century, “there is no dominant artistic school or style right now,” says Adam Weinberg, former director of New York’s Whitney Museum and a key curator at the Walker through the 1980s. That makes the experience of art more intellectually chaotic.

Because the Walker’s mission is to reflect what living artists care about, its hands are tied to some extent. And as art evolves, the Walker evolves with it. “[Art critic] Robert Hughes called it ‘the shock of the new,’ ” explains Dennis Scholl, former vice president/arts for the Knight Foundation and now on the board of the Perez Art Museum Miami.

Yet the Walker tries to maintain a delicate balance, working to avoid the trappings of elitism without compromising its mission, which is by nature rather elitist—in a Midwestern sort of way. “What distinguishes us is the five disciplines, independently curated,” says senior curator Philip Bither, referring to performing arts, visual arts, moving image, design, and education (which the Walker considers a discipline).

Later this month the Walker will open a blockbuster exhibition of the type it has rarely programmed in the last decade. A survey of the life and art of Keith Haring, a pop artist of the 1980s whose work has special relevance to the Walker. Haring’s art is sunny and accessible but with serious political and social undertones. He’s an important name brand whose work is easily recognizable beyond the art world, from an era that did not produce many. The exhibition, organized by The Broad contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, will help the Walker drive attendance and, by extension, visitor spending by casual contemporary art fans, who will be reminded that friendly art still exists beyond Spoonbridge and Cherry and Hahn/Cock (the blue rooster).

“We’ll be prepared to maximize Haring,” says Felice Clark, Walker director of new business, a job created by Walker executive director Mary Ceruti in 2021. “It is our first such opportunity in many years,” says Clark, noting that Haring “leaned into merchandising during his lifetime.”

What makes understanding the Walker so complex is that key figures there would perhaps disagree with much of what you just read and are about to read—if not its veracity, then its emphasis. (Is visual artist Julie Mehretu a name-brand artist? Was her 2022 Walker show a blockbuster?) That’s because so much of the discourse around art, especially contemporary art, is in the eye of the beholder.

“The avant-garde isn’t an elitist exercise,” insists Bither. “I’ve tried to convince people that it may seem opaque, but if you [attend] something, you’ll see the drier academic stuff isn’t what we do.”

Yet “contemporary art museums can seem elitist. You leave feeling dumber than when you walked in,” notes Walker board member John Christakos, co-founder and CEO of Minneapolis furniture concern Blu Dot. “[Our] board asked, ‘Why not frame that same work to broaden the aperture to make the Walker more welcoming?’”

It’s an important year for the Walker, as it emerges from the pandemic with an eye toward diversifying revenue streams and becoming less reliant on philanthropy. “That [philanthropic] foundation is built on what’s past more than what’s now,” says King. “[The Walker is] a beneficiary of shrewd and smart people of previous generations.”

So there’s a new urgency to the enduring dilemma: Can the Walker optimize its balance of art and commerce?

Data diffusion

Like everything else about the Walker, its core metrics are open to multiple interpretations. What can be said, definitively, is that the Walker embarks on its quest for more consumer spending from a firm footing. In FY23 it had nearly a $23 million budget. It has doubled its invested endowment in a decade, to roughly $300 million, drawing down 4.5% annually for operations. That’s a big endowment for an institution of its size and location. The Walker also maintains a healthy annual flow of philanthropy between $5 million and $8 million, which has been down slightly since the pandemic.

Director Ceruti, who joined in 2019, has made “getting people to look at data a priority.” And some of the Walker’s metrics would alarm a business. There’s financial data for the Walker dating back to the groundbreaking of its Edward Larrabee Barnes building in FY70 (July 1, 1969-June 30, 1970), but there’s no consistent historical data about attendance, membership, or the contribution of various business units.

“The goal is to create an entrepreneurial culture.”

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—Walker director Mary Ceruti

The Walker admits 50%-75% of visitors for free, depending on the year. But attendance remains “an important metric for relevance. We want to be the gathering spot,” says Christakos.

The Walker reported attendance of 450,000 in FY77 and 473,000 in FY86 (it’s assumed that includes gallery and performance/event attendance) but otherwise didn’t focus on attendance in annual reports between 1969-1988. In 1989 it began reporting combined building/sculpture garden attendance. It wasn’t until FY09 that the Walker began breaking down attendance between garden, galleries, and events. In the years since, combined building attendance never exceeded 290,000, and it stood at 251,000 in the year prior to the pandemic.

The Walker’s offerings in the 1970s and 1980s consisted of an extraordinary array of exhibitions: Miró, Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Johns, Picasso, Hockney, and Gehry among them. It was also an era when locals had less competition to fill their free time, and there was no internet to gaze into.

(Sculpture garden attendance peaked after its renovation in FY18 at an amazing 860,000. But all entrants are counted, whatever their purpose—to view art, take high school photos, or shortcut the commute home. A more consistent annual metric is 350,000-450,000.)

Christakos finds the idea of decline unconvincing, while Ceruti suggests showing a growth story isn’t a holy grail: “Attendance metrics are iffy. There is an audience for what we do, but [we’re] not for everybody.”

Senior curator Siri Engberg, whose history at the institution dates to 1990, echoes Ceruti, basically saying, “So what?” “[Attendance is] one angle, but so is strong community engagement and putting artists on the map.”

The Walker also sells half as many memberships as in the 1980s and ’90s—around 6,300 prior to the pandemic and 4,800 in 2022-23. “They’re declining nationally,” says Ceruti. “People are less likely to join. It’s a generational phenomenon. They don’t like subscriptions.”

There is no disputing that the Walker values and increasingly prioritizes earned revenue (as opposed to donated revenue). But it’s trended downward since its peak at 42% of budget in 1992-93. It stood at 29% in 2018-19, in range of the optimal three equal sources—earned revenue, donations, and endowment—that arts organizations typically target.

Christakos notes that “museums that are [most proficient] at earned revenue tend to be the ones with smaller endowments, because they have to be.”

It’s difficult to find comparable metrics for an entity like the Walker. Peer museums MOMA in New York City and SFMOMA in San Francisco attract a tourist-driven visitor base that spends more lavishly. The closest local analogue is MIA, which charges no admission. MIA’s attendance peaked at 891,000 in FY17 and is similar in size to the Walker if you include the sculpture garden. MIA sold over 26,000 memberships in FY00; in FY23 it had 12,500 paid members. (MIA added a free tier in 2000 and counts roughly 10,000 non-paying members.)

“We’d like to see earned [revenue] rise proportionally, but we don’t realistically expect it to become a larger part [now 10%] of our revenue pie,” says MIA CFO Ben Murray. “We are looking at growing attendance as a way of showing our funders the impact of their philanthropy.”

The quest for spending

The Walker that Mary Ceruti inherited in 2019 was coming off a high financial plateau, with earned revenue of $7 million averaging a third of budget, plus over 1 million in total attendance (including the sculpture garden). But 14 months into her tenure, the Covid-19 pandemic shut the Walker for most of a year. Its constituency was predictably slow to return. Surgical and N95 masks remain ever-present in the building today. Data for FY23 showed indoor attendance of 151,000, with earned revenue at 21% of budget. Philanthropy trended down during the pandemic, but government pandemic aid and a strong stock market buttressed the balance sheet.

Though Ceruti had focused publicly on diversity initiatives instituted before and during Covid, a second key emphasis was delayed. “The board’s intention is for the Walker to deliver earned revenue with the same focus as donations,” explains Christakos, who led the board after Ceruti’s hire.

“The goal is to create an entrepreneurial culture as opposed to specific financial goals,” says Ceruti. “I didn’t want to be at odds with our core mission.” The vast majority of the Walker’s programming operates at a substantial loss, says Ceruti, typical of institutions of its type.

Ceruti hired Clark to lead new business initiatives. “I’m the for-profit lens in a nonprofit organization,” Clark notes. She describes her role as “optimizing earned revenue streams and identifying new opportunities. … My lens is profit: Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Clark’s mandate, for now, is to find revenue within existing Walker facilities and programming—things Ceruti agreed were “low-hanging fruit.” Clark has a seat at the leadership table, but her role is not to suggest a Picasso exhibit to curator Engberg because it will ring the cash registers.

Earned revenue matters to the Walker for several reasons. “Every nonprofit is struggling,” notes King. “People are accustomed to home.”

“The Walker has a great history presenting work that’s challenging, and we wanted to protect that niche,” says Christakos, implying that earned revenue can support the Walker’s nature rather than soften it.

A generation ago, the Walker would have just ramped up fundraising. But “expenses are rising, operating costs are rising, and the nature of philanthropy is changing,” says Ceruti. “Individual giving is tied to social justice causes; philanthropy is seeking evidence of return on investment. That’s harder to provide in a museum environment.” The Walker’s stable balance sheet belies those changes. “It’s been work to keep those numbers just flat because of loss of corporate giving and replacing our older legacy donors” as they die or their families change priorities.

And donors often ask more of arts orgs than they can provide. “The greatest generation and the boomers trusted institutions,” says MIA’s Murray. “Gen X and younger want to see social impact at work, right away.”

“I’m the for-profit lens in a nonprofit organization.”

—Felice Clark, Walker director of new business

A profitable sandwich?

Not everything designed to make money at a museum does so.

The Walker pulled the plug on Rock the Garden because the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. The annual event, which ran from 1998 to 2022, operated barely better than break-even, “but was a huge organizational undertaking,” notes Ceruti. “Felice brought focus to questions like that.” (The Walker’s annual Avant Garden fundraiser is labor intensive and overtakes the campus as well, but it clears $1 million.)

“The goal is let’s monetize the things we have competencies for,” Ceruti continues. Idea House 3, the Walker’s rejuvenated store, is an extension of its design competency.

Blockbuster exhibitions do make money for museums. “Tokyo Form and Spirit” in 1986 gave the Walker its biggest earned revenue year, adjusted for inflation. “Haring will lead to a big jump in attendance, store sales, and membership giving,” notes Ceruti. “But blockbusters need to stay on-brand. What’s next, [not] what’s past. Haring is on-brand for the Walker.”

At MIA, budget director Kris Davidson says the goal is to have special exhibitions every 18 months, “but they’re not that frequent anymore.” Blockbusters have grown increasingly costly to mount (insurance, labor, transportation), and museums are reluctant to see their most beloved works travel for two or three years. The current blockbuster Mark Rothko exhibition in Paris was not organized by the Louvre or Centre Pompidou, but the private Louis Vuitton Foundation.

And if you’re cursing the skimpy mocktails at Cardamom restaurant, well, the Walker isn’t profiting off them either. “Very few museums make money with restaurants and hospitality,” says Ceruti. “It’s an amenity.” Clark adds that the iconic Walker shop of years past did best when it stocked a strong book selection. (The store represented 16% of earned revenue in FY91. Adjusted for inflation, it would be $1.5 million of store revenue today.)

Clark says items that sell are logo wear and exhibition catalogs—extensions of programming. “The program drives revenue streams and earned revenue,” she explains. “It’s the biggest lever we have.” If Clark can maximize her role, it will allow curators like Bither to continue to see his role as focusing “on works that can’t survive in the marketplace.”

Balancing obscurity and accessibility

To leadership, the Walker’s next opportunity is marketing its offerings in a way that brings more people through the doors. “The Walker needs a welcoming brand, a personality with a friendlier face,” says Christakos, who believes Ceruti is elevating marketing to be as important as what’s in the galleries. “We wanted a mentality change without changing the product.”

That’s not simple in an age where there are few living artists who could fill Walker galleries through name recognition, as was the case in the era of longtime director Martin Friedman, who led the creation of the present-day Walker Art Center in 1971. The Walker is, in essence, trying to do better at selling its ambitious nature.

“The world has splintered a bit,” says Ceruti. “It’s maybe harder to create [an artist] of that stature. There are more artists, period, making recognition harder to attain. People emerge and disappear more quickly.”

Scholl of the Perez Art Museum believes that “Julie Mehretu [whose work evokes DeKooning] will be canonized by the end of her career.” The Walker mounted a survey of her work in 2021, when the artist was 50, while Friedman’s blockbusters were mostly of recently dead legends whose reputations were burnished over several decades more.

And today’s art is more often multidisciplinary and layered in symbolism. “[Abstract artist Frank] Stella said, ‘What you see is what you see,’ while today what you see has a meaning and message outside itself,” explains King. It’s that meaning and message, often quite detached from the visual representation, that can make contemporary art so challenging.

Tweaking bits and pieces to enhance the whole

The expectation is that these tweaks in tactics will allow the Walker’s mission to remain unchanged. Bither says his performing arts calendar is currently selling 72% of seats, proving the Walker has returned its core constituency to Vineland Place after years of Covid dormancy.

But the rest has been harder to coax back, so measuring what resonates is taking on greater importance. “Audience metrics are relevant to fulfilling our mission,” says Ceruti. “We have to always be tinkering with our offering.” So the Walker is redisplaying its permanent collection after Ceruti realized many of the institution’s most beloved works were in storage.

Another interesting case study is the annual British Arrows Awards, a 90-minute compilation of the best in U.K. TV advertising, which shows roughly 60 times each December to sellout crowds. It funds the Walker’s entire annual film program, says Ceruti.

The Arrows symbolize the Walker’s ambivalence about works of mass appeal. The event occupies more time and space on the Walker calendar than any other performance or film by a wide margin, introducing the Walker to many of the 20,000-plus attendees.

After 37 years of evidence of public fascination with advertising as an art form, one would think the Walker would curate and program more around it (advertising overlaps two curatorial areas, design and moving image). Perhaps that’s the low-hanging fruit that Ceruti will find unavoidably ripe in the years to come.

What’s incumbent on the Walker, says Weinberg, is to evolve smartly. “Money always follows great ideas,” he says. “The Walker is still a great idea.”

The Walker Story

As the Walker enters its second half-century in its current form, an ever-smaller subset of the public recalls its origins. The Walker evolved out of the downtown art gallery of lumber baron and businessman T.B. Walker, opened in his Hennepin Avenue home in 1879. Walker built a stand-alone gallery where Hennepin and Lyndale merge in 1927. The institution did not begin collecting contemporary art until the 1940s, at the behest of Walker’s heirs, who still maintain a seat on the board.

The modern Walker is the creation of Martin Friedman, the Pittsburgh-born director who took over the institution in 1961, commissioned the Walker’s current building (opened in 1971), and sold off most of T.B. Walker’s vast (and  mostly undistinguished) collection to fund construction and the acquisition of important works of contemporary art.

“Martin had this vision of bringing art to the unwashed masses of the Midwest,” explains retired Weisman Art Museum director Lyndel King. “He wanted to give Minneapolis the possibility of participating in the international art world. The emphasis was visual art, [and] minimalism was in the avant-garde.”

“He and [wife and creative partner] Mickey came up with a Bauhaus approach; it’s a center, not a museum,” explains Adam Weinberg, the recently retired director of New York’s Whitney Museum of Art, who was the Walker’s director of education and assistant curator in the 1980s. “Martin was not a scholar or an ideologue. Nor was he an artist or an academic, but he had an intuitive understanding of the way artists worked. He seemed like an elitist but was actually a populist.”

He could be challenging to work for. “He was a perfectionist,” Weinberg recalls. “He would have the maintenance people turn over the snow that dogs had peed on.”

The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opened in 1988, late in Friedman’s tenure. And although he is not remembered as a champion of performance, the Walker programmed 270 nights of it in FY79.

Friedman retired in 1990 and Kathy Halbreich, contemporary art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, was named the new director. King describes her as a cooler personality than Friedman, but no less ambitious.

“Kathy’s vision was to make the Walker respected among curators and the art world elite,” says King. “She once said the Walker could be anywhere. It was a prideful thing for us to be influencing the world. Kathy elevated the institution to top 10 nationally.”

Senior curator Siri Engberg notes that under Halbreich, who joined the Walker not long after Engberg’s 1990 hire, the collection became more global and diverse. Halbreich departed after a decade and a half and was replaced in 2008 by Olga Viso, the Walker’s first leader of color, who had run the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian.

By then the Walker had competition. “It was unique, nationally, in its era,” says Weinberg, “but other institutions caught up.”

The Viso era is remembered for a controversy, but that’s unfair, says King. “Olga expanded the diversity of staff, strengthened performing arts to the point it was as important as visual arts, dealt with aspects of the campus and visitor flow that didn’t work.” (The huge 2004-05 addition brought needed space but was ill-conceived in wayfinding and turned its back on the sculpture garden and the Walker’s elegant Vineland Place entry.)

Viso departed quietly in late 2017 following the Walker’s purchase of the Sam Durant sculpture Scaffold, which evoked gallows used for executions by the U.S. government—including those used to hang 38 Dakota men in Mankato in 1862—and had been installed in the sculpture garden with minimal outreach to the Native American community, provoking protests. Viso’s contract is believed to have been bought out by the Walker board in an attempt to clean the slate. Scaffold was dismantled and turned over to the tribe, which subsequently buried it.

After a gap of over a year, Viso was replaced by Mary Ceruti, who had run the New York City-based SculptureCenter. She joined the Walker in early 2019.

The institution she inherited may have been dinged by controversy, but it had not been foundationally damaged. “We’ve always looked to the Walker as an institution that had optimized what you could be to your community,” says Dennis Scholl, former vice president/arts for the Knight Foundation. “It’s hard to explain just how respected it remains.”