The Walker Art Center: How One Museum Shaped Art in Minnesota

The Walker Art Center grew from one lumber baron's collection into a national leader in modern art. Here is how it shaped what Minnesotans collect, and what a Walker poster or exhibition label means for your piece.

SebastianCharles Auctions

The Walker Art Center taught Minnesota to look at modern art. It started as one lumber baron's private collection and became one of the most respected contemporary art museums in the country. Along the way it shaped what Minnesotans collected, hung on their walls and passed down. Here is how that happened, and what it means if you own a piece with a Walker connection.

A lumber baron opens his doors

Thomas Barlow Walker made his fortune in lumber. He began collecting as his business grew, and in 1879 he opened his collection to the public in downtown Minneapolis. It is often cited as the first public art gallery west of the Mississippi River.

The collection kept growing. By 1915 his 14 room museum drew about 100,000 visitors a year, and by 1920 it showed about 400 paintings. In 1927 he opened the Walker Art Galleries on Lowry Hill, the site the museum still uses. He died the next year.

1940: the turn to modern art

The Depression nearly emptied the place. For a stretch the gallery ran on a staff of three. In 1939 the Minnesota Arts Council took charge with help from the WPA's Federal Art Project, which put about 30 people on the payroll. Daniel Defenbacher became the first director.

Defenbacher changed what the building was for. He added art classes, showed local artists and renamed it the Walker Art Center to signal that it was open to everyone. It reopened on January 4, 1940. Two years later it bought its first modern painting, Franz Marc's The Large Blue Horses from 1911. That purchase set the direction for everything that followed.

Design you could live with

The Walker didn't stop at paintings. In 1946 it opened the Everyday Art Gallery, the first exhibition space in an American museum devoted to design. Its curator, Hilde Reiss, had studied at the Bauhaus. The museum also launched Everyday Art Quarterly, later renamed Design Quarterly, the first American museum journal on design.

In the 1940s the Walker built full scale "Idea Houses" on its grounds to show modern materials, furniture and floor plans. Idea House II opened in 1947. For Minnesotans, modern design wasn't something in a magazine. You could walk through it on a Sunday afternoon.

The Friedman years

Martin Friedman became director in 1961 at 36, one of the youngest museum directors in the country. He stayed until 1990, and those three decades built the Walker's national reputation.

• In 1963 the Walker hosted John Cage and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and started an artist in residence program.
• It added a performing arts department in 1970 and a film and video department in 1973.
• Its new building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, opened on May 15, 1971.
• In the 1970s and 1980s it bought work by Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Yves Klein, and sold some works from T. B. Walker's original collection.

The national press noticed. In 1974 the critic Peter Blake called the Walker "quite possibly, the finest American museum for modern art in operation today."

The Sculpture Garden and the spoon

Friedman proposed a sculpture garden in 1981, and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden opened in 1988 as a joint project with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. It now holds more than 60 sculptures on 11 acres. Its best known piece, Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, became a symbol of the city.

The garden also commissioned work rooted here. Siah Armajani, who built his career in Minneapolis, designed the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge that carries visitors over the freeway into the garden. In 2021 the Walker added Dakota artist Angela Two Stars's sculpture Okciyapi.

The Daytons and the Walker

No family shaped the Walker's collection more after T. B. Walker than the Daytons. Judy Dayton joined the board in 1966, became board president in the early 1970s and served as a trustee for 55 years. She and her husband Ken gave the museum 550 works, second only to the founder.

Their first gift, in 1969, was Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral Presence. In 1988 they gave nearly 200 Jasper Johns prints, which made the Walker home to the largest collection of Johns prints in the country. They also gave eight major works for the Sculpture Garden. Their personal collection came to the museum by bequest in 2021. The Walker's 2023 show of their gifts included work by Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Andy Warhol and Alexander Calder. You can read more in the Walker's announcement of the Dayton gifts.

The same family ran Dayton's department store, and its top floor gallery showed and sold work by Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol and other major names. We tell that story in our post on Dayton's Gallery 12.

What the Walker means for Minnesota collectors

From the start the Walker's mission included Minnesota artists. The 1938 plan that turned it into an art center called for exhibitions of contemporary Minnesota artists, and the WPA years brought classes and local shows. Today it runs mnartists.org, an online directory of Minnesota artists and arts groups.

The bigger effect is harder to measure. More than 80 years of shows, posters, classes and gifts taught Minnesotans to look at modern and contemporary art, and many of them started buying it.

Walker pieces we have sold

• Ellsworth Kelly, 1974 Walker exhibition poster featuring Red Green Blue, with toning and a small water stain: $210 (September 2026).
• Willem de Kooning, Woman, Walker Art Center poster, about 1974: $160 (2021).
• Robert Indiana, The Mother of Us All, poster for the Center Opera Company of the Walker Art Center: $50 (2024).
• Sam Gummelt, four mixed media works from the Brazos series, one with a Walker Art Center exhibition label on the back: $900 against an estimate of $200 to $400 (2024).

Walker exhibition posters usually sell for tens to a few hundred dollars. Condition and the artist make the difference. The Gummelt group, with its Walker label, sold for more than double its high estimate. A museum label proves a work hung in a museum show, and that gives bidders confidence.

How to read a Walker connection

Exhibition labels

Check the back of the frame or stretcher for a Walker label. It often names the exhibition. Write it down and keep it with the work. If you reframe, save the label.

Posters and prints

The Walker printed posters for many of its shows. Most are offset lithographs and unsigned. A poster signed by the artist, or a true limited edition print, is a different object with a different price. Our post on original posters versus reprints explains how to tell them apart.

Paperwork

Catalogs, receipts, letters from the museum and Walker membership materials can all help document where a piece came from. Keep them together.

Selling art with a Walker connection

If you have a Walker poster, a work with a Walker label, or art by an artist the Walker collects, send us photos of the front, the back and any signature or label. Sebastian personally reviews every inquiry. Our paintings and prints departments handle both. Our next fine art sale is December 2, and you can request an estimate here.