This Art Collector Set was written by Walker Art Center tour guides Kathy S and Judy B, and borrows from an original Set by Susan R.. It was created to accompany the "Time" tour theme, developed by tour guide Judy B..

To schedule your tour of the Walker Art Center, contact us using the Tour Request Form: walkerart.org/tourrequestform.

This Art Collector Set was written by Walker Art Center tour guide Kathy S with additional assistance from Walker education staff. It was created to accompany the "Seeing Art With All Five Senses" tour theme, developed by tour guide Rhonda B. with props by fellow guide Bianka P..

To schedule your tour of the Walker Art Center, contact us using the Tour Request Form: walkerart.org/tourrequestform.

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

For this portfolio of prints, Glenn Ligon references the typographic style of frontispieces from 19th-century slave narratives. Published by white abolitionists, these often recounted the lives of slaves and tales of their escapes. The artist has replaced the Bible verses and anti-slavery poems that sometimes appeared on these with quotations by contemporary authors he admires, while the narratives tell the story of his own life. “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essential notions of black identity,” Ligon writes. “The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

For this portfolio of prints, Glenn Ligon references the typographic style of frontispieces from 19th-century slave narratives. Published by white abolitionists, these often recounted the lives of slaves and tales of their escapes. The artist has replaced the Bible verses and anti-slavery poems that sometimes appeared on these with quotations by contemporary authors he admires, while the narratives tell the story of his own life. “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essential notions of black identity,” Ligon writes. “The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

For this portfolio of prints, Glenn Ligon references the typographic style of frontispieces from 19th-century slave narratives. Published by white abolitionists, these often recounted the lives of slaves and tales of their escapes. The artist has replaced the Bible verses and anti-slavery poems that sometimes appeared on these with quotations by contemporary authors he admires, while the narratives tell the story of his own life. “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essential notions of black identity,” Ligon writes. “The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

For this portfolio of prints, Glenn Ligon references the typographic style of frontispieces from 19th-century slave narratives. Published by white abolitionists, these often recounted the lives of slaves and tales of their escapes. The artist has replaced the Bible verses and anti-slavery poems that sometimes appeared on these with quotations by contemporary authors he admires, while the narratives tell the story of his own life. “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essential notions of black identity,” Ligon writes. “The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

For this portfolio of prints, Glenn Ligon references the typographic style of frontispieces from 19th-century slave narratives. Published by white abolitionists, these often recounted the lives of slaves and tales of their escapes. The artist has replaced the Bible verses and anti-slavery poems that sometimes appeared on these with quotations by contemporary authors he admires, while the narratives tell the story of his own life. “I was interested in the idea of invention and self-invention in autobiography as it speaks to counteracting essential notions of black identity,” Ligon writes. “The ‘one’ that I am is composed of narratives that overlap, run parallel to, and often contradict one another.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Ellen Gallagher collects popular magazines published for a black audience, such as Ebony, Black Digest, and Our World—most of them dating from the years before the civil rights era. She is drawn to vintage advertisements that promise physical transformation, including those for skin lighteners, hair straighteners, and wigs. The artist meticulously replicates the ads with printmaking techniques, then, as she says, “reactivates” the surfaces by adhering unusual elements, from plasticine and hair pomade to glitter and plastic eyes. In so doing, she modifies the idealized human beings into bizarre apparitions that call into question attitudes about fashion, mass media, and race prevalent in mid-century America.

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Sam Durant grew up in Massachusetts not far from Plymouth Rock, where he was introduced to white/Native American political relationships at an early age. The “Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions” was inspired by Minnesota monuments erected in remembrance of the massacres that took place in the Dakota Conflict of 1862. He developed the project through a residency at the Walker in 2002 with Heart of the Earth and Four Directions Native American schools. “The monuments ... commemorate deaths in the conflicts between the Indigenous people and settlers, from their arrival on the continent to the beginning of the 20th century. I saw turning things upside down as a kind of politicizing, a kind of acknowledgment of a world that for Native Americans is turned upside down.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"Most of my materials are not traditional art materials, and I take them as they are without modifying them or alienating them from their original forms and states. My treatment of material is grounded in my belief in people and the magic of everyday life, as well as in modesty and a down-to-earth attitude. This consitutes a large part of me as an artist, yet another part of me is directed toward madness, hysteria, drama, and a pathetic nature."—Haegue Yang

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"There's always a beginning and there's never a conclusion. I like the 'once upon a time' part of a story. I'm also very interested in the range of narratives that we tell ourselves (I'm thinking of the African-American community) that define who we are and how we got here. The idea of there being a place called 'African-America' is the heart of the need for this narrative."—Kara Walker

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"The hands and the ears are essential to play a musical instrument. Subtle hand gestures translate into music, which is always under the scrutiny of the ears. The playing of an instrument is a delicate balance between moving and listening. . .. As a deejay I can disrupt the listening of a record by touching it, changing its speed, or its spinning direction, and completely alter what the ear was perceiving a second earlier. The ears are the silent witness of our daily gestures. From Hand to Ear is a cast part of my body."—Christian Marclay

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Please feel free to investigate and reorder the posters in any way you choose. (They may be moved from one hook to another.) According to the artist, your decisions about how to arrange these are part of the piece.

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

When Rachel Whiteread’s acclaimed sculpture House (1993)—a full-size plaster cast of the interior space of a row house in London’s East End—was torn down, she made this series of prints depicting the leveling of three low-income housing complexes. Like her sculptures, which are often casts of the empty spaces between, under, or around objects and architecture, she has here memorialized these undistinguished, generic buildings as cultural remains.

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Mike Kelley, the Los Angeles–based artist who recently passed away at age 57, is much admired for his rowdy, subversive, and transgressive art, which calls attention to repressed aspects of our collective psyche and questions the conservative mores of American society. In Four Part Butter-Scene N’Ganga, four washtubs filled with a strange plastic stew are suspended from the ceiling, connected by pipes and wires. At the base of each, speakers emit a cacophony of grunts and gasps—taken from the soundtrack of the notorious “butter scene” in the 1972 Bernardo Bertolucci film Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando. For Kelley, the tubs in this work are estimations of “n’ganga pots,” cauldrons containing a fetid mixture of body parts and other materials used in West African Santeria rituals. He wrote, “The n’ganga is the pot which gives chaos its form and, in doing so, limits it.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

"This project deals with practical solutions for a small, single domestic space, which can be modified depending on the requirements of those who occupy it. Contemporary subspaces were the source: shacks, huts, cardboard cities of the homeless, cubicles, palafittes, improvised living. . .. The poetics of survival, concrete reality, inequality, the nécessaire, work tools, street vendors, adaptations for the human body, resistance, weight, volume, preoccupations, solutions for the collective popular universe, and architect Lina Bo Bardi can all be found within this work."—Marepe

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

In 2001, JoAnn Verburg took this photograph on the Sunday after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Her husband, poet Jim Moore, holds the newspaper showing an image of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. “It wasn’t that I wanted to capitalize on a great headline; [I used it] because I was devastated,” says the artist. “My way of working my way out of deep emotional traumas is looking out through the [camera’s] ground glass at the world.”

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is a quote from the artist, reproduced for the artwork's label for that exhibition.

“The felts are stolen death metal logos and are to me about the abstraction of text as a sculptural form. On the other hand, they are about growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey, which I guess could be considered nostalgic. But when I lived there, I could always feel an underlying presence of something sinister and I was always expecting something bad to happen.” —Jay Heikes

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Mark Bradford’s studio is in an old beauty salon his mother owned in Leimert Park, South Central LA. Like many of his works, this painting incorporates permanent-wave end papers used in the salon, which he collages with scraps of billboards, posters, and signs that he gathers from the neighborhood. The materials are torn, layered, erased, and sanded to become the painting. The artist describes himself as a “postmodern flâneur”—riffing off poet Charles Baudelaire’s 1860s description of the “idle man about town” strolling through the Paris streets. Bradford applies this practice to the contemporary urban landscape with its shifting demographics and economies.

This artwork is on view in the Walker exhibition The Living Years: Art after 1989. The text below is the artwork's label written for that exhibition.

Lorna Simpson compiled these images printed on tactile felt as a way, she says, “to indicate the body rather than actually using the body itself.” Her photographs of 21 individual hair pieces, ranging from black and braided to blonde and wavy, offer a taxonomy of styles that suggest differences of gender, race, age, and class. Like much of Simpson’s work, the accompanying texts circle around the subjects of identification and misidentification, appearances and stereotypes.