Walker Art Center

Start with the ground under your feet. On the Walker's hill, the pavement gives way to clipped grass, gravel paths and the low hum of traffic from the highways below. Look up and you see two very different walls side by side. One is dark, quiet brick. The other is a shimmering skin of metal that changes colour as clouds pass. This is the Walker Art Center, one of the most respected museums of contemporary art in North America. It sits on Lowry Hill, at the edge of downtown Minneapolis.

The story begins with a lumber fortune. Thomas Barlow Walker made his money from the vast pine forests of the Upper Midwest in the late nineteenth century. Like many wealthy men of his era, he spent part of that fortune on art. Unusually, he did not keep it private. In 1879 he opened rooms of his own home to the public. That gesture is often described as the first public art gallery in the Upper Midwest. The collection then was very different from what you will see today... jades, old master paintings, and objects from around the world.

In 1927 Walker opened a dedicated gallery building on this same hill. A few years later the institution changed direction in a way he could not have predicted. In 1940, with support from a federal arts programme during the Great Depression, it became the Walker Art Center. The new name signalled a new mission. This would be a living centre for the art of its own time, not only a store of older treasures. Over the following decades, the focus moved firmly toward modern and contemporary work.

Now look again at that dark brick. This part of the building was designed by the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and opened in 1971. From outside, it reads as a stack of plain, windowless boxes. Inside, the galleries climb in a spiral, so you move upward room by room. Barnes wanted the building to step back and let the art speak first. Many artists and curators praised the result. The walls are calm, the light is controlled, and nothing competes with what hangs on them.

The silvery addition is the work of the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, and it opened in 2005. Walk closer and you can see the surface is made of aluminium mesh panels, slightly crumpled, almost like folded fabric. Some locals call it the lantern. On a grey day it looks soft and pale. At dusk, light from inside glows through its windows. Here is a detail many visitors miss — the window shapes are irregular, cut almost randomly, so each one frames a different slice of the city.

That expansion was not only about more gallery space. It added a theatre, gathering areas, a restaurant, and room for programmes that go far beyond paintings on walls. This is important for understanding the Walker. It has long treated dance, music, film, design and performance as equal partners to visual art. Experimental choreographers and composers have premiered work here. On any given evening, the building may hold a film screening, a concert and a lecture at the same time.

Now turn toward the open green space beside the museum. This is the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1988. It is run together by the Walker and the city's park board. Paths cut through it in long, straight lines, past dozens of sculptures set among lawns and trees. The garden was renovated and reopened in 2017, with new plantings and new works. On a summer day you will hear children running, the crunch of footsteps on gravel, and conversations in many languages.

At the heart of the garden is the work almost everyone comes to see. It is a giant spoon, curving over a small pond, with a bright red cherry balanced on its tip. This is Spoonbridge and Cherry, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Oldenburg was famous for taking ordinary household objects and blowing them up to enormous scale. In warmer months, a fine mist rises around the cherry's stem. The piece is playful, but it also asks a quiet question — why should a museum treasure be serious?

Here is a second surprise. Not far away stands a very large rooster, painted an intense ultramarine blue. It is called Hahn slash Cock, by the German artist Katharina Fritsch. Before coming to Minneapolis, it stood on a plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. In German, the word for rooster can also suggest male pride. Next to the restrained grey of the city skyline, that strong blue is impossible to ignore. Many photographers frame it against the downtown towers behind.

At the garden's edge you will find the glass walls of the Cowles Conservatory. Inside, among the plants, swims a tall fish made of glass panels. It is Standing Glass Fish, by the architect Frank Gehry. Fish were a favourite shape for Gehry, and he returned to them again and again in his work. The conservatory offers a warm, humid break in winter, when Minneapolis can be bitterly cold. Step inside on a snowy day and the air smells of soil and green leaves.

Now find the long pedestrian bridge that crosses the busy roads to the east. This is the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, designed by the Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani. Its arches are painted in two colours, pale yellow and light blue. The bridge is a functional crossing, but it is also a work of art. Armajani believed that public art should be useful and part of everyday life. Walk across it and you reach Loring Park, one of the oldest green spaces in the city.

The Walker also has a playful public side. In 2012, it hosted a festival of internet cat videos on its lawn. Thousands of people came to watch together on a big outdoor screen. The event spread to other cities and gained fans around the world. It sounds like a joke, but it fits the Walker's long habit of asking what counts as culture. The museum has always been willing to take popular forms seriously and to laugh a little at itself.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment between the museum and the garden. To one side are the brick boxes and the folded metal skin. To the other, the spoon, the cherry and the blue rooster. Beyond them, the spires of the Basilica of Saint Mary rise against the sky. Listen to the wind in the trees, and the traffic below. A lumber baron once opened his home so that strangers could look at art. Today, that same invitation is open to you... on this hill, in the middle of the city.