If you ever have the dubious fortune to attend a dinner hosted by a museum or gallery, where they’re always topping off your wine glass, you may feel pressure to perform your wittiest anecdotes. Resist that impulse. You should instead hand the metaphorical microphone to the nearest artist. Try asking them about their intellectual notions, whether they’ve read any good scientific studies lately. Whether the artist is famous or a moonlighting art handler who has been roped into the dinner last minute, they’re going to offer a unique perspective that will keep your seatmates enraptured for the rest of the evening. I’ll always remember that one evening I spent hearing about the symbolic value of the Constitution, over grilled iguana at MoMA PS1.
Artists learn about the world differently from the rest of us, which is the thesis for “Ways of Knowing,” Rosario Güiraldes’s first exhibition as curator of visual arts at the Walker Art Center. The show features eleven mid-career artists working at the cutting edge of that excellent place where art meets research: Iosu Aramburu (b. 1986), Sammy Baloji (b. 1978), Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), Cabello/Carceller (b. 1963/1964), Chang Yuchen (b. 1989), Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986), recent recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Grant” Sky Hopinka (b. 1984), Christine Howard Sandoval (b. 1975), Eduardo Navarro (b. 1979), Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, with whom I have worked) and Rose Salane (b. 1992). The ambitious show was partially inspired by the critic Claire Bishop, who proposes that artists have a sort of “disordered attention,” and her April 2023 Artforum essay Information Overload.
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Aramburu’s work is exemplary of what she describes. His Atlas of Andean Modernism (2022-) is an installation of more than five thousand images printed on A4 paper, photographed or scanned from books he can find on Andean modern art, arranged in chronological order across over one hundred yards. His bibliography is rigid because part of the project is about the books that he has access to, and the story that is being told, rather than the objective reality. His work asks who has the right to take what from where, and to what purposes it should be used.
Salane’s work builds on this because it focuses on artifacts that have been returned to the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, where she was among the first cohort of artist residents. There she found the “reperti restituiti” (returned artifacts) that make up her Confessions (2023). These are photographed alongside notes that accompany them. One pair of stones is returned in a Swarovski box. Another in bubble wrap: “REFUNDED/SORRY.”
Chang’s project emerged from a residency, too, on the Malaysian island of Dinawan, where she collected coral and began to sort it by characteristics. From this, she has made her Coral Dictionary, translating the pieces into English, Mandarin and Malay, which she doesn’t speak. I have to imagine that there’s a homonym in her use of coral. The great fear in the 20th Century was censorship, with Western children taught that their culture was superior because of its free flow of information. Now that we are awash with information, artists seem to be responding to the situation in the same way they do to an imminent crisis like climate change.
“Ways of Knowing” is at the Walker Art Center through September 7, 2025.