MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- This fall, the Walker Art Center will debut its inaugural design triennial, titled Beyond Materialism. Guest curated by leading design voice Joseph Grima, in close collaboration with the Walker’s Aslı Altay, the presentation explores the importance of spirituality, emotional connectedness, and communal engagement to contemporary design. It features approximately 50 new and recent works by 26 designers and collectives representing more than 10 countries, including Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Nigeria, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Beyond Materialism includes seven designers showing in the U.S. for the first time, including Espace Aygo, Stef Fusani, Shao-Chun Hsu, Jonghoo Jeong, Maximilian Marchesani, Moon Seop Seo, and Christoph Wimmer-Ruelland, and two commissions created especially for the show by VESSEL (James Bridle & Navine G. Dossos) and Lucas Muñoz Muñoz. Among the other featured designers are Ananas Ananas, Germane Barnes, Theaster Gates, Objects of Common Interest, and Superflux. Together, the works reflect the varied and dynamic ways that today’s designers are confronting societal challenges and opportunities to imagine different futures.
Walker Design Triennial: Beyond Materialism will be on view from October 17, 2026, through February 14, 2027. The presentation builds on the Walker’s longstanding commitment to exploring innovation in design, which can be traced to its earliest days as a public art center when it initiated several groundbreaking projects about modern design. Today, design is an essential part of the Walker’s celebrated multi-disciplinary program. Beyond Materialism is also accompanied by an expansive, fully illustrated publication produced by the Walker’s acclaimed design studio.
“As faith in material abundance as a measure of happiness erodes, we need new metrics for prosperity. A new generation of designers is abandoning the ethos of accumulation that has long sustained consumer culture, turning instead to a new idea of design that foregrounds immaterial concerns, attending to the soul and spirit as much as the body,” said Grima. “This exhibition gathers reflections and explorations—recent and not so recent—on how design can chart a richer and more imaginative alternative to rampant consumerism.”
Beyond Materialism is organized around four core themes:
After Materials: Historical Notes
This section opens the presentation and traces several historical precursors to the fundamental shift taking place within design today—away from function and mass production to more existential considerations of the spirit, social and cultural ritual, and the creation of new futures. Among the featured works is Side Chair (c. 1820) produced by the Shaker Colony, a religious community established in New England in the 18th century that sought transcendence through the act of making. The Shakers’ incredible craftsmanship and commitment to simplicity served as a physical manifestation of their religious devotion. In Beyond Materialism, the Side Chair stands as an essential example of the early emergence of spirituality and communal engagement within design.
Also featured is documentation of Alessandro Mendini’s 1974 project Lassù (Up There). Mendini, an Italian designer recognized for his groundbreaking vision, often leveraged performance and ritual to explore the spiritual and symbolic possibilities of objects. With Lassù (Up There), he burned two identical chairs set atop pyramidal pedestals. The remnants of the chairs and the documentation of the process provided fertile ground to explore the boundaries between art and design, designer and industry, and the functional and conceptual. The section also includes works by key figures like Ettore Sottsass Jr., Buckminster Fuller, Nathalie Du Pasquier, and Theaster Gates. Their works reflect the foundations for a new generation of designers to create meaning, support ideology, and advance frameworks for collective transformation through design.
A New Poetics: The Techno-Craftspeople
This section of the exhibition explores the work of contemporary designers who leverage materials to share stories, evoke emotion, and convey the knowledge of the past and the possibilities of the future. Their practices embrace material as something that holds memory, reflects identity, and offers a way to relate to the world through form. This includes Germane Barnes, whose work explores the connections between architecture, design, and Black identity. Among his works featured in Beyond Materialism is Migration Column (2024), which reflects on the forced transatlantic passage of enslaved Africans to the Americas. The carved wave patterns in the wood column reference the lives lost at sea and the physical segmentation conveys ruptured family lines. The working of the material imbues it with narrative, which then becomes part of its physicality.
Narrative is also important to Greek designer Kostas Lambridis, whose practice emphasizes material reuse. His works often reimagine historical and found objects through new materials and combinations, revealing compelling juxtapositions of texture, color, and form. For his large dinner table titled fused before charred (2023), he joined and transformed a dozen wood varieties with the final work holding both the original stories of the found materials and his own singular vision. For other designers, the storytelling is much more personal. For example, Diamond Mirror (Green) (2025) created by Objects of Common Interest is inspired by the memory of a grandmother’s 1970s multifaceted glass ashtray. The section also includes works by Astronauts, Stef Fusani, Michael Bennett/Studio Ker, and WKND Lab.
Reclaiming Design: Technology, Environment, Politics
This section explores strategies for living through the turbulence of contemporary society, whether grappling with the pace of technological advancement, environmental degradation, or systems of inequity. Designers are engaging with a depth of materials, techniques, and approaches to offer new visions of speculative environments and gestures of repair and restoration. For example, Korean designer Jonghoo Jeong’s System of Atonement (2025) considers his own impact on local ecosystems and the accompanying cycles of guilt, confession, and absolution. Made with plastic jerrycans, the towering fountain recycles the same water in a perpetual loop—a kind of endless atonement for Jeong’s prior practice of dumping toxic liquid byproduct from his projects into the sewer system. The work considers personal guilt, societal pressure, and opportunities for reparation.
Maximilian Marchesani and Moon Seop Seo also mine the connections between humanity and nature. In his Famiglia series (2022-ongoing), Marchesani combines the “corkscrew hazel” plant—cultivated since the mid-1800s for its aesthetic appeal—with thin LED bulbs to create delicate lighting installations that question if technology can ever complement nature. Seo’s works explore the power and contemplative qualities of natural phenomena, from the ripples of water to clouds shifting in the atmosphere. His work Passage to the Lake (2022) highlights the possibilities of finding peace in nature, especially amid the chaos of urban life. The work invites visitors to meditate on the calm offered by the sound and movement of water. Designers in this section also include Ananas Ananas, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Superflux, Christoph Wimmer-Ruelland, and Kevin Quale, whose ceramic objects bring together the visual vocabularies of 17th century Delftware and contemporary queer expression.
Ritual and Symbolism: New Ideas of Community and Agency
Beyond Materialism closes with designers who are exploring design as a space for performance, community-making, and shared connection. Here, design moves beyond the realm of objects to embrace social practice produced through gestures, gatherings, and rituals. The section includes two new commissions, including an immersive installation created by Lucas Muñoz Muñoz. All Ears portrays the sonic landscape of Minneapolis in the summer of 2026, capturing the sounds and vibrations of nature, machines, and people. The work invites visitors to pause, come into their bodies, and to be present within the frenzy of the world to both engage with sound and drown out the noise. The second commission is produced by VESSEL (James Bridle & Navine G. Dossos) and continues the duo’s interest in modes of collective making. Here, the designers focus on the possibilities of textiles, sharing small-batch fabric, highlighting no-wasting clothing, and creating opportunities for learning that are intended to inspire active community engagement and creativity.
This section also includes works by Espace Aygo, Shao-Chun Hsu, and Anna Aagaard Jensen, whose series Lady Chairs (2018) responds to the ways that women have been socially conditioned to minimize their physical and social presence. The oversized, pink chairs, produced in acrylic resin, foam, and fiberglass, are built specifically to embrace the female form and to occupy space as an act of resistance. The materiality of the chairs embody strength and offer an unapologetic vision of both femininity and freedom.
“This exhibition starts with the question, ‘What does it mean to design now?’Not design as a noun—not the object on the pedestal—but design as a verb, an act, and a way of intervening in the world,” said Altay. “Beyond Materialism follows this question all the way to the last gallery, where two major commissions shaped together with communities here in the Twin Cities hand over the agency, and invite the audience to carry it further.”
