MINNEAPOLIS, MN.- On the occasion of its 75th anniversary as a public art center, the Walker Art Center announces a major campus renovation that will foster expanded opportunities for cross-disciplinary programming and community engagement for the next 75 years. A $75 million capital campaign will grow the Walker’s endowment and fund the renovation, executed in tandem with the reconstruction of the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden beginning in the fall of 2015.

“As we mark our 75th year, we are thrilled to commence plans to realize a fully integrated vision for the Walker’s and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden’s 19-acre campus,” says Olga Viso, Executive Director of the Walker. “It is a once-a-generation moment to shape one of the key gateways to Minneapolis’s downtown cultural district through the integration of art and landscape. It builds on the great legacies of past Walker directors Martin Friedman, who created the Garden in partnership with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board as the first urban sculpture park of its kind in 1988, and Kathy Halbreich who doubled the footprint of the Walker 10 years ago in a dynamic expansion designed by Herzog & de Meuron.”

The $75 million capital campaign will support an increase in the Walker’s endowment; a new entry pavilion and landscaped four-acre green space across from the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and surrounding the entire facility; and a complete replacement of the brick façade of the 1971 Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building (completed in December 2013). To date, the Walker has received 52 campaign contributions totaling $49.8 million from the private sector, including a lead gift of $20 million from Margaret and Angus Wurtele, which is the largest single cash gift in the history of the Walker. The Pohlad family is also contributing $7.5 million from the Pohlad Family Foundation ($5 million) and the Eloise and Carl Pohlad Family Fund, a Signature Fund of The Minneapolis Foundation ($2.5 million).

Additionally, the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board is reconstructing the 12-acre Sculpture Garden through an $8.5 million allocation from the State of Minnesota and a $1.5 million grant from the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization. Together, the $49.8 million private contributions supporting the Walker and the $10 million public contributions supporting the Sculpture Garden project total $59.8 million or 80% of the total goal of $75 million.

The campus renovation will allow the Walker to build on the 40-plus artworks already in the Sculpture Garden and on the Walker campus through new commissions in the Garden, green spaces, entry pavilion, and city streetscapes. Already home to iconic works by Dan Graham, Ellsworth Kelly, Jenny Holzer, and Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg, the campus will now welcome a next generation of signature works. An announcement about commissions and new artworks is forthcoming.

The new campus design pays homage to the Walker’s architectural histories. Taking a cue from Herzog & de Meuron’s arrangement of scattered interior galleries in the Walker’s 2005 expansion, Petra Blaise of Inside Outside extends this gesture to the outdoors, framing the hillside in a series of groves—some open, some enclosed—a casual twist on Edward Larrabee Barnes’s formal outdoor galleries in the Sculpture Garden. The Walker’s original brick gallery tower, also designed by Barnes, will be returned to the grassy berms that once surrounded it in 1971. A new hill reshapes the topography of the site, giving definition to the current, sloping expanse of green. Joan Soranno and John Cook of HGA have skillfully navigated the design languages of both Barnes and Herzog & de Meuron to create a distinct and powerful third voice in their new entry pavilion that ties the old and the new, the inside and the outside, the Walker and the Sculpture Garden.

The Walker campus plans are being executed in tandem with other major civic initiatives including the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Cowles Conservatory Reconstruction led by the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, and the reconstruction of the adjacent Hennepin/Lyndale Avenues led by the City of Minneapolis. The design solution for the Garden, designed by Tom Oslund and Tadd Kreun of oslund.and.assoc., is respectful of the original Barnes design while repurposing the northern half of the garden to accommodate existing and new sculpture. The solution unifies the entire garden while integrating with the Walker campus to create a stronger campus district. Both projects are scheduled to break ground in September 2015 with completion of the Walker campus slated for fall of 2016 and the Sculpture Garden to be fully open to the public by spring 2017.

“The partnership between the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board and Walker has been an exceptionally strong one for the past 26 years. This is a unique park within our system and it’s made possible because of our shared vision and commitment to provide such a remarkable space,” said Jayne Miller, Superintendent of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. “We are thankful for the funding support received from the State of Minnesota and the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization for reconstruction, and for the opportunity to work closely with the Walker and the community during the design phase that is taking place now. We are extremely pleased and proud of our ongoing collaborations with the Walker.”

Both the Sculpture Garden and the new designs to the Walker entry and green space take advantage of the latest sustainability technologies including a green roofed entry pavilion to the Walker, a greening of the streetscape—including planting trees on what was formerly a concrete median—and an ambitious rainwater reclamation project in the Sculpture Garden, funded by the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization, that works in concert with existing site conditions to utilize water that falls on the site. During the Sculpture Garden renovation, several of the most beloved sculptures will relocate through short- or long-term loans to the Weisman Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Gold Medal Park, and will remain accessible to the public.

The campus renovations relied heavily on community feedback to guide the design process. The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board’s plans for the reconstructed Sculpture Garden, designed in partnership with the Walker, were developed as part of an open Community Advisory Committee process that utilized public representation from a number of constituencies—neighbors, business, and elected representatives. The proposed design for the Sculpture Garden reconstruction project is pending Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board approval on April 15, 2015. The Walker has engaged a similar array of key community members to review and inform its campus plans.

The campus renovation is part of a series of institutional initiatives marking the 75th anniversary of the Walker as a public art center. Along with a robust program of exhibitions—including the major historical surveys International Pop and Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia and the contemporary solo exhibitions of contemporary artists Liz Deschenes, Andrea Büttner, and Lee Kit—and new performance projects and moving image commissions, these initiatives build on the rich traditions of the Walker as a center for cross-disciplinary programming and community engagement.