World Wide Walker
"We definitely want to be considered an online source for ideas," says the Walker's online editor Paul Schmelzer.
Image credit: Walker Art Center
The Walker Art Center has never been an institution that rests on its laurels. In keeping with that credo, the Minneapolis museum launched a new online identity earlier this month. The remade walkerart.org is more streamlined and clean than its predecessor, but also serves as what museum officials as an online “hub” for contemporary art.
Paul Schmelzer, the Walker’s newly appointed online editor, recently spoke with METRO about the revamped site and how he hopes it can make are more relevant to people’s lives.
METRO: The newly redesigned website has a similar layout to what one would find on a news site. How did this concept come about, and what does the Walker hope to achieve with the news-platform appearance?
Paul Schmelzer: The decision to create a site that looks and behaves like a news site comes mostly from our realization that we’re already creating tons of content here, from scholarly essays and research to interpretive videos about artists. We started thinking about the Walker site as an online publication, realizing we needed a robust platform to deliver content online as well. The news motif also came from a consideration of the reader. We wanted to think about who we wanted visiting our site and what a user-friendly interface for them might be. The news site seemed right. It’s also a way of underscoring what we’re about: the now. Unlike an encyclopedic museum, we’re working primarily with living artists, and they’re all responding to current events through creative and aesthetic means. It makes sense, then, to take on an ever-changing news format that addresses what’s going on around us. We’d also like to show how museums can be more relevant to people’s lives, and a news format suggests that connection. For art that’s often inspired by or responding to events in the world, the current-events structure of a news site is fitting.
METRO: The new website often showcases stories about art worldwide, not just within the walls of the Walker or in the Twin Cities. Why?
PS: The easy answer is that global programming is part of our mission. That runs from organizing exhibitions that travel the world to bringing artists from elsewhere here (off the top of my head, artists we’ve hosted include Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping, Argentina’s Guillermo Kuitca and, in the galleries now, Swedish filmmaker/sculptor Nathalie Djerburg). The web, of course, gives us a great opportunity to talk about contemporary art with people everywhere, regardless of whether they’re interested in or able to set foot in the museum. It’s also an online manifestation of our role over the past few decades of being at the center of thinking about contemporary art. But in short, we realize that we – all of us – are already part of globalism. We sometimes refer to the translocal, and that kind of sums it up: Thinking locally, acting globally… or understanding what happens locally in the global context, and vice versa.
METRO: Does the Walker want to be considered an online source for news? Will a more journalistic identity grow as the website develops?
PS: We definitely want to be considered an online source for ideas. As for journalism, we’ll be doing features and some reportage on art events and ideas, but our main focus will be on what’s happening at the Walker, with the artists we work with, and in the broader realm of contemporary art and all that informs it. While the site definitely has a news feel, we also think of it as an online publication or a magazine. Then there’s the aspect of “curating” – selecting the content we think is important. While not journalism per se, it seems like perhaps it’s a new form of it, or a related practice at least.
METRO: Many web enthusiasts and designers have described the new look as revolutionary or groundbreaking for museums and institutions. What is your response to that? Was being revolutionary the focus on the project from the start?
PS: We set out aiming to leverage what the medium of the Internet does well (rich content, linking out, bringing together original and aggregated content, etc.), and we wanted to shift paradigms. What we came up with is definitely innovative within the art field. We’re excited by the praise, and for my part, as the main overseer of the content on the homepage, challenged by the expectations both within the Walker and from those watching from the outside.
METRO: The new site provides the ability to find archived material, and does a good job at connecting it to current exhibitions and events. Why does the Walker find it important to give its followers this access?
PS: Just as we bring in ideas and links from outside the Walker to help contextualize what we do here, we also look to our past to bring context to the art we show. We have long and deep relationships with artists and we can draw back from the early years of those relationships to make new work more relevant today. We were the first museum to buy a large-scale portrait from Chuck Close, made in 1968, and we have a relationship with him today. We’ve had a relationship with Bill T. Jones since 1981, predating his current Broadway hit “Fela.” So we have rich resources that we can look to when we present work by these artists next time around. Or, for a more local example, we’re organizing an architecture and design show on skyways in cities like Minneapolis, St. Paul, Mumbai, Calgary and Hong Kong for late 2013. We have so much archival material that can shed light on the thinking we’ve been doing over the years that’ll contribute to it, from addressing the topic in our former publication, Design Quarterly, to a conference we hosted on urban planning issues surrounding the elevated walkways, to an exhibition of skyway photos shot in the Twin Cities by Catherine Opie. Access to these kind of resources will contribute to a great show but also to a (hopefully) fascinating series or reads for website visitors, even if they’re unable to make it to the Walker in person.
METRO: As the web editor, was there anything strategy wise from either Eyeteeth.org or your time at American Independent News Network that you wanted to be sure to include in the Walker’s new site? Or was this project purely an opportunity to explore with new ideas and concepts?
PS: The volume and pacing of content we’re doing is definitely informed by my work on blogs and online news. I hope to have a schedule that’s more like a news site: new top stories three to five times a week, new quickhits (in our Art News from Elsewhere section) 7-10 times a day, new archival material every week or two, etc.
METRO: How does the new site lead to discovery for its users?
PS: It creates a structure to allow for discovery. The site is packed with information, but it’s orderly and it comes in various lengths (tweets, quotes from artists, short videos, blog posts) and media (short- and long-form video, text, photo galleries, serious essays, quirky quick-hit news, etc.), so hopefully there are plenty of access points for readers.
METRO: Were there any existing websites that your team looked to for inspiration when conceiving the Walker’s new look?
PS: We looked at a lot of news site (The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC), as well as more niche cultural sites (Monocle, Tablet Magazine, GOOD, Pitchfork). And we may have taken some cues from Gawker.
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