Design Has a Permanent Seat at the Walker's Table

Design has been part of the Walker's program since 1940, when Daniel S. Defenbacher, a trained architect and designer, became its first director, the museum says. Early initiatives included the Idea House model homes of 1941 and 1947 and the Everyday Art Quarterly, launched in 1946 and renamed Design Quarterly, which ran as a leading design journal until 1996.

Curator Mildred Friedman shaped the design program from the late 1960s into the early 1990s, staging exhibitions on the Dutch De Stijl movement, the Herman Miller furniture company and the history of graphic design, including a 1989 survey billed at the time as the most comprehensive American show of its kind. More recent exhibitions have continued the thread, among them Graphic Design: Now in Production in 2012, Hippie Modernism in 2016 and Designs for Different Futures in 2020.

The museum also practices what it collects. The Walker's design studio produces the graphics, signage, catalogues and digital materials for its own exhibitions and programs, treating the institution's visual identity as a design project in its own right. For the designers, architects and studios concentrated in the surrounding lakes-and-hill neighborhoods, the program puts the history of their field on the walls of a museum a short walk away.