Every Thursday from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., the Walker Art Center opens its sleek glass doors to one and all for Free Thursday Nights.
As well as knocking the student ticket price down from $12 to $0, the Walker allows visitors to make art and view it through their Art Club program, which promises a new, unique art making activity each week from September to May.
Art Club came from a need for a program dedicated to consistent artmaking for adults as opposed to occasional one-off programs, according to Director of Public Engagement Megan Leafblad.
“It gives us a chance to be together in space, making with our hands,” Leafblad said in an email interview. “It’s something that is a really beautiful balance to the fast paced online world we live in.”
Some intriguing upcoming events from Art Club include journaling on Dec. 26 and music sampling on Jan. 16.
This Thursday’s Art Club activity was “punk-inspired patches,” which piqued my interest as a punk-adjacent person with a penchant for patches.
So, finally done with my second-to-last semester of college, I trudged through the snow under a dark early evening sky to make the 30-minute bus ride from Marcy Holmes to Lowry Hill (which felt more like 40 because of the roads).
I expected kitschy scrap fabric, embroidery, pop tabs and safety pins. What visitors got was plain black muslin and paint markers.
I understand the no-sharps safety precaution, considering Art Club activities are designed for ages 4 and up, but nothing felt particularly punk about the activity.
Instead, a young family with four kids crowded around one table, and yuppies chatted and drew at the tables on either side of me with lo-fi indie music playing softly in the background.
The Walker missed the perfect opportunity to educate people of all ages about the DIY punk subculture and its art. There could have been an overview of punk art history alongside the activity instructions.
What’s more, with their library open in the next room for their Open Stacks event, they could’ve laid out magazines and periodicals discussing punk and punk-adjacent art like Michael Shamberg’s “Guerrilla Television,” which argues for people to use cameras and cable television to create social change in response to the omnipresent 24/7 news cycle.
But of course, you can’t have people thinking too hard about how much the museum director is paid or why the Walker won’t let its gallery attendants sit during their shifts.
At one point an older man who, with his long silver hair and beard looked like the dictionary definition of a hippie, arrived, stoked to be at his first Art Club since May.
He looked like the kind of person who had made his fair share of patches and even had a large red patch with a black design emblazoned on the back of his denim jacket. I wasn’t able to get a closer look at the design.
I asked to look at his finished patch, and beaming with pride, he slid it in front of me. In pink, green and orange letters, it read “Art Club is WAC.”
I wondered if the double entendre was intentional, despite his clear enthusiasm for Art Club.
“Time to go look at some art,” he said, but then noticed the open library and made a beeline. I followed silently behind him.
If it weren’t for my headache and my empty stomach not helping matters, I could’ve sat in that library for hours, pouring over literature about art of all movements and media.
While perusing “Guerrilla Television” and any other book that caught my eye, I thought about how powerful it would be for everyone to be able to read about art, whether physically accessing it or being able to understand it.
I thought about how art, the very essence of human expression, is locked away behind the Walker’s sharp, contemporary walls for six out of seven days in the week. The Walker can only allow “punk-inspired” creation, because as an art center that makes millions in revenue each year, it stands squarely opposite the punk ethos.
