Less Than One
Lutz Bacher, Ericka Beckman, Trisha Brown, Paul Chan, Trisha Donnelly, Renée Green, Charline von Heyl, Jasper Johns, Joan Jonas, Meredith Monk, Adrian Piper, Sigmar Polke, Pope.L, James Richards, Dieter Roth, and Kara Walker

“It’s a remarkable moment to present these installation-scaled works, as many of them are first gallery appearances of important new additions to the Walker’s collection, alongside multidisciplinary artists who have anchored the Walker’s collection for some time,” says Fionn Meade, curator of the exhibition and the Walker’s Artistic Director. “Less Than One points to the Walker’s history of prescient acquisitions and how the collections continue to breach the boundaries of artistic disciplines.”

The show’s title is drawn from the collection of essays Less Than One by Nobel Prize-winning poet and author Joseph Brodsky. The text offers a meditation on the nature of human existence and artistic expression, suggesting that a person— defined in political and aesthetic terms—is always “less than one”. He argues that one can never be a discrete whole at any moment in time, driving the artist to pursue identity through words, images, and an uneasy embrace of artistic personae. Many works in the exhibition are by some of the most talked about contemporary artists today whose construction and performance of identity and use of graphics in repetition is central to their practices.