Olga Viso Steps Down as Executive Director of the Walker Art Center

According to an announcement by the board of trustees of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Olga Viso recently resigned her post as the executive director of that institution. The president of the board of trustees, Monica Nassif, said, "We are grateful for Olga's leadership and celebrate her significant contributions to the Walker Art Center during the past ten years," and added, "She led the organization through a major capital campaign to fund the vision and redesign of our entire campus, including the new Minneapolis Sculpture Garden [a $75 million dollar project]. In addition, she championed experimental and underrepresented artists throughout her tenure, while bringing many noteworthy exhibitions to the Walker, such as 'Merce Cunningham: Common Time, International Pop,' and groundbreaking exhibitions like 'Adios Utopia: Dreams and Deceptions in Cuban Art Since 1950,' one of the most comprehensive exhibitions of Cuban art to be organized in the US in decades," organized by Viso in collaboration with curators Elsa Vega, Gerardo Mosquera, Mari Carmen Ramírez, and René Francisco Rodríguez. An expert in Latin American Art, Olga Viso oversaw the development of curatorial projects that included retrospectives like those of Argentinean painter Guillermo Kuitca and US sculptor Jim Hodges, special projects with the Guerrilla Girls, and initiatives to mark the 75th anniversary of the Walker Art Center in 2015, which resulted in the donation of nearly 250 new works of art by more than 120 donors to the collections of the Walker Art Center. During her tenure, about 5,000 objects by local, female, and minority artists were added to the Walker's collection as the institution also sought to broaden its global diversity and fill its historical gaps. About her departure, Olga Viso said, "It has been a privilege to lead this venerable contemporary arts institution for the last ten years and to support the work of some of the most compelling and adventurous international artists working today […]. Completing the vision for the campus that began in 2005 with the Walker's Herzog and DeMeuron addition has been an absolute highlight. I am immensely proud of what we—the Walker's talented and ambitious staff and the generous community of donors who stepped up boldly—have accomplished together." Olga Viso has been a cultural leader at the national and international levels and served on the boards of the Association of Art Museum Directors and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Olga Viso was recently at the center of a controversy involving the installation of the sculpture titled Scaffold by artist Sam Durant in the Walker Art Center's Sculpture Garden. The piece represented the gallows used to hang thirty-eight members of the Dakota Sioux during the Dakota War of 1862. Installed as part of the garden revamp, the sculpture reopened wounds in the community and among Indigenous Americans in Minnesota, and led to a large protest in Minneapolis that included people from around the country who gathered to condemn the work and demand its removal. The institution eventually agreed and destroyed the work. Before she began to work at the Walker in January of 2008, Olga Viso spent twelve years at the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, first as curator of contemporary art and eventually as its director. The Board of Trustees has formed a search committee to hire a new executive director. During the interim period, the Board has decided to establish an Office of the Executive Director that includes four staff members of the Center.