Design meets spirituality, and a shaken Minneapolis, at the Walker
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In a bright white gallery at the Walker Art Center, curator Joseph Grima stands in front of a chair that appears to be charred to a crisp. Next to it is a grainy photo of the same chair lapped by bright orange flames, on the cover of the July 1974 issue of Casabella, a famed Italian design magazine. The image was as viral as one could be in the pre-internet age.
“This is something that all architecture students and design students have sort of burned into their memory because it was one of those iconic images,” Grima said. The Brit is a renowned international design figure who has been commuting to the Walker from his home in Milan.
The chair is the first object Grima wants to show me among the 100 or so pieces that create a bizarro world filled with off-center objects of domesticity and the built environment at the Walker's inaugural design triennial, “Beyond Materialism.” Grima and Asli Altay – the Walker’s artistic director of design programming – brought in the work of 26 major designers from around the world, from Nigeria to South Korea, Taiwan to the Netherlands.
The Walker also commissioned Spanish artist Lucas Muñoz Muñoz to make a piece about Minneapolis. More on that later; first, back to the chair.
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The medium is not the message
The chair, or rather the journey of the chair – the chair and fire and aftermath as performance art – is called “Lassù,” Italian for “Up There,” by Italian designer Alessandro Mendini. It’s a conceptual exercise. The chair itself is a platonic ideal, not something anyone would ever sit on comfortably, and Mendini is sending that idea up in flames.
“Lassù marked the beginning of a certain ritualistic idea of design,” Grima said. As he explains, it created a before and after in the design world: Design should also serve conceptual and spiritual purposes, not just those of practicality, affordability and convenience prized in the consumer boom after World War II.
This idea, that design could serve a higher or spiritual purpose, is at the heart of the entire exhibition. To drive this point home, “Lassù” has been placed next to a wooden American Shaker chair made in 1820, the kind of sturdy spindled seat found at a kitchen table.
“The Shakers were one of the first movements to acknowledge that design could have a dimension that transcends the material,” Grima said. “For the Shakers, making beautiful objects was a form of devotion.”
As Grima points out, beyond the Shaker chair, none of the design objects are practical or useful in a conventional sense.
“We really wanted to start the exhibition by showing that as an example of an object that speaks to a physical need and to kind of everyday use, but also to a secondary purpose that addresses the sort of the realm of the spirit,” Grima said.
Who is the designer now?
Altay, who came to the Walker from Turkey in 2021, has been dreaming up the triennial since she arrived. She wants to track how design has changed and will change in response to technology, climate, trends and new habits, and reconnect the museum to its storied design history.
“The triennial will be coming back to the same question every three years: What is design, and who is the designer now?” Altay says.
The answers that the exhibition presents vary wildly, but a common response is the fountain. For one, “System of Atonement” is a 6-foot-tall fountain made of stacked plastic jerrycans – a form originally designed for the German military in the 1930s – by Korean designer Jonghoo Jeong. As a designer, Jeong had long worked with synthetic materials that are harmful to the environment, using jerrycans to dump their liquid waste into the sewer system, Grima explained.
“He decided to create this fountain as a way of actually atoning for his sins as a designer and somehow acknowledging that the process of design, in his case, carried with it externalities and consequences that were not necessarily positive,” Grima said. “It's a reflection on the trade-offs of trying to do good things, but also being caught in a system of production that is almost inevitably harmful.”
As the water trickled through the thin plastic, Altay added, “What I love about this is the fact that it speaks to how guilt works, so it’s closed circuit.”
The object dreamscape continues with an iridescent alien-like seesaw by Greek design duo Astronauts, a spartan and glistening chrome tableware set by the design group Ananas Ananas, based in Los Angeles and Baja, Calif., and the “Migration Columns” of American architect Germane Barnes, which reinterpret the classic Greek form through the lens of the African diaspora. Here Barnes has broken the column free of its smooth Western molds (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and so on), replacing it with rippling, jagged and rough surfaces.
“Each of the works – they're very personal,” Grima said. “They speak to the dilemmas of the designers themselves. So they're almost a form of self-reflection and self-therapy.”
From Minneapolis to the world
In an intimate corner at the end of the exhibition's chain of galleries is a work more personal for Minnesotans, too. Spanish designer and sound-system artist Lucas Muñoz Muñoz paid multiple visits to Minneapolis over the past year to create a commission for the Walker called “ALL EARS.”
Altay and Grima stand amid the interactive fleshy sonic environment that is “ALL EARS.” Altay operates a soundboard, sending the sounds of birds, waterfalls and city streets through the installation.
“What happened with Lucas was Lucas was going to build us a broadcasting-speaker sort of work, but he'd seen what happened during the ICE invasion, so he really pivoted,” Altay said.
“The moment of the surge, and he was very touched by the stories that he was hearing, people's experiences in this very, very difficult moment,” Grima added. “And so he decided to create a piece dedicated to the idea of listening. He built a series of, you could say, big ears.”
On a video call from his Madrid apartment, Muñoz remembered how, on a cold December day in 2025, he visited Cheapo Records, the iconic used music store on Eat Street in south Minneapolis. Weeks later, after Muñoz had returned to Spain, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti on the same street. A friend notified him that the shooting happened next door to Cheapo.
“It's quite impressive as a foreigner,” Muñoz said, “that a month before a very, very history-making event, I was in the place that that happened.”
“Now when I go to that place, it feels like there is a wound on the social tissue of the city,” added Muñoz, comparing it to the “Upside down” in the sci-fi show “Stranger Things.” “Everything looks the same, but it feels weird. It feels different. It feels that there is something open that is historical and it's still finding its place in history.”
Minneapolis, Operation Metro Surge and the killings of Pretti and Renee Good were all over the news in Europe, Muñoz said.
“Minneapolis was in the mouth of everybody in all the newspapers because of the very, very contestatory society it has that stands for its rights and stands for its ethics,” Muñoz said.
Birds, whistles and ‘La Migra, La Migra’
At the next meeting with the Walker, Muñoz informed them that he was changing the design of his commission from speakers to microphones: “This is a moment for microphones. This is a moment to give voice to the people, give voice to the street. I think it’s a moment of listening.”
On return visits in June and September, Muñoz roamed the city with his massive fleshy latex microphones, capturing everything from the street sounds of Nicollet Avenue to the Heron Rookery, Minnehaha Falls to Karmel Mall, Mercado Central and the personal stories of Minneapolitans filled with memories of helicopters flying over south Minneapolis, “whistles and ‘La Migra, La Migra.’”
Now, visitors can go to the Walker to see the “ears” and listen to and mix the sounds and memories of Minneapolis in 2026.
“Beyond Materialism” runs at the Walker through Feb. 14, 2027.
