As a cultural institution devoted to connecting the work of living artists with our diverse audiences, the Walker increasingly has begun to produce, present, and interpret work originating from many different cultural perspectives. But this mission is not without significant risk during economically challenging times, when even robust institutions such as the Walker are facing difficult choices, including laying off staff and freezing salaries. When our endowment dropped from historical highs, our 21-year tradition of balanced budget forced us to do both this year. As some sponsorship shifts from purely philanthropic ends, as government shrinks or abandons some of the ways it traditionally has undergirded culture, and as content is held in fewer and fewer corporate hands, popularity is sometimes confused with excellence and the familiar is an infinitely safer economic driver than the new. But if we only produce Shakespeare, applaud Beethoven, and admire Monet, what happens to the generative possibilities of today’s artists and the sensory and intellectual appetite of our audiences? What happens to the alternative voices that animate our society? Who seeds the cultural landscape for the future? And how do we begin to understand values other than our own? This is the backdrop against which the Walker can make a difference.

A few years back, we realized that in order to realize our mission to be a model multidisciplinary, diverse, and global center for the arts, we needed to learn how to swim before diving into unknown seas; we needed to better understand the social, historical, and aesthetic criteria by which art is shaped outside of the European context in which we most often operated. We made an institutional commitment to take the time necessary to learn how to think and act more globally even if we didn’t know the immediate outcome of this study. In 1999, we received a $1 million grant from the Bush Foundation to launch an institution-wide effort to challenge and expand our own expertise and policies in this area. A primary manifestation was the creation of a Global Advisory Committee comprised of seven individuals representing a breadth of expertise in international artistic and educational programming in Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, the United States, and Turkey. Over the past four years, this committee—Walter Chakela, Vishakha N. Desai, Hou Hanru, Paulo Herkenhoff, Vasif Kortun, Hidenaga Otori, and Baraka Sele—traveled to the Walker twice per year for five-day seminars designed to engage our curators, designers, and educators in a critique of our existing global programs, to help expand the global and disciplinary range of our curatorial perspectives, and to assist us in planning programming for the final year of the initiative.