Walker Art Center’s Amanda Hunt Shares Her Top Five Recent Obsessions

Artist Seitu Jones, who has worked with the Walker in the past, runs Frogtown Park and Farm. It’s a thirteen-acre public park, with five acres devoted to an organic farm. As I become further acquainted with Minneapolis and the surrounding area, I look forward to connecting to the earth and with others here through Jones’s practice. He offers community meals, inviting people to converse. His work reminds us that visual art can be an investment in people and communities, in food and knowledge, and in offering space outside institutional systems that have historically left many people out.

Part of having a child is revisiting our own childhood. I was most excited to return to Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon [1947] with my daughter. There’s a simplicity to the language that Brown employs in this children’s book, and Clement Hurd’s illustrations have a colorist sensibility reminiscent of Matisse’s. But it wasn’t until recently that I learned how passionate and radical Brown really was. As teacher at New York’s Bank Street Experimental School, and later as an editor at W.R. Scott, she was super ambitious and disciplined. Brown wanted to make great children’s stories, and drew from the immediate things of life: the sock, the bowl of mush, the big bunny saying “hush”—and these are all things that most kids can relate to.

Huddle is a 1961 original dance construction by Italian-born, Los Angeles–based artist and writer Simone Forti. She has an incredibly rich practice encompassing films, drawings, watercolors, holograms, and performance art. Huddle consists of ten to thirteen performers who climb over each other and, in so doing, slowly but constantly evolve into a new shape. There’s an intense vulnerability in the piece’s building together and falling apart—a continuous action that speaks not only to me personally, but to what we have all experienced in the last two years with the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, and the war in Ukraine. It feels important during these times to remember and celebrate our interconnectedness.

Throughout the pandemic, my husband and I listened to the 2018 album Con Todo el Mundo by the Houston-based band Khruangbin, whose name means flying engine or airplane in Thai. An intersectional band, Khruangbin draws on the musical legacies of Black funk, jazz, and Latinidad. Even though we couldn’t go anywhere, the album made us feel connected to the world because it has such a global feel.

I’m excited to experience Simone Leigh’s Sovereignty [2022] at the Venice Biennale. I’m fortunate to have worked with Leigh on one of her first public art pieces, at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2016. I admire her power of representation and how she brings people together. There are always threads of collaboration that she reengages and reiterates throughout her work. Leigh is such a powerful person and maker, and it feels like a landmark moment to have her Black female subjectivity representing the United States in its official pavilion.