Martin Friedman, longtime Walker Art Center director, ca. 1980s. Friedman directed the Walker from 1961 until 1990 and helped shape its contemporary focus.

The Walker Art Center complex. Photograph by Steve Plattner, August 6, 1975..

Exterior façade of the Walker Art Center. Photograph by Robert Jacobson, ca. 1960s.

A Walker Art Center exhibition during the institution's WPA (Works Progress Administration and Work Projects Administration) period, 1941. From the National Archives and Records Administration; public domain.

A children’s art class at the Walker Art Center, then a community art center operated by the Federal Art Project (1941). From the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); public domain.

A Federal Art Project exhibition at the Walker Art Center, ca. 1940.

Art class at the Walker Art Center, 1940. The Federal Art Project held art classes for all ages at the Walker in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

A postcard depicts the “new” Walker Art Museum, which opened in 1927 on Lowry Hill in Minneapolis.

T. B. Walker standing on the grand stairway inside the Walker Art Gallery (later called the Walker Art Center), ca. 1925.

T. B. Walker, ca. 1915.