The Cookout Turns the Upper Garden Into a Block Party

The Walker Art Center's summer Cookout turns the Wurtele Upper Garden into a neighborhood gathering of food and music.

Some of the Walker Art Center's most memorable summer programming happens nowhere near the galleries. The Cookout takes place up the terraced green space above the main building — the Wurtele Upper Garden — where it gathers neighbors around food, music and the idea that joy itself can build community. It is a striking thing for a contemporary art museum to put its name on: not a difficult exhibition or an austere performance, but a party.

The event leans into celebration. The programming is warm, loud and easy to join — the opposite of the hushed, reverent register a museum is usually associated with. The same institution that books demanding experimental theater in its McGuire Theater also throws a summer gathering designed for delight, and the Upper Garden is the right stage for it: elevated, green and set apart from the main galleries, closer to a backyard than a venue.

For Lowry Hill residents, an event like The Cookout blurs the line between cultural venue and neighborhood gathering place. The Walker has spent years arguing, through its programming, that it belongs to the neighborhood and not only to the art world.

The Walker does not list a fixed annual date for The Cookout; dates and details for a given summer are posted on the museum's calendar at walkerart.org. A gathering like this rewards arriving early and staying late.