Kathy Halbreich, Director
Walker Art Center
725 Vineland Place
Minneapolis, MN 55403
USA
fax: 612 375 7618
kathy.halbreich@walkerart.org

May 18, 2003


Kathy Halbreich,

I am writing to express my deep sadness at the decision taken by the Walker Art Center to dismiss Steve Dietz and to terminate the curatorial programme of new media initiatives and to implore you to not forget your institution's own mandate: to support (by presenting, interpreting, collecting and preserving) the media arts of our time. 

The new media arts community is shocked, outraged, frustrated, appalled and disappointed. As Tate curator Honor Harger has written, "the Walker's support of artists using technology over the past 5 - 10 years has been highly significant in raising the profile of new media art within cultural institutions around the world.  It is hard to imagine the new media art landscape without Gallery 9."

It is not just Gallery 9 and the landmark digital arts study collection Steve created our community fears losing. We fear for the Walkeršs extensive expansion and the failed realization of the new media galleries and flexible technological spaces which Steve helped design. Moreover we fear for continuation of the new media programming of other museums worldwide which followed Stevešs lead and were able to convince their board members, directors and funders to support emerging media by holding up the (democratic, socially engaged) example of the Walker. Steve's leadership in the field has been one of the most progressive forces within the genre of new media, one of the most rapidly developing fields of our time, and to lose his example is nothing short of tragic.

I find it hard to imagine how Walker would feel confident proceeding into the global age it so well expouses without Steve as part of its team. (As Walker-commissioned artist Jon Winet wrote regarding your staff layoffs, "we'd  put Steve in the top seven most important staff at the Walker, not number 142-147.") His work consistently demonstrated "a critical understanding of what a center for contemporary art should be about", in the words of Berlin-based curator Andreas Broeckmann. He is in his curating both "thoughtful and conceptual, really taking what has happened online seriously, and not just looking at technology or the browser. He even tried to build some kind of historical knowledge about net art, a knowledge again not based on the 'technological ethos' alone" writes Amsterdam-based critic Josephine Bosma. Louisiana-based artist and curator Patrick Lichty writes that if we are to take the "long view of new media as a historical movement - an airplane which we're building while zipping through the sky as we speak - to shape the construction of such an undertaking, we need scholars, curators, writers, and artists." Steve Dietz's role at Walker was fundamental to the construction of our movement.

Whitney Museum new media curator Christiane Paul writes that, "we all know that education and new media are the areas that usually experience the most severe cuts in times of economic recession. What is highly unusual, however, is that a museum or arts center would cut the program that has established the institution as the leading one in the whole country - which is what the new media initiatives program at the Walker did, largely thanks to Steve Dietz. This cut comes at a time when the rest of the world is gearing up its new media efforts (and the US has been behind on that end in the first place). If US institutions do not at least maintain the new media initiatives they have built so far, they may have to spend millions in the near future to catch up with the rest of the world."

I lament your decision and hope you are aware of what you have lost and of the respect and support that Steve's work holds worldwide, from artists and museum professionals alike. I urge you to act responsibly towards Gallery 9, and to conserve and continue to present both the digital arts study collection and the new media projects which were commissioned by Walker during Steve's tenure. They are an invaluable part of Walker's - and hence our community's - collections and resources and history. 

Sincerely yours,