Flesh-like speakers and post-apocalyptic scenes open Walker Design Triennial

The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has launched its first design triennial, titled Beyond Materialism, running from 17 October 2026 to 14 February 2027. Among the opening works: a set of speakers covered in latex skin, programmed to play sounds recorded across Minneapolis in the months before the show.

Curator Joseph Grima, who has worked with Design Academy Eindhoven and co-founded the Alcova exhibition series, framed the exhibition as a challenge to mainstream conceptions of what design does. "We live in an age that is conditioned to think that anything and everything can be designed, and often what is that everything can be optimised," Grima said. "And it's precisely this association between design and optimisation that this exhibition intends to question."

He called the triennial an "opportunity to stop, take stock for a moment, and reflect on what design is today."

What is on show?

The exhibition fills a series of galleries at the Walker Art Center, spanning objects from small furniture to room-scale installations, many displayed on terracotta plinths built into the exhibition design. Several large-scale works were commissioned directly for the event.

The line-up mixes historical and contemporary material. Italian radical designer Alessandro Mendini's 1970s Lassù appears, paired with depictions of the chair's performance on fire. Contemporary US designers in the show include Germane Barnes and Theaster Gates.

The commissioned pieces anchor the large-scale gallery:

• Spanish designer Lucas Muñoz Muñoz's All Ears: latex-covered, amorphous speakers playing Minneapolis field recordings, routed simultaneously through a sleek soundboard to cacophonic effect. Muñoz told Dezeen the work was designed as a "microphone" for the city and to "make visible the act of listening". The broadcast also projected beyond the gallery as a radio sequence.
• A work by Vessel: two massive rolls of fabric spooled over a kiosk, based on cofounder Navine G Dossos's paintings of the self-built home she shares with her partner, James Bridle.
• Post-apocalyptic appliances by Brussels-based Espace Aygo, made from found objects and derived from the studio's 2022 transformation of a derelict apartment building into a home and art space.

Flesh, ruins and reuse in the smaller galleries

The themes of the large installations — fleshy surfaces, post-apocalypticism, reuse — carry into the rooms of smaller objects.

London studio Superflux showed pieces from its Relics of Abundance series, which imagines objects a future civilisation might build from our own in a time of scarcity, including a chair made from straw and rebar. Austro-Canadian designer Christoph Wimmer Ruelland contributed furniture built from found objects with precisely matched colours. Korean designer Jonghoo Jeong used jerrycans to build a fountain, a reference to his earlier practice of discarding the containers during his process.

Athens-based studio Astronauts showed inflated metal works informed by autobody shops — love seats, chairs and a seesaw, iridescent yet familiar. Italian-German designer Maximilian Marchesani created a structure of smartphone glass refracting metal-coated leaves, plus a chandelier combining LEDs with branches. South Korea's Wknd Lab presented stools made from discarded shells.

Dozens of other designers took part, including Moon Seop Seo, Studio Ker, Objects of Common Interest, Stef Fusani, Kevin Quale and Kostas Lambridis — a cross-section of avant-garde design filtered through Grima and the event's artistic director, Asli Altay.

The Walker, long known for its contemporary art programme, has now committed to design on a recurring three-year cycle. Whether Beyond Materialism's argument — that design means more than optimisation — sustains itself across future editions will be the measure of the new format.