Olga Viso, Walker Art Center Director

During more than a decade at the helm of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Olga Viso 92G has championed the arts in all forms and promoted artists on the leading edge of creativity.

“The Walker is an institution that is deeply committed to catalyzing thinking and provoking questions. How does art reflect society in our time? We offer inquiry-based experiences of seeing things that may rock your world and may inspire a whole domino effect of challenging and questioning,” Viso says. “These moments are often quite challenging—they don’t just focus on beauty, they focus on reality and human experience. Art provokes that.”

Viso is executive director of the Walker, which ranks among the five most-visited modern/contemporary art museums in the United States. Prior to her tenure with the Walker Art Center, Viso held positions at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, starting as assistant curator and becoming director in 2005. Viso was a curator at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida, from 1993 to 1995, and held several curatorial and administrative positions at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art while earning a master’s degree in art history at Emory.

“At a time in our country when the values of a creative and inclusive society are being decidedly challenged, it is ever more important for arts organizations to affirm their values and promises to the communities they serve,” Viso wrote in a blog post supporting the thirtieth-annual Arts Advocacy Day, which took place in Washington, D.C., in February.