COLLABORATION / KIMBALL ART CENTER
Modern West is pleased to collaborate with artist Angela Ellsworth for the Kimball Art Center group exhibition Step After Step. On view May 30 through September 14, 2025.
Step After Step explores the evolution of walking as an art form, inviting viewers to reflect on how a simple act can have profound meaning.
In the late 1960s, as artists across the globe began to question the confines of the gallery and the commodification of the art object, a quiet revolution took shape—on foot. What began as a radical gesture against traditional media evolved into a profound artistic language: walking as art.
Step After Step traces the lineage of this movement, from its conceptual origins to its contemporary resonance. Artists turned to the act of walking not only as a means of mark-making, but as a mode of inquiry—into place, politics, embodiment, and constructed barriers. Inspired by the flux of Dada, the chance operations of Surrealism, and the emerging ethos of Land Art and performance, these works positioned the artist’s body in motion as both subject and tool. Richard Long’s solitary pathworks through the British countryside and the long-distance performances of the 1970s redefined what it meant to make and experience art.
Today, walking endures as an artistic strategy rooted in presence, meditation, and attention. It is both intimate and expansive: a way of recording memory, resisting systems, and mapping the self within a shifting world.
Through a constellation of video, photography, sculpture, ephemera, and participatory works, Step After Step invites viewers to consider the resonance of each step taken—and to imagine how even the most ordinary gesture might be transformed into a profound act of meaning.
Kimball Art Center
1251 Kearns Blvd, Park City, UT 84060
Tuesday – Friday: 10 AM – 6 PM, Saturday-Sunday: 10 AM – 5 PM
WORKS ON LOAN
Museum of Walking (Angela Ellsworth and KB Thomason) | The Rolodex, 2025 | rolodex open rotary card file: bent tubular metal, molded plastic, paper & an archive of scores | 7.25 x 7.25 x 6.5"
ARTIST STATEMENT
A ‘score’ uses written notation of some kind to communicate instructions for realizing a work of art. The idea and use of the score is originally rooted in music. In visual art and intermedia, the score offered a way to transmit non-musical art forms. It became a method for encoding, recording and transmitting art forms. -Ken Friedman, Fluxus Artist
Museum of Walking: The Rolodex is an archive in the shape of a walk… an ever-evolving repository, in motu - for event/graphic scores, prompts and instructions centered on the practice of walking.
The Museum of Walking’s rolodex archive exists as an active and mobile reference of walking as practice, and a nod to artists, philosophers, writers, composers, laborers, performers, etc… who have honored, considered, paid attention to or experimented with the act of walking in their respective practices.
As an ongoing document on an endless walk, the Rolodex is an archive in continuous movement. It is an object document that never completes itself…always another step, always in motion…an archive that is active and alive. Like a walk, the rolodex, and the scores within it, are an homage to the analogue, simple, free, experiential… complete in themselves and never twice the same… an invitation to connect to the whims of chance, to memory, to interruption, to detours, to distractions.
Circular aspects of a rolodex object reference the continuity of a walk and the repetition of (re)writing, (re)walking, (re)presenting histories of engagement in the everyday, a relational tactic enabling museum visitors to interpret archival practices as open invitations via the reproduction, distribution, reactivation, and recapitulation of scores in various/novel settings and situations.
Feel free to walk your fingers through the pages of this rolodex. The experience of the score is transmitted to you via text and shall be interpreted as you desire. Many of the original artists have performed the scores themselves, and / or have passed them along to be performed by others thereafter. Now you have the chance to interpret and realize a walking score. By realizing these scores you are taking a walk in the shoes of many others while simultaneously embodying the score yourself: honoring those who came walking before us while walking along, anew.
Go on, around and about… walk to the front desk and ask for a score. Enjoy.