Arts centre

An art centre or arts center is distinct from an art gallery or art museum. An arts centre is a functional community centre with a specific remit to encourage arts practice and to provide facilities such as theatre space, gallery space, venues for musical performance, workshop areas, educational facilities, technical equipment, etc.

In the United States, "art centers" are generally either establishments geared toward exposing, generating, and making accessible art making to arts-interested individuals, or buildings that rent primarily to artists, galleries, or companies involved in art making.

In Britain, art centres began after World War II and gradually changed from mainly middle-class places to 1960s and 1970s trendy, alternative centres and eventually in the 1980s to serving the whole community with a programme of enabling access to wheelchair users and disabled individuals and groups.

In the rest of Europe it is common among most art centres that they are partly government funded, since they are considered to have a positive influence on society and economics according to the Rhineland model philosophy. A lot of those organisations originally started in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as squading spaces and were later on legalized.

Walker Art Center

The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is considered one of the nation's "big five" museums for modern art along with the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Hirshhorn. Begun in 1879 as the personal art gallery of lumberman Thomas Barlow Walker, it was formally established as a public art gallery in 1927—the first of its kind in the Upper Midwest. With the support of the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which was establishing community art centers nationwide, the Walker Art Galleries became the Walker Art Center in January 1940. The Walker celebrated its 75th anniversary as a public art center in 2015.

Its building, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and opened in May 1971, saw a major expansion in 2005: Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron's addition, clad in a shimmering aluminum-mesh facade, includes new gallery space, a theater, restaurant, shop, and special events space. Directly across from the museum are the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, which opened in 1988, and the Cowles Conservatory.