The Walker Arts Center's Living Collections Catalogue

Holding a master's degree in management from Northwestern University, Paul Liska has executive-level experience with manufacturing companies near Chicago such as Kraft General Foods and Specialty Foods Corporation. Now working as a private investor, Paul Liska concurrently serves on the board of several corporations and civic organizations, including the Walker Arts Center in Minnesota.

Although the Walker Arts Center temporarily closed to the public on March 14 as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, it offers several online resources that should be of interest to art enthusiasts and academics, including its Living Collections Catalogue. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the third volume of the online catalog was published in 2020, while a fourth volume will be published in the summer. The first two volumes were published with support from the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative.

The idea for the Living Collections Catalogue was conceived by the Walker Arts Center in 2009 after the Getty Foundation invited it and eight other museums to explore the possibility of developing innovative new models for scholarly collection catalogs. The three volumes of the Living Collections Catalogue feature essays rich in media integration and in-depth investigations of different artwork. The recently-released third volume, “Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980,” features five cases studies of prominent practitioners during this time.