Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.
–Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: a history of walking

Walking has a history as long and varied as humankind. Whether for changing location or simply exercise, purposive or incidental, walking is both universal and idiosyncratic; we all traverse different paths, shaped by specific encounters and experiences. Contemporary discussions about rootlessness, diaspora, displacement, and disconnectedness, are abstractions that neglect our physical, corporeal reality and that at every moment we exist physically, in a physical location. Technology has worked to disembody us: cars and airplanes make us faster, global communication eclipses distance, the internet negates geography. Walking brings us back, grounds us in biological limitations of time and space. As Rebecca Solnit reminds us, “On foot everything stays connected.”

Walking is an impure practice. We walk and think, we move to and from a place, through a landscape, and we engage a set of encounters along the way; mind, body, and world are connected. Within the visual arts, walking came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of performance-based conceptual practices, but in a contemporary era of border fences, cars, incarceration, obesity, and technological distraction, it has taken on an urgently political dimension. In a sprawling city like San José, to walk is a subversive detour.

Other Walks, Other Lines focuses on artwork made during the last thirty years by artists living around the world who reflect on this specific, mundane activity, and use it to make meaning. Divided into six porous sections, this wandering exhibition considers topics as disparate as procession, immigration, pilgrimage, and accessibility. Other Walks, Other Lines is an open-ended call to act, to connect, to walk.

Organized by Lauren Schell Dickens, curator, Rory Padeken, associate curator, and Kathryn Wade, curatorial associate.

Excerpt of a play based on Rebecca Solnit book's Wanderlust https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_HLJkKpktY