Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

Dimensions of Citizenship, the theme of the US Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, co-commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the University of Chicago, challenges architects and designers to envision what it means to be a citizen today. As transnational flows of capital, digital technologies, and geopolitical transformations expand, conventional notions of citizenship are undermined. How might architecture, then, express, and engage with today’s rhizomatic and paradoxical conditions of citizenship?

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Art Center College of Design / Media Design Practices
Curators: Tim Durfee and Mimi Zeiger

2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture: Re-Living The City
Former Dacheng Flour Factory & 8# Warehouse, Shenzhen

Winner of UABB Bronze Dragon award.

Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City unpacks the practices, rituals, and epistemologies that traditionally delimit the understanding of the city in terms of geographic, material, and economic parameters. Now, more than ever, urban and digital realms are inextricably linked. This exhibition presents a selection of screen-based works, objects, and texts that develop, explore, and visualize a city that is not tied to any physical locality. Now, There, however, understands this resulting networked city a place in its own right, albeit one shaped by experiences contingent on media and devices, flows of data, and the demands of global technology. As such, it too is open to a retroactive assessment of what is now and where is there.

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Edited by: Margo Handwerker and Richard Saxton. Featuring works by: Richard Saxton, municipalWORKSHOP, and M12 Collective. Graphic design: Peter de Kan Publisher: Jap Sam Books.

Art has its Billboard charts. They focus mostly on artists and exhibitions in urban centers. A Decade of Country Hitsis devoted to uncharted hits thriving instead on rural aesthetics and rural knowledge. This richly illustrated volume documents ten years of collective works initiated by artist Richard Saxton in rural communities around the world, from the American Midwest and Southwest to parts of Europe, Australia, and South America. Impossible to attribute to any one artistic genre, the works archived here explore a growing community of artists and researchers drawn to the rural experience in all its complexity. It resembles a sketchbook: with drawings, photographs, and from the hip accounts in the field, as well as contributions from likeminded artists, musicians, poets, and writers. Designed by Peter de Kan, the book is published by Jap Sam Books and distributed in North America and Canada by RAM Publications & Distribution.

A Decade of Country Hits includes an international roster of contributors. It contains interviews with Todd Bockley, co-director of the Center for Social Sculpture; Twink Metzler, founder of Living Room Studios; architectural historian Robert Nauman; and Wapke Feenstra, artist and co-founder of Myvillages. Featured throughout are new collaborations with Zach Boddicker, singer and songwriter for 4H Royalty; Kurt Wagner, singer and songwriter for Lambchop; and Matthew Fluharty, director of Art of the Rural. Providing context for the work are essays by artist Stuart Hyatt, founder of TEAM Records; as well as essays by critics and writers Josh Garrett-Davis, author of Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great PlainsMimi Zeiger, author of New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World, Tiny Houses, and Micro Green; and Enrique Ramirez, whose writing has appeared in PerspectaThresholdsAA Files, and elsewhere. In addition are essays by award-winning artists Marjetica Potrč,Chris Sauter, and Fernando García-Dory, founder of A Shepherds School; as well as essays by curators, Ian Hunter, director of the LITTORAL Arts Trust; Marco Marcon, co-founder of International Art Space, and Kirsten Stoltz, programming director of the M12 Collective.