Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

The M&A Catalogue Launch Party celebrates the publication of Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful, a collection of M&A’s past twelve years of projects and installations, produced with the University Art Museum, CSULB. Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful covers over a decade of art and architecture experiments, workshops, parties and performances at Materials & Applications, with special focus on the installations produced by M&A collaborators Ball & Nogues, Jimenez Lai, Layer LA, PATTERNS, Gail Borden, Doris Sung, and founding director, Jenna Didier and director emeritus Oliver Hess. The release party will be the first time the M&A catalogue will be made available to the public.

Panel Discussion on Architecture on Exhibition with Benjamin Ball, Anthony Carfello, Jimenez Lai, Ingallil Wahlroos-Ritter and Mimi Zeiger [Moderator] with Jenna Dider, Jia Gu and Courtney Coffmann

Given that exhibition-making is also a practice, how does the architectural work become transformed by the exhibition? How and why do we exhibit architecture? How do we extend possibilities of publicness in an architect’s work but do this with the work as foreground? How can we inscribe an interaction between a “public” and architects that is different than the container forms we already know (exhibitions, monographs, etc)? In a public conversation, each of the speakers speakers explore their own roles related to exhibition-making, whether in categorical divides (“artist,” curator, instigator) or through diverse genres (installation, exhibition as container, total environments, public platform).

Architecture and Design Film Festival Panel:
Hands-on, Ground-up: Community and Design/Build

Hippie havens, handbuilt provocations, and tech experiments with Yestermorrow, Jersey Devil, and Materials & Applications.

 

Mediabisto’s coverage of the panel by Brigitte Brown.

Architecture, especially at its most conceptual, is murky territory. It takes a risk for the public to wade in. The field is routinely blasted for using alienating jargon or offering up sci-fi designs that produce head scratching. Three exhibitions on view right now across the southland celebrate experimental design, while making it accessible to a broad audience. Each show — Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB); Materials & Applications: Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful, Projects 2002 – 2013 at Cal State Long Beach University Art Museum; and Blindspot Initiative at the Keystone Gallery in Los Angeles–provoke a collaborative dialog about architecture and its allied disciplines: art, design, fabrication, and digital technologies. While the installations run the gamut from the scrappy to the institutional, when taken together these shows reveal a rich and diverse community united by an ethos to question both the academic and professional boundaries that surround architecture. Read More …