Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

On Saturday, October 22, from 11am-3pm, the Architecture Lobby will host a “Think-In” at UCLA, where invited panelists and a professional facilitator will critically debate and discuss topics most integral to the aims of the Architecture Lobby, including: architecture labor and labor rights, the pros/cons of professionalization, the perceptions of architects within the media, and emerging pedagogical models. The Think-In is free and open to the public, and all interested students, academics, or practitioners are strongly encouraged to join the discussion.

Panelists:
Frances Anderton, KCRW (DnA, Design and Architecture)
Wil Carson, 64North, UCLA
Peggy Deamer, Yale University and The Architecture Lobby
Jia Gu, Materials & Applications, The Architecture Lobby
Tia Koonse, UCLA Labor Center
Elizabeth Timme, LA-Más
Mimi Zeiger, critic and curator, Art Center College of Design, The Architecture Lobby
Peter Zellner, ZELLNERandCompany, USC, Free School of Architecture
Facilitator: Nancy Alexander

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).

Host curators are Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design), Leonardo Bravo and River Jukes-Hudson (Big City Forum), and Sarah Lorenzen (Neutra VDL Research House).

This fall, curators from three Los Angeles-based organizations come together as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project, to present Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles. This series of exhibitions and events is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Neutra VDL Research House.

Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles explores the multivalent meaning of “host” though spectacle, parasitic opportunism, and domestic landscapes. The Neutra VDL Research House serves as the site of these investigations and the house, embedded with spatial effects—mirrors, screens, and pools of water—heightens and confuses the relationship between the domestic interior and the exterior.  Read More …