Winter 2020

Dreaming & Dwelling

The architecture that imagined a new society

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Adam Wiseman, Architecture, Art, Articles, Elon Musk, Jade Doskow, Laurent Kronental, Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer

Imagining a new society begins with visionary design. What can we learn from the bold architectural schemes of the twentieth century?

The frontispiece of the original edition of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, published in Leuven, Belgium, in 1516, depicts a small island, nearly round with deckled edges. The engraver’s hand shaded the landmass with short, neat hatch marks to suggest topography and a river. More imagined utopia as a self-contained world where communities shared a common culture and way of life. This definition sets up two particular criteria: place and society. To convey these intertwined conditions, the illustrator dotted the woodblock print with buildings.

November 16, 2020

On Futures: Beatriz Cortez

SCI-Arc Channel

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Art, Articles, Beatriz Cortez

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Born in El Salvador, Los Angeles-based artist Beatriz Cortez crafts sculptures—often large, metal, and architectural—that evoke Latinx and Indigenous pasts and presents. Her practice explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. Widely exhibited, Cortez’s has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary Museum and Clockshop in Los Angeles, and has been included in group shows at the Hammer Museum, the Whitney, and Ballroom Marfa, among others. In 2019 she received the inaugural Frieze LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize and in September 2020, she installed her monumental piece Glacial Erratic in New York City’s Rockefeller Center as part of Frieze Sculpture 2020. In addition to her art practice, she is a cultural and literary critic and professor of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. Cortez is the author of Aesthetics of Cynicism: Central American Post War Fiction and the author of numerous essays on postwar Central American literature and culture.

November 9, 2020

On Futures: Olalekan Jeyifous

SCI-Arc Channel

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Olalekan Jeyifous

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Brooklyn-based visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous creates work that critiques the present by looking at the past and the future. Trained in architecture at Cornell University, he blends techniques and skills from the field with speculation drawn from a range of science fiction imaginaries from Afrofuturism to Solarpunk—a genre that envisions possible ecological futures under climate crisis. Best-known for his digital illustrations in the series Shantytown Megastructures, an imagined Lagos, Nigeria in which contemporary ad hoc construction practices are extrapolated into fantastical vertical settlements, his practice crosses between disciplines and mediums, taking shape as drawings, films, and installations. Jeyifous’ work has been shown at the Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. His large-scale public artworks were shown at Coachella in 2017 and recently along the waterfront in Alexandria, Virginia. He is one of the participants in the 2020-21 cycle of Exhibit Columbus and the MoMA exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

October 26, 2020

How 53 artists redesigned the toilet paper holder. Selfie stick, anyone?

Los Angeles Times

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A.H.O.F., Art, Articles, Benjamin Critton, Black Lives Matter, Carlos Little, Design, Lland, Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Theo Martins, Wrk–Shp

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Last spring, as stay-at-home orders set in and consumers cleared out store shelves, we learned something that we probably knew all along: You don’t think about toilet paper until you are desperate.

And if the lowly roll is overlooked, the design of the toilet paper holder is even less considered — until now. The Echo Park gallery Marta is presenting “Under/Over,” an exhibition of more than 50 toilet paper holders by an international lineup of artists and designers.

October 15, 2020

The Nun Who Became a Pop Art Activist

In the 1960s, Sister Corita Kent made photographs and silk-screen posters that crackled with energy at a time of unrest.

Aperture

TAGS

Andy Warhol, Art, Articles, Corita Kent, Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi

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The works of artist, educator, and social justice activist Corita Kent are packed with slogans and scripture. Her silk-screen posters from the 1960s and ’70s crackle with the energy of a time of social unrest. She pulled text and images from advertising and media, recombining them into compositions reflecting on the Civil Rights and peace movements.

“GET WITH THE ACTION,” demands a 1965 silk-screen titled for emergency use soft shoulder, its primary colors reminiscent of Wonder Bread packaging. “HOPE AROUSES AS NOTHING ELSE CAN AROUSE A PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE,” says another piece from 1969 in black block letters on a bright-yellow field. Kent’s Pop art style is often compared to that of Andy Warhol— whose paintings of soup cans she saw in 1962 at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles—often as defense of her legitimate claim to be part of the canon. Yet while the more famous artist traded in a cosmopolitan deadpan, Kent’s practice reflected her Catholic beliefs and humanity.

September 15 – October 29, 2020

Exhibit Columbus: New Middles Symposium

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Anne Surak, Architecture, Ash Smith, Chris Cornelius, Dan Hill, De Nichols, Events, Iker Gil, Iñaki Alday, Joar Nango, Kate Orff, Marcus Fairs, Paola Aguirre, Radha Mistry, Wes Jackson, Matthew Fluharty

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The 2020 Exhibit Columbus Symposium: New Middles gathered national and international thought leaders in architecture, art, design, and landscape architecture together with Columbus stakeholders to explore the question, What Is The Future of The Middle City?

The Symposium examined this question through the lens of four topics:

Futures and Technologies: Dan Hill, Vinnova, Stockholm, Sweden; Radha Mistry, Autodesk, San Francisco CA; Moderated by Marcus Fairs, Editor-in-Chief, Dezeen

Resiliency and Climate Adaptation: Iñaki Alday, Tulane University / aldayjover architecture and landscape, New Orleans; Kate Orff, SCAPE, New York, NY; Moderated by Iker Gil
2020–21 Curator, Exhibit Columbus

Arts and Community: Paola Aguirre, Borderless Studio, Chicago IL; Matthew Fluharty, Art of the Rural & M12 Studio, Winona MN; De Nichols, Civic Creatives, St. Louis MO; Moderated by Anne Surak, Director, Exhibit Columbus

Indigenous Futures and Radical Thinking: Chris Cornelius (Oneida), studio:indigenous, Milwaukee WI; Wes Jackson, The Land Institute, Salina KS; Joar Nango (Sámi), FFB, Alta, Finland; Ash Smith, Carson Center of Emerging Media Arts, Lincoln NE; Moderated by Mimi Zeiger, 2020–21 Curator, Exhibit Columbus

Each topic was explored weekly through Thematic Conversations, hosted in partnership with Dezeen, featuring international thought leaders. They were followed by Columbus Conversations featuring community stakeholders in conversation with 2021 Miller Prize recipients highlighting forward-thinking initiatives happening in our community of Columbus, Indiana.

These dialogues have served as foundational research for all New Middles participants—as a kind of Exhibition Design Brief and Community Design Brief — identifying topics, themes, and writings for community partners while growing exhibition participants’ understanding of Columbus’ culture and context as they conceptualize their commissioned installations for the Fall 2021 Exhibition.

August 2020

INTERVIEW: JOAR NANGO ON INDIGENOUS ARCHITECTURES AND SLIPPERY IDENTITIES

Pin-Up

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Charles Jencks, Joar Nango, Reyner Banham

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Joar Nango’s identity as Sámi, the Indigenous people of northern Europe, is central to his art and architecture practice. Yet in terms of discipline or medium, he actively defies categorization, choosing instead to mobilize the space in-between and across worlds. This is partly to find breathing room within his creative practice and partly political stance — strategic evasion as post-capitalist critique. Through site-specific installations, video, and zines, Nango actively investigates intersections between Indigenous and contemporary architectures, traditional Sámi construction, and new media. The results have a way of escaping the present; instead, they create a kind of feedback loop between past and future architectural narratives.

June 30, 2020

Can Quarantine Propel Us Toward Planetary Sanctuary?

Critic Mimi Zeiger reflects on refugia and the regenerative potential of crisis.

Metropolis

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Design Earth, Donna Haraway, Olalekan Jeyifous, Urbanism

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I can’t stop thinking about refugia. In the years, months, and days before the COVID-19 pandemic, the term was confined to the literature and philosophy of climate crisis, referring to pockets of life that through geographic isolation or species resilience manage to hang on in spite of the environmental forces against them. Think of clusters of Pacific Northwest barnacles nestled high on coastal outcroppings to avoid falling prey to sea snails. Or old-growth forests insulated from rising temperatures in cool mountain valleys.

As self-quarantine set in earlier this spring, the word refugia, at least for me, expanded in definition from specific ecological condition to conceptual touchstone—a necessary leap to metaphor when faced with planetary crisis. The magnitude of this pandemic falls outside human comprehension, but for the luckiest of us, refuge is manageable: a place of relative safety, of sourdough starters and online Jazzercise classes.

May 20, 2020

Interview with Sterling Ruby

STATE is a video compiling aerial footage of California’s prison systems by the multidisciplinary artist Sterling Ruby. Amid the Covid-19 pandemic and its effect in prisons, the work is hugely pertinent

AnOther Magazine

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Art, Articles, Sterling Ruby

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For his 2019 exhibition DAMNATION at Sprüth Magers, LA, Sterling Ruby presented a 33-minute video projection titled STATE. The piece compiles years’ worth of aerial footage of California’s prison system, which encompasses 35 adult institutions. The idea of incarceration and the USA’s prison system is something the multidisciplinary artist explored extensively for 15 years, with exhibitions between 2005 and 2008 before returning to the subject for DAMNATION; Ruby once described “Supermax penitentiaries as being an allegory for a contemporary hell … an inaccessible parallel world”.

Ruby’s studio, where his wide-reaching work is created – spanning ceramics, textiles, collage, drawing, painting, photography, fashion, video, metalwork, sculpture – is based in Vernon, California. And it’s here that the artist and his team were photographed by Mario Sorrenti for Another Man’s 30th issue, guest edited by Jo-Ann Furniss. “When I first moved to LA, I was fascinated by the extremely rural patches with people living on them, and then suddenly there could be a luxury high-rise condo. There are mountains with snow, the desert, downtown, and the beach – it’s a schizophrenic landscape,” Ruby told Furniss.

May 4, 2020

Opinion: LACMA Demolition

The cruelness of demolishing LACMA when Angelenos are unable to bear witness should not be ignored

Dezeen

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Chris Burden, Paul Murdoch Architects, Peter Zumthor, Renzo Piano, William L. Pereira

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“LACMA belongs to the people of Los Angeles County and it should reflect the tremendous diversity, creativity, and openness to change that can be found here,” reads a headline on the buildinglacma.org, a website ostensibly tracking the design and construction of the controversial, squiggle of a proposal by Swiss architect Zumthor.

Such marketing copy, written by the voice of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) director Michael Govan, is meant to rally support (public and financial) under a banner of shared values. But that last phrase – openness to change that can be found here – is suspect on two accounts.