"Deadtime" research photo with Cally Spooner's annotations in "Decreation" by Anne Carson (Vintage, 2006), 2018/2023. Photo: Cally Spooner

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Registration does not require attendance for the full program. Note that the event breaks for lunch and resumes for the afternoon. Lunch is not provided.

Cally Spooner is an artist who exhibits performances that unfold across media—on film, in text, as objects, through sound, and as illustrated in drawings. Recent institutional solo exhibitions have taken place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana; Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Parrhesiades, London; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Swiss Institute, New York; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the New Museum, New York; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Her live performances been staged at, amongst others, Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London; Performa 13, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum M, Leuven; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London. Spooner is the author of recent and forthcoming monographs published by Lenz Press and the Swiss Institute (2023); Hatje Cantz (2020); Mousse (2018); and Slimvolume/Cornerhouse (2016). Her novella, Collapsing in Parts, was published by Mousse in 2012. Spooner is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Paul Hamlyn Award and the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Mads Øvlisen PhD Scholarship for practice-based art. She was born in the United Kingdom, is British Italian, and lives and works between London and Turin.

Hendrik Folkerts is curator of international contemporary art and head of exhibitions at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, where he has curated exhibitions such as Vaginal Davis: Magnificent Product (forthcoming, 2024), Seven Rooms and a Garden: Rashid Johnson and Moderna Museet’s Collection (2023), and Every Ocean Hughes: Alive Time (2022). Folkerts previously was Dittmer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017–22); curator at documenta 14, Kassel/Athens (2014–17); curator of performance, film, and discursive programs at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2010–15); and coordinator of the curatorial program at De Appel arts center, Amsterdam (2009–11). Folkerts has (co)edited various publications and catalogs, most recently Alexandra Bachzetsis’s monograph SHOW/TIME/BOOK BOOK/TIME/SHOW (Roma, 2023), Thinking-in-action: A Conversation between Rashid Johnson and Kevin Quashie (Moderna Museet, 2023), Katalin Ladik: O-oooooopus (Skira, 2023), and Igshaan Adams: Desire Lines (Art Institute of Chicago, 2022). His texts have been published in South as a State of Mind, Mousse Magazine, Artforum International, The Exhibitionist, Metropolis M, Art & the Public Sphere, among others.

Nuar Alsadir is a psychoanalyst, poet and writer based in New York City. Her poetry collection Fourth Person Singular (2017) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Forward Prize. Animal Joy (Fitzcarraldo / Graywolf, 2022), her first prose work, is a free-associative essay on laughter, spontaneous expression and the elusive idea of feeling alive, which takes in clown school, erotic knowledge, canned laughter, Abu Ghraib, Trump, dance and adjectives.

Marquis Bey is a professor of African American studies, gender and sexuality studies, and English at Northwestern University. Their work focuses on thinking blackness not as racial identification but as “paraontological,” and utilizes this understanding to recalibrate how we might move through questions of non-normative subjectivity—via race, gender, and personhood. Through black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, and abolitionist theory, Bey articulates a project of black trans feminism that is not beholden to a veneration of particular subjects but rather an assertion of the dismantling of the normative constraints that define the world—white supremacy, cisnormativity, and heteropatriarchy as well as the categories of race and gender themselves. Most recently the author of two books—Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (both Duke University Press, 2022)—they continue to work at the intersections of race, gender, and radical politics.

Wendy Brown is professor emerita in the department of political science at the University of California, Berkeley.  Professor Brown received her PhD in political philosophy from Princeton University in 1983. Brown’s fields of interest include the history of political theory, feminist theory, contemporary critical theories of law, nineteenth and twentieth century Continental theory, and contemporary American political culture. She is best known for intertwining the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Frankfurt School theorists, Foucault, and contemporary Continental philosophers to critically interrogate formations of power, political identity, citizenship, and political subjectivity in contemporary liberal democracies.  In recent years, her scholarship has focused on neoliberalism and the political formations to which it gives rise. Some of her most prominent books include States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, 1995); Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton 2006); Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010); Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone, 2015); and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism:  The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019).

Joshua Chambers-Letson is professor of performance studies and Asian American studies at Northwestern University. His research focuses on performance theory and contemporary art criticism, Asian American cultural production, legal and political theory, and queer of color critique. At work on a book about queer love and loss, art, and grief, Chambers-Letson’s most recent monograph, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (NYU Press, 2018) studies contemporary art and performance by queers and women of color who mobilize aesthetics to survive, thrive, and mourn within the annihilating conditions produced by the overlapping forces of racial capitalism, Euro-US colonialism, white supremacy, and cis-heteropatriarchy. Chambers-Letson’s first monograph A Race So Different: Law and Performance in Asian America (NYU Press, 2014) argues that law influences racial formation by compelling Asian Americans to embody and perform recognizable racial identities in both popular aesthetic forms (from theater and opera to rock music), before attending to the way Asian American artists and activists have used performance, theater, and art to contest and disrupt the forces and effects of racialization. With Tavia Nyong’o, Chambers-Letson is the coeditor of José Esteban Muñoz’s posthumous The Sense of Brown (Duke University Press, 2020) and with Christine Mok he is coeditor of Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s China Triology: Three Parables of Global Capital (Metheun Drama, 2022). Chambers-Letson serves as a performance editor for ASAP, on the editorial board of women & performance, as a series coeditor for the Sexual Cultures series at NYU Press (with Nyong’o and Ann Pellegrini), and is the 2022–23 Thinker-In-Residence with the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation.

Tony Cokes is a post-conceptual artist whose practice foregrounds social critique. His video, installation, and sound works recontextualize appropriated materials to reflect upon our production as subjects under capital. His recent projects often take the form of text animations with sound functioning as a constitutive, intertextual element, complicating the visual. Cokes' works have appeared in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; MACBA, Barcelona; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; and REDCAT, Los Angeles, among others. Cokes' projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from The Rockefeller Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York State Council on the Arts. In spring 2014, Cokes was a Residential Fellow at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. Cokes is a professor in media production and director of undergraduate studies, department of modern culture and media at Brown University.

Cellist Melody Giron, a native of Boston, began her musical studies at the age of four at the New England Conservatory of Music Preparatory School. She has since established herself as a versatile performer, appearing as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player in the United States, Europe, and Asia. Currently splitting her time between New York and Boston, Giron's diverse portfolio encompasses new music premieres, orchestral engagements, chamber music, Broadway theater, and solo performances. She has also added to her credits recording for movie scores and TV commercials and collaborating with popular music artists as well as visual artists. Giron is also a long-time collaborator with the renowned contemporary artist Cally Spooner, who works across visual, sound, sculpture, film, and performance art. Most recently, Giron was invited by Spooner to collaborate in creating a sound installation titled “Melody’s Warm Up: Deadtime.” “Melody’s Warm Up” was on display in Turin, Italy, at the Pinacoteca Agnelli from May 2022 through November 2023. It also had showings at ZERO Gallery, Milan; Art Basel; and Cukrarna, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Irena Haiduk directs Yugoexport, a blind and non-aligned oral corporation whose founding logic is equivalence, loyalty, and familial solidarity between people and things. Initiated as a copy of the former Yugoslav apparel and weapons manufacturer Jugoeksport, Yugoexport is formally incorporated in the United States (where corporations are people), launched in Paris, and headquartered in New York. Their maxim, How To Surround Your Self With Things In The Right Way, powers the production of images, books, apparel, orations, films, scenographies, and variable spaces, all designed to nourish the organ of imagination. Haiduk often collaborates with institutions, for instance the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Istanbul Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, documenta 14, Swiss Institute, Sternberg Press, Art Basel, and Acne Studios. Since 2018, Haiduk's studium has been hosted, in part, by the Department of Art History at Barnard College where Haiduk is assistant professor of professional practice. Current lines of study and practice are named Buoyancy, Loving, and The Third Way.

Darrell Jones is associate professor in the department of dance at Columbia College Chicago. He specializes in contemporary dance technique, improvisation, contact improvisation, movement for actors, conditioning, and pedagogy, focusing his research on mechanisms of oppression and liberatory practices. He has received choreographic fellowships from MANCC (Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography), CDF (Chicago Dancemakers Forum), and a recipient of the Wesleyan University Creative Campus Fellow (2017), MAP Fund (2017), and Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation. He is a two-time Bessie Award recipient for his collaborative work with Bebe Miller Company (Landing Place), and for his most recent research into (e)feminized ritual performance (Hoo-Ha). For the past ten years, his artistic research has found its central focus through a conversation between his postmodern training and the voguing aesthetic. Through years of experimenting and analyzing oppression as it lives in the body, Jones seeks to excavate how individuals accumulate identity and mirror culture through movement.  He frequently collaborates with choreographer and artist Ralph Lemon.

Sanford Kwinter is an architectural theorist, writer, and editor. He is a professor of architecture at The European Graduate School / EGS, Visp, Switzerland; Pratt School of Architecture, New York; and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where he heads the Institute for Theory and History of Architecture. He is cofounder of Zone Books publishers. Kwinter is the author of Architectures of Time: Towards a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (MIT Press, 2001), Far from Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture (Actar, 2008), and Requiem: For the City at the End of the Millennium (Actar, 2010).

Ralph Lemon is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and visual artist who generates interdisciplinary modes of artistic expression as he strives to communicate stories, emotions, memories, and identities that do not conform to standard categories of representation. He incorporates sensibilities and approaches gleaned from endeavors beyond the arts, such as ethnographic and historical research, into a diverse and complex body of work that includes choreography, books, paintings, and experimental stage and lecture performances. Lemon’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Kitchen, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; Hayward Gallery, London; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, and more. Lemon was a 2013–14 Annenberg Fellow at The Museum of Modern Art and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020.

Maggie Segale is an artist working in dance and performance. Segale started working with Cally Spooner in 2016 and has continued as a collaborator in numerous roles including performer, archive, and co-choreographer. Segale completed the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon in 2022 and graduated from The Juilliard School in New York in 2014. Segale is currently a graduate assistant at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Frances Stark is an interdisciplinary artist and writer, living in Los Angeles. She works in various media, exploring notions of pedagogy, literature, relationships, art, music, sex, procrastination, and motherhood. She received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, in 1993, and a bachelor of arts from San Francisco State University in 1991. Stark has shown extensively both nationally and internationally at institutions including Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunsthalle Zurich; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She has participated in many important biennial exhibitions, such as the Whitney Biennial (2008, 2017); International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2011, 2017); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2013); and La Biennale de Montréal (2016). In 2015, Stark received the Absolut Art Award. Her work is in many public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For more information on the exhibition, Deadtime, an anatomy study , click here.

Ellen Phan premieres Tension and Release, a new work of computer music, centering on a series of vulnerable, private therapeutic Neuro-Linguistic Programming sessions with her mentor over the course of three years that focus on releasing grief, people pleasing, inner child work, and navigating the complexities of motherhood.

Ellen Phan (b.1986, Fountain Valley, CA) is a computer music artist. Her work focuses on creating multi-dimensional frequencies using a variety of processing and synthesis with a distinct hallucinatory, dissociative, psychoacoustic sound world inspired by the Superconscious.

She has performed at CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), Stanford University; Algorithmic Art Assembly, San Francisco; Hangar, Barcelona; The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles; Desert Daze Festival, Lake Perris; Corridor Festival, Seattle; and Indexical, Santa Cruz. Her music has been published by Bánh Mì Verlag, Anòmia, Nada Recs and LOL Editions, with a forthcoming release on Rope Editions. Phan also has a hypnotherapy practice, and her work in hypnotism informs her approach to sonics. She lives in Los Angeles.

Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Join us for the book launch of Julia Phillips’ first monograph Energy Exchange (Mousse, 2023), featuring a conversation between the artist and scholar and writer Nana Adusei-Poku. The event includes two commissioned performances: Sweat to melt your heart by S. Tai Tai and On Falling, Part IV by Eli Greene.

Inspired by tools and functional objects, the sculptures of Julia Phillips are metaphors for social and psychological experiences. These metaphors are both mechanical and bodily, and the experiences they describe typically focus on power relations between individuals or between an individual and an institution.

A reception will follow the event; copies of Energy Exchange will be available in the Graham Foundation bookshop.

Julia Phillips was born in Hamburg and lives and works in Chicago and Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York and Kunstverein Braunschweig, and was featured in the Berlin Biennial, the New Museum Triennial, and the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Venice. Her work has been shown at museums including the MUSEUM für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Phillips recently completed her first public art commission titled Observer, Observed for the High Line, New York, and her work will be included in the Whitney Biennial 2024.

Nana Adusei-Poku is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include how cultural changes are articulated at the intersections of art, politics and popular culture, artistic productions from the Black Diaspora and curatorial practice as a research tool for shaping art historical discourses.

Eli Greene holds a bachelor of arts from Cornell University and an MFA from the University of Chicago. Through image, object, and performance, her practice traces the act of one thing becoming another. Greene’s recent work has been exhibited in Chicago at the Smart Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Regards, Goldfinch, and Produce Model. She lives and works in Chicago.

S. Tai Tai (Tina Wang) is an artist based in Chicago and Los Angeles, with roots in other parts of the US (California and New York) Taiwan, and Latin America. She makes installations—sculptures and photographs)—that are activated in movement-based performance. Negotiating a freedom in self-expression with the fragility of belonging (to society) are key themes in her work. For more information about her pedigree, visit taitaistudios.com/bio.

Photo: Julia Phillips, Negotiator (#1), 2020. Ceramic, stainless steel, marble, 77 × 59 × 79 in. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

As the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow for 2023–24, Cédric Van Parys has investigated and transformed the meaning of billboard infrastructures as representative monuments of American culture by juxtaposing and reconciling word, image, and object. This talk elaborates on his creative process, from initial research to conceptual and material appropriation. This presentation follows the opening of the exhibition Sentinels at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture on April 5, 2024.

Exhibition: Sentinels, April 5–May 3, 2024
UIC School of Architecture
845 W Harrison St, Chicago, IL 60607
Exhibition opening: April 5, 6 p.m.
Click here to learn more

 

Cédric Van Parys is an artist-architect and the founder of Cédric Van Parys | CCXD, a Rotterdam and currently Chicago based practice operating at the intersection of architecture and the visual arts. Working across media and conceptual paradigms, his work is based on analytical research and is primarily concerned with the relation between monuments, public space, symbols, rituals, and aesthetics. Van Parys’ research, sculptures, and installations have been exhibited and constructed at the Venice Art Biennale, Venice Architecture Biennale, RAUM Utrecht, Shanghai Art Biennale, Biennale de Arquitetura de São Paulo, Plus359 Gallery Sofia, Sofia Art Week, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Drawing inspiration from architectural history, archival research, and natural science, Van Parys aims to foster curiosity about the world we have made and inhabit and how this relates to the planet, the cosmos, and beyond.

Currently, Cédric Van Parys is the 2023-2024 Garofalo Fellow at the University of Illinois, Chicago, School of Architecture and the Arts. www.officeccxd.com

About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation and an exhibition at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Image: Cédric Van Parys, "Sentinels: Iron Portals of Chicagoland," 2024. Location: Addams (I 90) S/S .8 Mi W/O Wolf F/E; Media/Style: Permanent Bulletin/Regular; Impressions: 550000/week; Advertising Strengths: Located on the Jane Addams Tollway (I-90), this 20x60 reaches NW Suburban commuters.  With a site that is within 2 miles of O'Hare International Airport, and on the main route between Downtown and hard-to-reach suburbs such as Barrington, Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg (Woodfield Mall), this sign is extremely valuable in any general market showing.

Madison Greenstone performs Silent Paradox of Expression, a new concert-length extension of their exstatic resonances practice of playing the clarinet.

Madison Greenstone (b.1992, Los Angeles) is a clarinetist, composer, and writer based in Brooklyn. Greenstone’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, explores intense instrumental expressivities that arise when the clarinet is treated as a site of indeterminacy and generative instability. exstatic resonances draw on ongoing studies in phenomenology, self-generative music, acoustics, and the Jewish-mystical emanations of ruach.

Greenstone performs widely as a soloist and chamber musician. As a soloist, they have presented their work at KM28, Berlin; the Vigeland Mausoleum, Oslo; Night of Surprise, Cologne; Issue Project Room, New York; Non Event, Boston; and the Merce Cunningham Centennial Night of 100 Solos, Los Angeles. As a chamber and orchestral musician, they have performed at the New York Philharmonic; PS21, Chatham; KKL Luzern; Hamburg Elbphilharmonie; Darmstadt Ferienkurse; Indexical, Santa Cruz; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angles; and Miller Theater, New York. They have held residencies at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and University of Chicago.

Their debut solo album, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch Records), was released in 2022. Greenstone can also be heard on labels such as Wandelweiser Editions, Another Timbre, TAK Editions, Pleasure of the Text Records, New Focus Recordings, Impakt Collective, and upcoming on Dinzu Artefacts.

Greenstone is the clarinetist of TAK Ensemble, and a founding member of the [Switch~ Ensemble]. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they have learned greatly from the mentorship of Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis at University of California San Diego.

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Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound ,and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Photo: Titilayo Ayangade

SATURDAY, MAY 11, 12–5 pm CT
CLICK HERE to register to attend the in-person live-stream in Chicago at the Graham Foundation
CLICK HERE to buy tickets to attend in-person in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to buy tickets to attend in-person in New York (SOLD OUT)
CLICK HERE to register to live-stream the event

Join us to watch the live-stream of the The World Around Summit 2024—a convening of global architecture’s “now, near, and next”—in the Graham Foundation’s ballroom. The World Around Summit is a conference featuring luminaries from architecture, design, and beyond presented online and in-person at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This all-day program curated by Beatrice Galilee, presents a year of architecture and design in a day, introducing the best of contemporary buildings, and exploring cutting-edge and inspiring new projects and initiatives in landscape, technology, and design—all through the lens of social and ecological justice. The 2024 World Around Summit is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation.

An international and interdisciplinary line-up of speakers will present new approaches to landscape and urbanism, material innovation, synthetic spaces, housing, museums, and community. The World Around's format of short, singular presentations are intended to share the exciting and extraordinary ways in which architects are addressing the critical topics of our time. As part of the nonprofit's mission to make its programming accessible to all, the summit will be live-streamed in partnership with Dezeen.

SESSION ONE: AN EXAMINED WORLD
12 PM CT 
Beatrice Galilee — Welcome
Cyra Levenson
Neri & Hu —  RE:
Germane Barnes — Watch the Tone
Nguyễn Hà — Dao Mau Museum and Temple
Ernesto Picco — Lithium Chronicles
Mae-ling Lokko — The World Around with Coconuts
SO–IL — In Depth
Emanuele Coccia — Homes: How to Design for Our Moral Topography

SESSION TWO: A FLUID TERRITORY
2:30 CT 
Jakob Kudsk Steensen — Ephemeral Lake
Niklas Bildstein Zaar — Manticore
Alexis Sablone —  Skatespace: Underexplored Terrain
Sameep Padora — Looking for Context
Ma Yansong & Sandra Jackson Dumont — In Conversation moderated by Asima Jansveld

SESSION THREE: A PLANETARY LANDSCAPE
4 PM CT 
Béatrice Grenier
Yu Kongjian — Turenscape
Joe Christa Giraso — MASS Design Group
Lisa Switkin — Field Operations
Beatrice Galilee — Close

PARTICIPANTS

Germane Barnes, Studio B-arn-S – An architecture practice disrupting the status quo, committed to hands-on, research-driven design in service of social transformation in the USA

Niklas Bildstein Zaar, Sub – A Berlin-based studio with a synthetic approach to design that encompasses emerging technologies, semantic analysis, and behavioral research alongside traditional architectural techniques

Joe Christa Giraso, MASS Design Group – A design group on a mission to promote social and environmental justice, advocating a deeper approach to “sustainability” rooted in place, community, and care on ongoing projects in Rwanda

Emanuele Coccia – A philosopher revealing the dependencies between all life on earth to write an aesthetics for the Anthropocene Era in his new book, The Philosophy of Home

Nguyễn Hà, ARB Vietnam – A landscape architecture studio reading the natural poetry in an orchard site to preserve a space of spirituality at the Dao Mau Museum and Temple on the outskirts of Hanoi, Vietnam

Mae-ling Lokko – An architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines working with agro-waste and renewable bio-based materials

Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg, SO–IL – An architecture practice envisioning new urban housing models in Brooklyn, New York through homes that allow the outdoors to enter into nurture connection

Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art – A curator, author, educator, and public advocate bringing her vision to redefine the role of art museums today to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles

Sameep Padora, Sameep Padora & Associates – A landscape architecture firm based in Mumbai, attending to the landscape’s material histories to shape an architecture at one with its context in South India

Ernesto Picco – An investigative journalist documenting the destructive race to power the green transition in South America’s Lithium Triangle

Alexis Sablone – An Olympic athlete making “skateable” public art across Europe and the USA to invite urban communities to play in their cities

Lisa Switkin, Field Operations – A landscape architect behind some of New York City’s most revered public parks, including the High Line, Domino Park, and Gansevoort Peninsula

Rossana Hu & Lyndon Neri, Neri & Hu – A Shanghai-based architecture studio bringing their characteristic tactile minimalism and attention to massing to the extension of Xi’an’s Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts

Ma Yansong, MAD Architects – An award-winning Chinese practice drawing on nature to design a landmark arts institution, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, into the cultural fabric of Los Angeles

Kongjian Yu, Turenscape – A China-based landscape architecture and urbanism practice, building on tradition to reconnect communities to the earth and steward the environment for future generations

Founded in 2020, The World Around (TWA) is a global nonprofit platform headquartered in New York, with a simple but ambitious mission: to rethink architecture. Taking the most critical issue of our time—the climate crisis—as the lens to view all of their activities, TWA connects with global institutions to craft unique public conversations that look beyond buildings to investigate the often-invisible forces that shape our homes, cities, landscapes, and lives. The World Around Summit 2024 is co-presented with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

To learn more about the 2024 Summit and browse past presentations, click here.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Graham Foundation, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

In Music for laptops, speakers and mechanical instruments, Michelle Lou and Bryan Jacobs create a hybrid synthetic sonic space, made up of both digital synthesized and physical acoustic sound-making devices. The performance offers a potentially dizzying, at times playful experience for listeners in the round.

Lou and Jacobs follow a large-scale structure from which they explore, respond, and react—improvising on each of their own custom-designed performance systems—Lou on a laptop and 8 channels of speakers, and Jacobs on computer-controlled DIY musical devices.

Reflecting on their work, Lou and Jacobs write, “Sound is at the limit of materiality; it touches things, it’s modulated by surfaces, by bodies, by objects and architecture. It’s only heard if it enters your body and triggers a mechanical response. It’s terrestrial in that it requires so much stuff to travel that it can’t travel through the vacuum of space, and yet it’s immaterial in most other ways."

“With this in mind, one could say that sound may provide a pathway towards accessing unseeable and untouchable interiors. The tension between the seen and the heard, particularly when the two do not align is highlighted through the use of loudspeakers. The tension found in listening also expands to the perception of one’s location: the limits of the actual physical space reaches beyond itself as the imagination stretches, while also collapsing into a singular experience as the body is still sitting in a chair.”

Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ (b.1979, Columbus, OH) work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-built electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoustic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.

His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and defunensemble. His music has been featured at many music festivals in Europe and the US. He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. He has performed his own compositions for guitar and electronics at The Stone, New York; Miller Theater, New York; and The Wulf, Los Angeles. Jacobs is also a member of the performer/composer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse and is on faculty at the Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University.

Michelle Lou (b.1975, San Diego, CA) composes mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music, both in hardware and in computer based forms. She has also created large-scale sound installations that are often performative and collaborative. She performs and improvises on acoustic and electric bass, electric guitar, and on laptop and various electronics. Her work has been presented at Wien Modern; Donaueschinger Musiktage; Darmstadt Ferienkurse; Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik; the Festival of New American Music, Sacramento; the MATA Festival, New York; the 66th American Music Festival at the National Gallery in Washington, DC; Rainy Days Festival, Luxembourg; Ultima Festival, Oslo; Chance and Circumstance, Brooklyn; Klub Katarakt, Hamburg; Klangwerkstatt and MaerzMusik, Berlin; among others.

She received degrees in double bass performance and music composition from University of California (UC) San Diego with additional studies at The Conservatorio G. Nicolini in Piacenza, Italy (double bass) and The UDK in Graz, Austria (composition), the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship. Graduate studies culminated in a doctorate in composition from Stanford University. Lou was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has been granted commissions from institutions like the Fromm Music Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, and the Norwegian Arts Council. She has taught as visiting faculty at Dartmouth College, the Akademie für Neue Musik in Boswil, Switzerland, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently on faculty at UC San Diego.

Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

During this presentation, photographer Virginia Hanusik discusses her first book, Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2024).

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water—and the history of controlling it—is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry—past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

The book includes texts by Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.

The presentation will be followed by a reception and book signing. A limited amount of copies of Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana will be available for purchase at the Graham Foundation bookshop.

Presented in partnership with MAS Context

Virginia Hanusik is an artist whose projects explore the relationship between landscape, culture, and the built environment. Her work has been exhibited internationally, featured in The New Yorker, National Geographic, British Journal of Photography, Domus, Places Journal, The Atlantic, MAS Context, and Oxford American among others, and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Pulitzer Center, Graham Foundation, Landmark Columbus Foundation, and Mellon Foundation. She regularly writes and speaks on landscape representation and the visual narrative of climate change, and is on the board of directors of The Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans where she coordinates multi-disciplinary projects on the climate crisis. She received her BA from Bard College and lives in New Orleans.

RELATED GRAHAM FOUNDATION GRANTS:
Virginia Hanusik, A Receding Coast: The Architecture and Infrastructure of South Louisiana, 2017 research grant

MAS Context shares ideas and facilitates discourse about urban design and the built environment. Deeply rooted in Chicago but with a global reach, MAS Context nurtures an inclusive community of creative thinkers across disciplines who are interested in the future of cities.

Visit the Graham Foundation Bookshop during the closing week of our current exhibition, Cally Spooner: Deadtime, an anatomy study. Purchases will be 20% off, with select titles discounted up to 50% off.

SALE HOURS

Saturday, June 22 12–5 p.m.
Wednesday, June 26 12–5 p.m.
Thursday, June 27 12–5 p.m.
Friday, June 28 12–6 p.m.
Saturday, June 29 11 a.m.–7 p.m.

The Graham Foundation Bookshop features a selection of publications on architecture, art, design, and related fields—many titles by the Foundation’s international network of grantees working on ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.

Designed by Ania Jaworska, the bookshop is located in the former dining room of the Madlener House, a 1902 Prairie-style mansion designed by Richard E. Schmidt and Hugh M. G. Garden in the Gold Coast neighborhood.

Image: Assaf Evron

TAK Ensemble presents works by Tyshawn Sorey, Ashkan Behzadi, Eric Wubbels, Bethany Younge, and their first group composition on October 19. They also guide a workshop on October 20.

On October 19, TAK Ensemble—Laura Cocks, flute; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Charlotte Mundy, voice; Marina Kifferstein, violin; and Ellery Trafford, percussion—perform Tyshawn Sorey’s For Jaimie Branch (2022); Ashkan Behzadi’s Deseo, from Love, Crystal and Stone (2017); Eric Wubbels’ Root and Vein, from Interbeing (2023); Bethany Younge’s at midnight I walked into the middle of the desert (2019); and Artefacts (2024), composed by TAK Ensemble.

Founded in 2013, the New York-based TAK ensemble has premiered hundreds of works to date, including work by composers such as Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, Taylor Brook, Ann Cleare, Seth Cluett, Jessie Cox, Natacha Diels, Erin Gee, Bryan Jacobs, Brandon Lopez, Michelle Lou, Jessie Marino, Elaine Mitchener, Weston Olencki, Tyshawn Sorey, Eric Wubbels, Bethany Younge, and many others. They have released seven albums, including Oor (2019), which launched their in-house media label, TAK Editions. TAK has conducted residencies at Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, New York University, Oberlin Conservatory, Stanford University, and Wesleyan University. The ensemble has also collaborated with the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program and Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program. From 2022-­23, TAK served as the Long-Term Visiting Ensemble in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Additional support for this program is provided by New Music USA’s New Music Inc program and the Farny R. Wurlitzer Foundation Fund.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Join TAK Ensemble—Laura Cocks, flute; Madison Greenstone, clarinet; Charlotte Mundy, voice; Marina Kifferstein, violin; and Ellery Trafford, percussion—for the workshop, The Creative Score: Unconventional Notation for Unconventional Music, to examine non-traditional scores from works within TAK’s repertoire, from the physical and symbolic to the graphic and spatial.

The workshop guides participants through learning excerpts of TAK’s most theatrical, uncanny, and strange compositions. Participants will also create their own notation systems and symbologies to be performed by TAK and other workshop attendees.

Intended for a general audience of the musically curious, participants may bring an instrument, but it is not required.

TAK Ensemble is also performing at the Graham Foundation on Saturday, October 19, at 7 p.m. Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Additional support for this program is provided by New Music USA’s New Music Inc program and the Farny R. Wurlitzer Foundation Fund.

Founded in 2013, the New York-based TAK Ensemble has premiered hundreds of works to date, including work by composers such as Ashkan Behzadi, David Bird, Taylor Brook, Ann Cleare, Seth Cluett, Jessie Cox, Natacha Diels, Erin Gee, Bryan Jacobs, Brandon Lopez, Michelle Lou, Jessie Marino, Elaine Mitchener, Weston Olencki, Tyshawn Sorey, Eric Wubbels, Bethany Younge, and many others. They have released seven albums, including Oor (2019), which launched their in-house media label, TAK Editions. TAK has conducted residencies at Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, New York University, Oberlin Conservatory, Stanford University, and Wesleyan University. The ensemble has also collaborated with the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers Program and Juilliard’s Music Advancement Program. From 2022-­23, TAK served as the Long-Term Visiting Ensemble in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Frederick Kiesler. Study for the development chart “Creation Mutation,” from the “Correalism Manifesto,” 1947-50. Ballpen on paper, 10.8 x 13.9 (27.5 x 35.4 cm). Copyright Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna

Join for a presentation by Mark Wasiuta, curator of the exhibition Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, as he discusses Frederick Kiesler’s (1890-1965) experimental design practice through the activities of his Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia University from the late 1930s to the early 1940s.

Mark Wasiuta is codirector of the Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Wasiuta is recipient of recent grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, NYSCA, and the Graham Foundation, where he was an inaugural Graham Foundation Fellow. His research exhibition practice focuses on architecture’s media, politics, and environments through under-examined projects of the postwar period. His work has been exhibited widely, including at LAXArt, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Venice Architecture Biennale, MAXXI, the Graham Foundation, and the Onassis Foundation. He is co-author and co-editor of Rifat Chadirj: Building Index (Arab Image Foundation, 2018), Dan Graham’s New Jersey (Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), and author of numerous articles. His upcoming publications include The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

For more information on the exhibition, Frederick Kiesler: Vision Machines, click here.

Modney and Ingrid Laubrock present solo works and duo improv for violin and saxophone and, Modney’s new work, Ascender. Although they have played in each other’s bands, this performance marks the acclaimed experimentalists’ first duo performance.

Josh Modney (b.1985, Albany, NY) is a violinist and composer working at the nexus of composition, improvisation, and interpretation. A highly detailed relationship to sound production on the violin is foundational to Modney’s creative practice, with a particular interest in complex timbres, Just Intonation, and in exploring the perceptual space between improvisation and notation. He has worked closely with leading composers of his generation including Alex Mincek, Sam Pluta, Eric Wubbels, Tristan Perich, and Rick Burkhardt, and with major figures including Kaija Saariaho, Mathias Spahlinger, Helmut Lachenmann, George Lewis, and Pauline Oliveros. Modney’s releases include Ascending Primes (Pyroclastic Records); Near to Each (Carrier Records), featuring Ingrid Laubrock, Cory Smythe, and Mariel Roberts; and Engage (New Focus); and an album of improvised chamber music with guitarist Patrick Higgins, EVRLY MVSIC (NNA Tapes). Modney is the violinist and executive director of the composer-performer collective Wet Ink Ensemble, a member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, and a former member and co-founder of the Mivos Quartet.

Ingrid Laubrock (b.1970, Stadtlohn, Germany) is an experimental saxophonist and composer based in Brooklyn since 2009. She is interested in exploring the borders between musical realms and creating multi-layered, dense and often evocative sound worlds. Laubrock has performed with Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Jason Moran, Kris Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, Mary Halvorson, Tom Rainey, Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, and many others. Awards include a Fellowship in Jazz Composition by the Arts Foundation, SWR German Radio Jazz Prize, and the German Record Critics Quarterly Award. She was named Rising Star Soprano Saxophonist in the 2015 DownBeat Annual Critics Poll and Rising Star Tenor Saxophonist in 2018. Laubrock is one of the recipients of the 2019 Herb Alpert Ragdale Prize in Music Composition and has received composing commissions from the Shifiting Foundation, the Jerwood Foundation, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, the Jazz Gallery Commissioning Series, NYSCA, Wet Ink, John Zorn’s Stone Commissioning Series and the EOS Orchestra.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Image: Left: Modney, photo by Frank Heath; right: Ingrid Laubrock, photo by John Thomas

Join us for the presentation and book launch of Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago: Rise and Fall of Experimentations in Concrete (Actar, 2024). While Félix Candela’s captivating structures in Mexico and across the globe made him one of the most important and iconic architects of the twentieth century, we know very little about his work in the United States and his life in Chicago during the 1970s. Understanding this transitional period, however, enables us to see his innovations in a new light and to reevaluate the contexts of his work. The book links analyses of his celebrated structures with the specific societal, economic, urban, and material conditions that first facilitated his work in Mexico, then prompted his departure, and eventually complicated his practice in the US. Therefore, it also adds to our understanding of architecture’s transnational exchanges, while further exposing its complicated and often troubled relationship with labor, capital, and politics.

During this presentation, Alexander Eisenschmidt, editor, along with contributors Robert Bruegmann, Geoff Goldberg, Jonathan Miller, and Kathryn E. O'Rourke, discuss the publication and their contributions.

The book includes texts by Alexander Eisenschmidt, Juan Ignacio del Cueto, Nader Tehrani, Elisa María Teresa Drago Quaglia, Kathryn O’Rourke, Jonathan Miller, George F. Flaherty, Stanley Tigerman, Geoff Goldberg, William Baker, Bob Bruegmann, Stuart Cohen, Ero Aggelopoulou-Amiridis, and Kenneth Schroeder, in addition to translations, interviews, and republications by Félix Candela, Reyner Banham, Ester McCoy, Alvin Boyarsky, and Carl W. Condit.

The manuscript for the book was awarded a Graham Foundation publication grant, a Creative Activity Award from the Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research, and the Faculty Scholarship Support Grant at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The initial research for this project was sponsored by UIC’s Office of the Vice Chancellor of Research.

A reception and book signing follows the event. A limited number of copies of Félix Candela from Mexico City to Chicago are available for purchase at the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

This program is presented in partnership with the School of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and MAS Context.

Robert Bruegmann is a historian and critic of the built environment. After his 1976 PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1979, where he is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of art history, architecture and urban planning. Among his books are The Architects and the City: Holabird & Roche of Chicago 1880–1918 (1996), Sprawl: A Compact History (2005), The Architecture of Harry Weese (2010), and the edited volume Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (2018). His main areas of research are the history of architecture, urban planning, landscape, and historic preservation.

Alexander Eisenschmidt is a theorist, designer, and associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s School of Architecture. He directs the Visionary Cities Project and leads Studio Offshore. Eisenschmidt is author of The Good Metropolis (2019), guest-editor of City Catalyst (2012), and the co-editor of Chicagoisms (2013) and The Project(s) of Modern Architecture (2017). His research and design works have been published and exhibited at a range of international venues such as the Venice Biennale (2012), the Art Institute of Chicago (2014), the Biennale on Urbanism in Shenzhen, China (2015), and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale in Portugal (2016).

Geoffrey Goldberg has practiced architecture and urban design in Chicago for more than 30 years. Projects done under his direction include planning for an urban airport, building a new city college, and design management of large public transportation initiatives. He has taught architectural design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, urban design at Harvard University, and the history of form at the University of Chicago. Goldberg has published architectural and engineering histories, and has been awarded for his work in design, urban planning, and historical research.

Jonathan Miller is an educator, critic, and artist. He is a studio associate professor in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he teaches classes on film, architecture, cities, and landscape. For many years, he reviewed films and interviewed filmmakers on Chicago Public Radio. He has presented numerous public film series and served on film festival juries. His artwork has been exhibited in the United States and Europe.

Kathryn E. O’Rourke is an architectural historian and professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses on modern architecture and Latin American art. O’Rourke is the author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City: History, Representation, and the Shaping of a Capital (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), which received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. She is the editor of O’Neil Ford on Architecture (University of Texas Press, 2019), and is at work on two book projects: Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture (2024) and Archaism and Liberalism in Modern Architecture.

Image: Félix Candela and UICC Students posing below an experimental dome, south wall Art and Architecture Laboratories, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, c. 1972. Félix Candela Papers, Library and Special Collections, Princeton University

Ka Baird premieres Yomp, a performance piece featuring live-processed flutes, samples, electronics, voice, broken rhythms, and movement. Yomp plays with the idea of a march that repeatedly falls apart, taking various sonic detours throughout the performance.

“The general time pressures destroy all that has the character of a detour, all that is indirect, and thus makes the world poor in forms. Every form, every figure, is a detour. If walking lacks all hesitation, all pausing, then it freezes into a march.”—Byung-Chul Han

Ka Baird (b.1976, Decatur, IL) is a performer, sound artist, musician and composer based in New York City. They are known for their live performances that include extended voice and microphone techniques, which are combined with electronics and psychoacoustic interplay of flutes and other woodwinds.

In March 2024, Baird released their most recent record, Bearings: Soundtracks for the Bardos (RVNG Intl.), which was built on a Lampo commission. Other releases include Sapropelic Pycnic (Drag City 2017), Respires (RVNG Intl. 2019), Brooding Exercises (Longform Editions 2021), and Vivification Exercises (RVNG Intl. 2021).

Performances include the Unsound Festival, Krakow; Lampo, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MoMA PS1, Queens; Issue Project Room, Brooklyn; The Kitchen, New York City; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; TUSK Festival, Newcastle; Incubate, Tilburg; KRAAK, Brussels; Le Guess Who, Utrecht; and the Festival Of Endless Gratitude, Copenhagen. They have been artist-in-residence at We Jazz Festival, Helsinki; Sonoscopia, Porto; Inkonst, Malmo; ESS, Chicago; and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. Baird has received the Foundation of Contemporary Art’s Emergency Grant, a Jerome Foundation Artist-In-Residence at Roulette Intermedium, and is currently a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow 2023–25. They are one of the core members of Spires That In The Sunset Rise, founded in Chicago in 2001.

Ka Baird last appeared at Lampo in March 2022, when they performed Bearings, which was commissioned for small audiences in the Lampo office. Ka explored the concept of “bearings” through a series of intimate performances, where they shifted guises between magician, shaman, clown, and athlete. This piece, in tandem with the heaviness of caring for a dying parent during the subsequent year, laid the groundwork for their 2024 album Bearings.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.


Photo: Michal Murawski