Petrochemical polymers known as plastics were developed in the United States as a revolutionary material. Today, the global urgency to reframe our approach to the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets is clear. Exploring our fraught, yet enmeshed, kinship with plastics, Everlasting Plastics considers the ways these materials both shape and erode contemporary ecologies, economies, and the built environment. This exhibition highlights our unseen dependency; demonstrates how plasticity has created expectations for the behaviors of other materials; and points to plastic’s unknown, long-term, and indelible impact on our futures.

Tizziana Baldenebro is the executive director at SPACES in Cleveland, and the commissioner and cocurator of Everlasting Plastics, the theme of the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. She served as the 2019–20 Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and held an internship at the Art Institute of Chicago within the Architecture & Design department. She has been a curator-in-residence at Red Bull Arts Detroit and an ALI Fellow at the National Association for Latino Arts and Culture. She currently sits on the board of FRONT International and is an editor-at-large at The Avery Review. Tizziana received a master’s of architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s of arts degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Lauren Leving is the curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa) and the cocurator of Everlasting Plastics. Since joining moCa in 2019, she has developed projects with Aram Han Sinfuentes, Rebirth Garments, Finnegan Shannon, and Nina Chanel Abney. Leving was previously a curatorial fellow at Hyde Park Art Center and the exhibitions manager for Wrightwood 659, where she helped shape their inaugural year of programming and exhibitions of work by Ai Weiwei, Tetsuya Ishida, Tadao Ando, and the domestic premiere of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion exhibition. Leving served as board secretary for Terrain Exhibitions and holds a master’s of art in museum and exhibition studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and bachelor’s of arts from Tulane University.

Xavi Laida Aguirre is an assistant professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founder/director of the architectural design practice stock-a-studio. With equal interests in the scenographic and the utilitarian, they create digital/physical productions, develop material techniques and assemble architectures that reconsider our relationship to circular resources, aesthetics and supply systems. Aguirre’s work has been commissioned by organizations including MOCA Geffen, Dartmouth College, Materials & Applications, and Oya Music Festival in Oslo. They hold a bachelor’s of arts from Northeastern University in political science and a master’s of architecture from California State Polytechnic Pomona. Aguirre is the director of MMs - Mixed Matters Lab, a XR production lab at MIT. Currently, they are a 2022–23 Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture for the collaborative project The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality and one of the recipients of the 2022 Architectural League Prize.

Simon Anton is an artist, educator, and the cofounder of Thing Thing, an experimental design collective working with waste plastics. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and a master’s of fine arts in 3D design from Cranbrook Academy of Art where he received the President's Award for Sustainability and the Redmond Prize. Anton has worked across the fields of architecture, interior design, furniture, art, jewelry, and cocktails. After suffering a profound family loss, he cofounded Got Grief House, a nonprofit with the mission to support Detroit children and families experiencing grief. He enjoys judo, roller skating, and sitting in saunas; he is a member of Matterfruit, a Detroit artist cooperative.

Ang Li is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University. She is the founder of Ang Li Projects, an interdisciplinary design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, critical preservation, and circular material research to explore the maintenance rituals and material afterlives behind architectural production. Li’s work has been featured in numerous national and international exhibitions including the Now+There Accelerator Program, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, RAIR Philadelphia, and the Lisbon Architecture Triennial.  She has been published in Log, Manifest, Wired, and Blueprint. She was a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the 2015–16 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo. Li holds a bachelor’s of arts from the University of Cambridge and a master’s of architecture from Princeton University.

Norman Teague is a designer and assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago whose practice explores the systematic complexity of urbanism and the culture of communities. Teague's past projects include consumer products, public sculpture, performances, and specially designed retail spaces. He works with common, locally-sourced building materials and local fabricators to create objects and spaces that explore simplicity, honesty, and cleverness, and relate to the culture of the client and/or community. Teague served as lead craftsman and cofounder of the Design Apprenticeship Program at the University of Chicago's Arts Incubator and is a creative collaborator on the exhibitions team for the Barack Obama Presidential Center. Teague holds a bachelor’s of arts focused on product design from Columbia College Chicago and a master’s of fine arts in designed objects from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lauren Yeager reimagines commonplace objects as sculptural components. Using salvaged materials, she references classical form through sculptures that recover and elevate the value of these recycled objects. Yeager received her bachelor’s of fine arts from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2009. Since then, her work has been highlighted in several important national and regional exhibitions including Sculpture Milwaukee 2021, FRONT International, Artists to Watch: Women at Work, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland’s Realization is Better than Anticipation. Her work has been placed with collections of Progressive Insurance, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, and other prominent private collections. In 2021, she was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artists.

SPACES provides artists the freedom to create remarkable works of art that help us see the world in unexpected ways. SPACES serves as the resource and public forum for artists who explore and experiment. Since 1978, SPACES has presented work by over 10,000 artists to more than 400,000 individuals and have formed a unique and thriving creative community in the heart of Cleveland.