Peter Fend, Sequence of Acts to Build A Gulf, 2011

Please note that due to unfavorable weather conditions this event has been cancelled.

Volume 5 of the Graham-funded New Geographies journal aims to recast the Mediterranean as a contemporary phenomenon and spatialize its region-making processes as a larger geographic entity in the twenty-first century. On April 18, Antonio Petrov, editor-in-chief of Volume 5, considers major topics of the new issue with Sean Keller, Clare Lyster, and Hashim Sarkis in a panel discussion moderated by Stephen J. Ramos. A reception and book signing will follow.

New Geographies is a Harvard University Graduate School of Design journal that aims to examine the emergence of the geographic, to articulate it and bring it to bear effectively on the agency of design. As the synthesizing role that geography aspired to play among the physical, the economic, and the sociopolitical is now being increasingly shared by design, New Geographies encourages designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies within the design disciplines.

Cofounder and editor of New Geographies, Antonio Petrov is a professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He is currently program director at Archeworks in Chicago, founder and editor-in-chief of DOMA, a bilingual magazine published in Macedonia, and the director of WAS, a think tank located in Chicago. Petrov’s research explores new discourses in regionalism and architecture with a focus on the Mediterranean. His book, Superordinary: New Paradigms in Sacred Architecture,is forthcoming. Petrov received his doctoral degree from Harvard University.

Sean Keller (Assistant Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology; Ph.D. Harvard University) is a historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture. He has taught at Harvard and Yale universities and is a trustee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum and has written for numerous anthologies and journals, including Grey Room, Perspecta, Journal of Architectural Education, and Art Journal. He has two books forthcoming: Semi-Automatic: Motivating Architecture After Modernism (University of Chicago Press) and, with Christine Mehring,Munich ’72: Art and Architecture (Yale University Press).

Clare Lyster, Assistant Professor at University of Illnois at Chicago, is an architect, writer, and educator and founding principal of Claire Lyster Urbanism And Architecture (CLUAA) in Chicago. Her work explores the city from the perspective of its landscape and networks and the implications of this for architectural design. She is editor of Envisioning the Bloomingdale: 5 Concepts (Chicago Architecture Club, August 2009) and 306090 vol. 09 Regarding Public Space, with Cecilia Benites (Princeton Architectural Press, August 2005). Her writings have appeared in many publications including Cabinet, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education and The Landscape Urbanism Reader and her design work has been exhibited locally and internationally including the Art Institute of Chicago. Current work toward a publication exploring the relationship between architecture and logistics was funded by a research grant from the Graham Foundation.

Stephen J. Ramos is an Assistant Professor in the College of Environment and Design at the University of Georgia. He is author of Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Ashgate Press,2010), and co-editor of Infrastructure Sustainability and Design (Routledge, 2012). He is a founding editor of the journal New Geographies and editor-in-chief of New Geographies Volume 1: After Zero (GSD/Harvard University Press, 2009). He received his Doctor of Design degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Hashim Sarkis is the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Sarkis is a practicing architect in Cambridge and Lebanon, working on urban and landscape projects. He has authored and edited many books and articles including Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953–1969 (coedited with Eric Mumford, 2008), Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis (2003), CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (2001), and Projecting Beirut (coedited with Peter G. Rowe, 1998).

Robert Rauschenberg creating the combine 'Gold Standard in Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg,' Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, November 28, 1964. Photograph by Masaaki Sekiya. ©2011 Masaaki Sekiya. All rights reserved. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY.

Please join us for a panel discussion exploring the emerging role of artist-endowed foundations as a force in cultural philanthropy and in the stewardship of contemporary art and design.

Research conducted by the Aspen Institute's National Study of Artist-Endowed Foundations, the first effort to examine the field of private foundations endowed by visual artists in the U.S., has documented more than 355 foundations, many created in the past two decades, holding $3.5 billion in assets, $2 billion of this in the form of art and intellectual property. With higher profile foundations bearing names such as Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rauschenberg, these organizations make grants to nonprofits and to artists and scholars. They steward art collections and archives, contribute artwork to museums, operate artist residency centers, care for architecturally significant properties, and conduct cultural and educational programs. In 2010, members of the field made $70 million in aggregate grants. Among key trends documented by the Study is a rise in the number of foundations associated with architects and designers. The Study’s report may be viewed online at www.aspeninstitute.org/psi/a-ef-report.

Panelists include Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and former director/curator of the Storefront for Art and Architecture; Christy MacLear, Executive Director of Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and former inaugural director of the Philip Johnson Glass House, a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation; Stephen K. Urice, Professor of Law, University of Miami School of Law, and co-author of the standard art law casebook, Law, Ethics and the Visual Arts, Kluwer Law International (5th Ed. 2007); and Christine J. Vincent, Study Director, The Aspen Institute’s National Study of Artist-Endowed Foundations and former deputy director for media, arts and culture at the Ford Foundation. The panel will be moderated by Angelique Power, Senior Program Officer, Culture, the Joyce Foundation.

The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts was created in 1956 by a bequest from architect Ernest R. Graham (1866–1936). The Foundation makes project-based grants to individuals and organizations and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Foundation’s programs can be viewed online at www.grahamfoundation.org.

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation was formed by Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) in 1990 to promote awareness of the causes and groups close to his heart. Activities of the Foundation include managing the artwork, exhibition and scholarship of Robert Rauschenberg as well as the growth of the philanthropy programs that intersect art and issues central to the artist’s concerns during his lifetime. The Foundation’s programs are detailed online at www.rauschenbergfoundation.org

The Aspen Institute’s National Study of Artist-Endowed Foundations has been supported by a consortium of national and regional donors whose members include the Joyce Foundation.

Institute of Contemporary Art Boston by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Photograph by Nic Lehoux.

Architecture and film scholar Edward Dimendberg discusses his Graham-funded book Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images (University of Chicago Press, 2013), the first full-length critical chronological monograph on the work of the New York-based architecture studio known for its integration of visual art, multimedia, and performance into its buildings and urban projects.  Book signing and reception to follow the presentation.

Edward Dimendberg is professor of film and media studies, visual studies, and European languages and studies at the University of California, Irvine and the principal of Dimendberg Consulting LLC.  He is the author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), also supported by the Graham Foundation,  and the co-editor of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994).

On March 30, Berlin-based composer and sound installation artist Valerio Tricoli offers a special program for Lampo to mark the 100th anniversary of Luigi Russolo's Futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises (March, 1913). Russolo’s manifesto introduced the idea of noise-sound into musical discourse, creating the conditions for radical advancements in sonic art and informing movements in musique concrète, electronic music, and the practices of American experimental composers such as John Cage. In the essay, Russolo lays the foundation for a new music based on what he calls ‘Futurist noise-sound,’ claiming that all sounds of life—whether natural or derived from man-made devices or machines—should be incorporated into music. He also strongly encourages the development and design of new instruments capable of producing new kinds of noises suitable to the mise en être of the expanded acoustic imagination of the composer. Russolo himself, some months after the publication of the manifesto, would present his own Intonarumori (Noise-tuners).

This Lampo program will be divided in two parts: first, An Homage to Luigi Russolo, a live electro-acoustic improvisation for electronic devices, self-built instruments, found sounds, and voice, to be followed by La Solidità Della Nebbia, a multi-channel diffusion of the tape composition.

Valerio Tricoli (b. 1977, Palermo, Italy) is a Berlin-based composer, improviser, producer, sound installation artist, sound engineer, and curator bridging musique concrète and conceptual forms of sound with a radical interest in how reality, virtuality, and memory relate to each other during the acoustic event. He mostly uses analogue electronic devices including reel-to-reel tape recorders, synthesizers, microphones, light effects, and ultrasonic speakers. However, the structure of the setup is ever-changing,  seeking multiple relations between the performers, the device, and the space in which the event takes place. Tricoli is one of the founders of 3/4HadBeenEliminated and the Bowindo label / collective. In 2012, he presented a new interpretation of the seminal 1952 John Cage electro-acoustic tape piece Williams Mix with Werner Dafeldecker, which premiered at Maerz Musik, Berlin. He is currently working on two compositions for piano and electronic sounds (with Anthony Pateras) and on a concrete music cycle inspired by the Book of Qohelet. Tricoli made his U.S. debut at Lampo in March 2008, when he performed Take Thy Horoscope and Walk, a multi-sensorial set of live concrete music in quad sound with strobe lights.

Thomas Demand, Beyer #34, 2011, Pigment Print, 41.9” x 63.0”© Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn / DACS, New York. Courtesy Esther Schipper, Berlin / Matthew Marks Gallery, New York / Sprüth Magers Berlin London.

Please join us to celebrate the opening of Model Studies: Thomas Demand with Fernand Léger, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Scheibitz, and the VKhUTEMAS School. The exhibition will open with remarks from Thomas Demand and Graham Foundation director Sarah Herda followed by a reception.

6PM Opening remarks with Thomas Demand and Sarah Herda
6-8PM Opening Reception

For more information on the exhibition, Model Studies, click here.

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