Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org

Aug 21, 2025

Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.

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EXHIBITION
Prioritizing projects that foreground conversations about spatial representation and contemporary image making practices, A83 produces and hosts exhibitions of work by architects, designers, and artists.

EXHIBITION
This exhibition presents a selection of the maps drawn by bestselling and highly influential author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018), many of which are being exhibited for the first time, and considers how her imaginary worlds enable us to reenvision our own.

PUBLICATION
This series presents short theoretical texts by architectural practitioners addressed to the field of architecture—such as Andrew Holder, Karel Klein, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, and others—that articulate the ideas informing their current work.

EXHIBITION
Exploring the unbounded creative practice of visionary American architect Bruce Goff (1904–1982), this major retrospective presents a new focus on his diverse cultural engagements, wide-ranging personal collections, and multimedia productions spanning painting, architecture, and music.

PUBLICATION
Compiling 60 feminist magazines and journals from around the world, produced between the democratization of print in the 1960s and the rise of desktop publishing in the 1990s, this project serves as both a visual resource and a historical journey that showcases how feminist print functioned as a powerful tool for organizing, mobilizing, and building networks of transnational solidarity.

STUDENT-LED PUBLICATION
Showcasing essays, projects, drawings, and interviews of students, faculty, and practitioners, this inaugural issue of this architecture magazine supports undergraduate students as they navigate the academy and the profession of architecture.

EXHIBITION
Investigating the multidisciplinary symposium series Culture Lab, this exhibition explores the Lab’s philosophy and theory of digitization through diverse cultural perspectives in the early 1990s, offering insights into contemporary architectural discourse and technological transformations.

EXHIBITION
The sixth edition—and tenth anniversary of the Biennial–explores how architecture engages with the profound cultural, social, and environmental transformations shaping our world today and explores the possibility of envisioning alternate paths forward.

EXHIBITION
Citygroup’s multifaceted exhibition program and long-standing debate series considers the political and social role of architects within the city.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
This symposium explores liberatory design thinking through interdisciplinary dialogue, participatory exchange, and a shared commitment to dignity.

PUBLICATION
An extensive collection of archival materials by the artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015), along with new readings of her practice, is presented in this volume, centered on the intersection of art and architecture.

PUBLICATION
Surveying the use of postcolonial pedagogy emerging from radical Caribbean thinkers throughout the diaspora, this publication applies epistemologies that center creole aesthetics, spiritual phenomena, and adaptations of humanity to affirm spatial design initiatives that favor humanitarian and ecological concerns.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Investigating the Black praxes of making space, taking space, and creating “tools for living” through three interconnected themes—Black theologies, Black ecologies, and Black geographies—this conference explores the relationships between belief systems, environments, and lands that shape our communities to ensure a viable future.

EXHIBITION
Reexamining Isamu Noguchi’s work through the framework of design, this exhibition prioritizes the significance of his interdisciplinary collaboration with a broad network of creative practitioners, fabricators, designers, architects, clients, and corporations who helped him imagine and realize the possibilities of shared space.

EXHIBITION
This installation by artist Alison Ruttan juxtaposes ceramic sculptures with video to represent flooding events stemming from architectural and urban planning policy choices and challenges the audience to grapple with large-scale and hard-to-comprehend disasters related to climate change.

PUBLICATION
Presenting a place-based analysis of artist Beverly Buchanan’s 23-year period (1987–2010) living and working in Athens, Georgia, this publication focuses on how her work engaged with both the experience of surviving chronic illness in the absence of an equitable healthcare system and her multidisciplinary efforts to study and commemorate Black Southern geography, architecture, and forms of life.

PUBLICATION
Seeking to enflesh and articulate how architectural sites that serve as loci of Black assembly and gathering are passageways to interdisciplinary creative engagements, this project sparks, develops, and enacts critical modalities of radical imagination.

PODCAST
The second season of this audio series hosted by Shumi Bose and Federica Zambeletti pursues the belief that conversations across diverse spheres can extend our capacity to imagine better planetary futures.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
This series brings the work of music’s leading experimentalists from around the world to Chicago.

PUBLICATION
Celebrating fifteen years of exhibitions and initiatives by the Mexico City-based independent space, this book documents its history of promoting Latin American architecture, revealing the connections, issues, and conversations that have emerged to form a visual and textual narrative that extend beyond the exhibitions.

EXHIBITION
Investigating the concept of urban weight—not only in physical terms but also in symbolic, social, and environmental dimensions—this collaborative platform, culminating in an exhibition and conference at the Lisbon Triennale 2025, offers complementary perspectives that both enrich and challenge our understanding of how the urban fabric accumulates and transforms over time.

EXHIBITION
Consisting of four solo shows by emerging architectural practices, this exhibition program presents new work as site-specific installations accompanied by corresponding talks and discussions.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
Creating a platform for diverse local and national creatives, this intergenerational design event gathers participants to discuss pressing topics such as injustice in the built environment, design as a change agent, climate, equity, and belonging while cultivating lasting and meaningful connections.

EXHIBITION
This presentation is the first major exhibition to look critically at modern architecture in the West African region in the period leading up to and following political independence.

PUBLICATION
This edited volume offers a tour of the creation of the first-of-its-kind museum, told through the perspectives of those who built it—demonstrating how exhibitions and the built environment can shape the public’s perception, knowledge, and emotional experience around the struggle for housing justice.

PUBLICATION
A new London-based platform for writing about buildings and cities, this weekly newsletter shakes up design criticism with an irreverent tone and fresh new voices.

PUBLICATION
This special edition reviews architecture in Chicago.

EXHIBITION
This exhibition explores fungi, not as human tools but as independent, disruptive, forces that challenge civilization through their roles as both builders and destroyers in a multispecies world.

PUBLIC PROGRAM
A multimedia theatrical performance created by artist Aria Dean that merges historical reconstruction with contemporary staging techniques to explore a philosophical dialogue between two pseudo-fictional Black American artist-intellectuals in 1923 Berlin’s Tiergarten, using innovative projection design, virtual environments, and architectural elements to examine the tensions between artistic and political consciousness while questioning theatrical realism and historical representation.

EXHIBITION
For Serpentine’s 25th anniversary architecture commission, Bangladeshi architect and educator Marina Tabassum designs the summer Pavilion, titled A Capsule in Time, for public engagement with contemporary architectural practice.

PUBLICATION
Featuring a rich visual archive of architectural drawings and renderings created by Black architects and architectural designers, this publication illuminates their creative and technical skills and makes their underrecognized design contributions visible to the architectural community and the public.

PUBLICATION
Documenting and studying freely accessible urban spaces, this zine shares findings about spaces in cities that are available to everyone, for any use, for free.

EXHIBITION
Deconstructing the idea of the home as a place where personal narratives are contesting systemic concerns such as racial capitalism, historical erasure, and cultural reclamation, this research and exhibition cycle focuses on artistic practices that reconcile sites of conflict and violence through memory making and archival strategies.

EXHIBITION
This exhibition highlights the legacy of Black architects and architecture at Tuskegee University, beginning with Robert R. Taylor (1868–1942), the first accredited Black architect in America and founder of Tuskegee’s architecture program.

EXHIBITION
This exhibition focuses on the representation of the architecture and national character of the United States of America through the contemporary manifestation of “the porch”—the quintessentially constructed American place that is at once social, environmental, tectonic, performative, hospitable, generous, democratic, and an unheralded architectural icon, persisting across scales, geographies, communities, construction methods, and histories.

STUDENT-LED PUBLICATION
This publication provides an outlet for creative work that traditionally falls outside of the scope of academic architectural institutions.

STUDENT-LED PUBLICATION
The tenth edition of this graduate architecture publication is dedicated to prying at the in-between spaces that exist as silent agents of transition and development within the architectural field.

STUDENT-LED PUBLICATION
Through this volume, architecture’s relationship to contamination is examined, highlighting accelerating environmental collapse, the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, and the ways practitioners and critics are responding to new pressures on the field.

PUBLICATION
Supporting a cohort of emerging writers, this program offers dedicated mentorship, guest lectures and workshops, engaged feedback, and short- and long-form publishing opportunities in Urban Omnibus and elsewhere.

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