Exhibition

  • Citygroup Exhibition Program, 2023
  • GRANTEE
    Citygroup
    GRANT YEAR
    2023

Installation view of Citygroup’s “Off the Fence,” New York, 2022. Courtesy Citygroup and The Architectural League of New York. Photo: Em Joseph

From a storefront on Forsyth Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Citygroup organizes exhibitions, interventions in or on the space, and installations in the surrounding neighborhood. Exhibitions staged by Citygroup—open calls or shows highlighting issues facing our neighborhood—endeavor to organize designers on new political grounds, upon which new collective possibilities can be imagined. These efforts are used to garner a sense of community, spur engagement between the audience and the content, test strategies, prompt spirited discussions and shape gatherings. Significantly, these projects don’t propose solutions as much as they open up questions.

Citygroup formed in response to the structural and cultural forces that shape architecture and planning within the city. The group seeks to study and challenge the conditions that solidify the city as we know it—interrogating the dynamics that subjugate, alienate, and appropriate the very inhabitants of architecture, as well as architects, designers, and architecture itself. Through discursive and diagonal models of investigation, the group aims to define an approach which promotes alternatives to urban developments that erode the social, cultural, and equitable fabric of the city.