Join us for an evening of discussion with scholar Christina Sharpe and artist Torkwase Dyson. First introduced through the Center for African American Poetry & Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh’s program, Unruly Collaborations, Sharpe and Dyson continue their conversation at the Graham Foundation. Both share interests in tackling meaningful and ethically responsible ways to wrestle with the many challenging issues of contemporary society, including those influenced by post-civil rights and postcolonial landscapes.

Christina Sharpe is Professor of English, Africana, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University. In July she will join the faculty of York University in Toronto as Professor in the Department of Humanities. Her second book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, was published by Duke University Press in November 2016 and was named in the Guardian newspaper and The Walrus as one of the best books of 2016. In the Wake was also chosen as a finalist in the category of nonfiction for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards. Her first book, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery, Subjects was published in 2010, also by Duke University Press. She is currently completing the critical introduction to the Collected Poems of Dionne Brand (1982–2010) to be published by Duke University Press. She is also working on a monograph: Black. Still. Life. She has recently contributed essays to the book accompanying Arthur Jafa’s first solo exhibition Love is the Message, The Message is Death and an essay called “The Crook of Her Arm” for a collection on the work of the artist Martine Syms.

This talk is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School.

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

Urban designer and professor of architecture, Mitch McEwen presents an original lecture responding directly to the exhibition Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School. Building on ongoing discussions with Dyson, McEwen examines experimentation, design, and how transformative events, such as climate change, can incite change in architecture and urban studies. Components of this commissioned lecture and elements of the intellectual partnership between McEwen and Dyson will be presented as part of the Graham-published book that accompanies Dyson’s exhibition and fellowship.

V. Mitch McEwen is principal of McEwen Studio and co-founder of A(n) Office, a collaborative of design studios in Detroit and New York City.  McEwen’s work has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.  A(n) Office and McEwen Studio projects have been commissioned by the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and the Istanbul Design Biennial. McEwen’s work in urban design and architecture began at Bernard Tschumi Architects and the New York City Department of City Planning, as well as founding the Brooklyn-based non-profit SUPERFRONT. McEwen earned her MArch at Columbia University and BA at Harvard College cum laude in Social Studies.  Since 2017 she has been Assistant Professor at Princeton School of Architecture, after teaching previously at University of Michigan and Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Since 2017, McEwen serves as a Board Member of the Van Alen Institute in New York City.

This talk is presented in conjunction with our current exhibition Torkwase Dyson and the Wynter-Wells School.

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

Join us for a talk by Sean Keller to launch his new Graham-funded book Automatic Architecture: Motivating Form after Modernism recently published by University of Chicago Press.

Automatic Architecture examines architects’ enthusiasm for autonomic design methods in the 1960s and 1970s. Influenced by the new science of computing, these architects tried to replace individual intuition with methods that were thought to be objective, logical, or natural. The book closes with an analysis of our contemporary condition, suggesting paths for architectural practice that work through, but also beyond, the merely automatic.

Sean Keller is a historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture. His writing has been recognized by a Winterhouse Award for Design Writing and Criticism and by a Warhol Foundation Grant. He is the author of Automatic Architecture: Motivating Form After Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2018); and is currently completing a book on the art and architecture of the 1972 Munich Olympics (forthcoming, with Christine Mehring, Yale University Press).

Keller is Associate Professor, Associate Dean of Research, and Director of the MS program at the IIT College of Architecture. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Yale University, and Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Neubauer Collegium and formerly a Residential Scholar of the Franke Institute for the Humanities, both at the University of Chicago. He is a trustee of the Graham Foundation.

Image: Grid-shell forms determined by hanging chain nets, the Institute for Lightweight Structures, Stuttgart, 1974. Courtesy of ILEK, University of Stuttgart.

This symposium will bring together a roster of international scholars to examine challenges and opportunities presented by the comparative study of cities across the globe from the sixteenth century to the present. The opening panel discussion at the Graham Foundation will feature Reinhold Martin, Nancy Steinhardt, and Kenny Cupers.

Reinhold Martin is Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University and Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Nancy Steinhardt is Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of East Asian Art in Penn’s History of Art Department.

Kenny Cupers is Head of Urban Studies and Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Ayala Levin, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University, will moderate the panel.

The symposium continues on May 18 at the Northwestern University Library in Evanston. The event at Northwestern is free but separate registration is required. To register for the full symposium, click here.

Image: Left: Vassallieu dit Nicolay, Map of Paris, 1609. Bibliothèque national de France, Paris; right: Aerial view of Chicago. Jesús Escobar

Torkwase Dyson, “Looking for the People (Water Table Ocular #3),” 2017. Polymer gravure on Hahnmuhle Copperplate White paper. Published by Brodsky Center. Collaborating Master Printer Randy Hemminghaus. Photograph courtesy of Brodsky Center. Copyright Torkwase Dyson and Brodsky Center. Photo by Peter Jacobs

Please join us for a reception with artist Torkwase Dyson as we celebrate the opening of her new installation.

Torkwase Dyson, born in Chicago, is an artist based in New York whose practice draws on her interest in abstraction, social architecture, and environmental justice. She began engaging social architecture through her project Studio South Zero (2014–ongoing), a mobile studio that relies on solar power and supports multidisciplinary artmaking. Recent solo exhibitions of Dyson’s work have been presented at the Drawing Center, New York City; Landmark Gallery, Texas Tech University, Lubbock; Eyebeam, Brooklyn; and the Meat Market Gallery, Washington, DC. Her work has also been included in exhibitions in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Martos Gallery; Postmasters Gallery; and We Buy Gold, Brooklyn as well as at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia, and the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC. Dyson’s work has been supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation; Nancy Graves Foundation; Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University; and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center. She is on the board of the Architectural League of New York and is a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art. She is represented by Davidson Contemporary, New York; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

For more information on the exhibition, Wynter-Wells School, click here.

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