NASA Visible Earth, Great Lakes, 1999. Courtesy SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE.

Join the Graham Foundation for a panel discussion and reception to celebrate the launch of Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan. This recent grantee publication describes the conditions for urbanization across the Great Lakes region and assembles a multi-layered, empirical description of urbanization processes within the drainage basins of the five Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. This publication encompasses a range of representational forms including maps, plans, diagrams, timelines, and photographs, as well as speculative design research projects and critical texts. Postponing diagnosis, let alone treatment of these conditions, Third Coast Atlas aspires to simply describe. It proposes a new geographic gestalt for urban analysis. Superimposed upon the North American continent, and with easily recognizable yet divergent political and geological borders, this megaregion traverses portions of eight US states and two Canadian provinces, as well as the world’s largest collection of surficial fresh water. Third Coast Atlas characterizes the littoral edge as a distinct field of urbanization, and constructs a reading of the region both specific and speculative.

Daniel Ibañez is a practicing architect and urbanist, and founder and co-director of the design firm Margen-Lab. He is currently an instructor and doctor of design candidate at the Harvard GSD, editor of New Geographies, and researcher at the Urban Theory Lab. Ibañez’s research critically seeks to frame the design disciplines in relation to broader socio-ecological interdependencies through cross disciplinary research on the field of urban metabolism. Daniel is editor several book publications, including New Geographies, no. 6: Grounding Metabolism (HUP, 2014) and the Wood Urbanism: From Molecular to Territorial (forthcoming Actar, 2017). Also, since 2015, Daniel is editor at urbanNext.

Clare Lyster is an Irish architect, educator, and writer based in Chicago, Illinois, where she is associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture. She is principal of CLUAA, a research-based design office in Chicago operating at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and planning. In addition to her design practice, Lyster writes about architecture and urbanism from the perspective of contemporary theories in landscape, infrastructure, and globalization. She is author of Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Cities (Birkhauser, 2016); co-editor of 306090_09, Regarding Public Space (PA Press, 2005); and Envisioning the Bloomingdale, (Chicago Architecture Club,2009). She is the 2017 Gillmor Lecturer at the University of Calgary.

Charles Waldheim is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, and co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Mason White is a Canadian-American architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Ontario. White is founding partner of Lateral Office, a Toronto-based experimental design practice that operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. In addition to his practice, White is associate professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He is recipient of the Emerging Voices and Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York; the Wheelwright Fellowship from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; the Friedman Visiting Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley; and the Lefevre Fellowship at The Ohio State University. White is co-editor of Bracket, vol. 1 and co-editor of Pamphlet Architecture, no. 30: Coupling—Strategies for Infrastructural Opportunism.

Philip Enquist is Partner in Charge of Urban Design and Planning SOM and the leader of its Global City Design Practice. The scale of Enquist’s design perspective encompasses from innovating sustainable urban forms that enhance city living with walkable, transit-enabled districts humanized by their natural amenities to rapidly changing urban clusters within regional ecosystems like North America’s Great Lakes basin and China’s Bohai Rim. He has taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and as the Charles Moore Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He was honored with the 2010 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Architectural Guild of the University of Southern California's School of Architecture for his dedication to strengthening the physical, social, and intellectual infrastructure of cities and in 2009 Chicago Tribune named him and his studio as one of the "Chicagoans of the Year in Architecture."

Martin Felsen co-founded UrbanLab in 2000 and is an Associate Professor in the Illinois Institute of Technology’s (IIT) College of Architecture. Martin received the Dubin Family Young Architect Award in 2007 from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Chicago. Also in 2007 UrbanLab was named as the national winner of the History Channel’s “City of the Future” competition for a proposal titled “Growing Water.” UrbanLab won the American Institute of Architects (AIA) College of Fellows Latrobe Prize in 2009, and UrbanLab’s architecture and urban design projects have won several design awards from the AIA. In 2010 UrbanLab was included in the Emerging Voices lecture series sponsored by the Architectural League. In 2012, UrbanLab exhibited work at the Venice Biennale in "Common Ground" curated by David Chipperfield, and in 2015, UrbanLab exhibited "Filter Island" at the Chicago Biennial. Publications presenting UrbanLab’s design and research work include Architecture, Architectural Record, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He is co-author, with Sarah Dunn of the book, Bowling: Water, Architecture, Urbanism, which investigates the symbiotic relationships between architectures of quality and infrastructures of quantity in Chicago, New York, and the Sun Belt.

James Wasley is a Director of the Institute for Ecological Design and the former Chair of the Department of Architecture at UWM. Professor Wasley’s current research is in the creation of ecological urban waterscapes at a variety of scales. Since 2011 he has led the school-wide Milwaukee Inner Harbor Project, which has explored the redevelopment and ecological restoration of the 200+ acres of brownfields surrounding the Port of Milwaukee. This has in turn led to a suite of ten demonstration projects on the harbor at the UWM School of Freshwater Sciences that are moving towards implementation. Professor Wasley teaches architectural design studios and professional practice seminars from an ecological perspective.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:

2015 Publication Grant to Daniel Ibañez, Clare Lyster, Charles Waldheim, and Mason White for Third Coast Atlas: Prelude to a Plan of The Great Lakes Region

2014 Publication Grant to Clare Lyster for Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities

2014 Publication Grant to Lola Sheppard and Mason White for Many Norths: Spatial Practices in a Polar Territory

2014 Publication Grant to InfraNet Lab (Neeraj Bhatia and Mason White) for Bracket 4 [Takes Action]

2014 Publication Grant to Harvard Graduate School of Design for New Geographies 07: Information Geographies and New Geographies 08: Islands

2013 Exhibition Grant to Harvard Graduate School of Design for Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (Sonja Dümpelmann and Charles Waldheim, curators)

2001 Grant to the University of Illinois at Chicago for Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives (Katerina Rüedi Ray and Charles Waldheim, authors)

1999 Grant to Georgia Daskalis, Charles Waldheim, and Jason Young for Stalking Detroit

LoVid presents Mesh Extenders, a group of interconnected compositions made for their handmade analog synthesizers along with video—new work that constructs landscapes between virtuality, abstraction, and documentation of daily life.

The art duo’s A/V performances are live, immersive, visceral, audiovisual noise. Their synthesizers are designed to continue the legacy of artist-made tools. LoVid’s approach to instrument building is an exploration of the relationship between craft and engineering, embracing and integrating fragilities of analog systems into the instruments’ design, and audiovisual compositions. Aesthetically, the instruments are sculptural combinations of circuits, wires, and textiles. Combining material and media sheds light on handmade DIY technological tools that expand on the relationship between the human body and technological development as part of the artists’ practice.

Tali Hinkis (b.1974, Jerusalem, Israel) and Kyle Lapidus (b.1975, New York, N.Y.) have worked together as LoVid since 2001. Their work includes immersive installations, sculptural synthesizers, single channel videos, textile, participatory projects, mobile media cinema, works on paper, and A/V performance. Projects have been presented at ISSUE Project Room, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; The Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York; The New Museum, New York CAM Raleigh, North Carolina; Hors Pistes Tokyo Daejeon Museum of Art, Korea; Netherlands Media Art Institute; and ICA, London; among many others. LoVid has performed and presented works at The Kitchen, MoMA, PS1 and The Museum of the Moving Image, all in New York; Lampo, Chicago, International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Netherlands; CCA (Israel) and FACT (Liverpool). They have received support from several organizations and foundations. LoVid’s video works are distributed through Electronic Arts Intermix.

LoVid last appeared at Lampo in December 2010. They premiered C/O/L/O/R/G/B, performing with a new synthesizer color wheel. In Becoming One.2, LoVid invited guests to contribute body signals that were amplified by the duo’s circuit tacos.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects. Additional support is provided by mediaThe foundation inc.; organized in cooperation with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Art and Technology Studies and Department of Performance.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:
2013 New Media Grant to LoVid for iParade (Chicago)
2016 New Media Grant to LoVid for iParade (Chicago)

David Hartt, still from “in the forest,” 2017. 4K Digital Video File, color, sound; 20 min. Courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey and commissioned by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Join us for a reception to celebrate the opening of in the forest, an immersive installation by artist David Hartt that revisits architect Moshe Safdie’s unfinished 1968 Habitat Puerto Rico project through a contemporary lens. Consisting of a newly commissioned film, a suite of photographs, and a series of sculptures, the exhibition continues Hartt’s investigation into the relationship between ideology, architecture, and the environment.

6-8:00 p.m. Opening Reception

6:00 p.m. Comments by David Hartt with Graham Foundation director Sarah Herda

For more information on the exhibition, in the forest, click here.

"Still Move," performance stills taken at Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, Canada, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Photo: Rod Leland Photography

Join us for the Chicago launch of Lost Bodies and Still Move, two new monographs on the work of artist Brendan Fernandes. David Getsy and Zach Stafford will join Fernandes in a conversation about his recent work. A book signing and reception will follow the discussion.

In his multimedia practice, Brendan Fernandes addresses a wide range of questions surrounding identity and expression, including the concept of queer bodies, the history of ballet as a cultural signifier—particularly in juxtaposition to African modes of visual and ritual art—and, more recently, the dance floor as a sacred space of freedom. Lost Bodies (Agnes Etherton Art Centre, Queen’s University, ON, 2016) and Still Move (Black Dog Press, London, 2017) explore these themes in depth.

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya, lives and works in Chicago) is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA from the University of Western Ontario (2005) and his BFA from York University in Canada (2002). Fernandes has exhibited widely domestically and abroad, including exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; The National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA: The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Sculpture Center, New York; The Quebec City Biennial; the Third Guangzhou Triennial in China; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Upcoming projects include a performance of Free Fall at The Getty, Los Angeles (June); a residency at Recess, New York (July); and a solo exhibition at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ(fall 2017). He is currently Artist in Residence and Faculty at Northwestern University in the Department of Art Theory and Practice, and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

David J. Getsy is the Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  He has published seven books, most recently Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale University Press, 2015) and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer (MIT Press, 2016), which is a 2017 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist.  He writes about histories of art and performance with an emphasis on queer and transgender topics and methods in modern and contemporary art, and his current projects pursue archive-based recoveries of forgotten queer and genderqueer performance practices in late-twentieth-century America.

Zach Stafford is the editor at large of Out Magazine and a contributing writer for The Guardian where he covers justice, violence and social issues. He regularly provides commentary on radio, podcasts, and has appeared on the BBC, CNN, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Zach is also the co-editor of the bestselling book Boys, An Anthology (2013), and is currently touring his photo-essay project, When Dogs Heal, which explores the lives of HIV+ people and the pets that saved their lives.

Phill Niblock, "Meudrone1," 2013

Join us for the debut of recent work by the great minimalist composer Phill Niblock in his first Chicago performance in more than eight years. Niblock constructs 24-track digitally-processed, monolithic, microtonal drones, and describes the intention of his music as “produce[ing] something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.”

The two-hour program in the Graham Ballroom includes the following recorded works: FeedCorn Ear (2012) with Arne Deforce, cello; Bag (2014) with David Watson, bagpipes; Praised Fan (2016) with Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon; Ronet (2014) with Neil Leonord, tenor saxophone; V&LSG (2015) with Lore Lixenberg, voice, and Guy De Bièvre, lap steel guitar; and Vlada BC (2013) with Elisabeth Smalt, viola d’amore. Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm joins Niblock to play live on FeedCorn Ear.

In keeping with other Niblock performances, his films and videos accompany this presentation. Meudrone1 (2013), Agosto (2014), DH *Sand-Water (2014), Vain4 (2015), and Meudrone2 (2014), all works that include time-stretched and close-up studies of nature play as his new works play.

Niblock first performed at Lampo in March 2000, screening six 16mm films from the 1960s including The Magic Sun in addition to presenting his music. Additional Lampo performances followed in May 2001, February 2005, and December 2008, of various works and films from The Movement of People Working.

Phill Niblock (b.1933, Anderson, Ind.) is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video, and computers. He has presented his work around the world since the mid-1960s and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Artists Public Service Program, the City University of New York Research Foundation, and the Foundation for the Contemporary Performance Arts. Niblock has been a member of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York since 1968 and now serves as director following his appointment in 1985.

Since 2010 the Graham Foundation has supported and partnered with Lampo to produce this performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a non-profit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

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