The documentaries in the Living Treasures series, led by the collective Innovando la Tradición, record the life stories and techniques of established potters from Oaxaca. Living Treasures highlights the memories and teachings of these storied potters—enabling the series to transcend individual stories to provide examples of the challenges that villages currently face and the strategies of resistance in response. Shown for the first time in the United States, the Living Treasures film screened at the Graham celebrates Doña Amelia who, at 95 years old, is the last traditional potter from Ixtlán de Juárez.

A conversation with Innovando la Tradición founders, Kythzia Barrera and Diego Mier y Terán will follow. Kythzia and Diego will talk about what they have learned by working with indigenous potters in Mexico, how it has shaped their practice and worldview, and their experience working in the interstices between design, community organizing, commerce and social practice. In describing the work of Innovando la Tradición, they write:

Clay is alive. We serve artisan communities by developing conditions for their well-being, agency and autonomy. We transform dominant narratives through contact with the soil. We generate care of our human, social and natural environment. We create bridges between the wisdom of the handmade and the world. We are and operate as a community. We learn and are transformed together. We maintain spaces for individual and collective creativity. We are proud of what we do. We are all clay.

This program is presented in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial: CAB 5: This is a Rehearsal.

Innovando la Tradición is a collective and multidisciplinary nonprofit that seeks to revitalize traditional pottery in Oaxaca, Mexico to bring visibility to the profound knowledge of this centuries-old craft. The organization positions pottery as a tool of economic stability, cultural development, an agent of social cohesion, and a source of inspiration in the construction of new paradigms for a more balanced relationship with the world. This mission is realized through workshops, courses, and skill exchanges to share the work of master potters and pass on the discipline to younger artisans.

Kythzia Barrera is an industrial designer, and cofounder of Innovando la Tradición and Colectivo 1050º, organizations that support the development of pottery communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Barrera’s work strengthens the bridges between art, craft, and design to foster social and human change. Honesty and open disclosure from the conventional and privileged designers position shapes an essential part of Kythzia's creative leadership as Head of Innovando Tradición and dynamic CEO of Colectivo 1050º. She holds a master’s degree in social and sustainable design by The Design Academie Eindhoven, Netherlands; in addition to having completed postgraduate coursework in ceramics at the School of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland; and in crafts and design at Kyoto Institute of Technology. She previously served as sustainable design professor at Centro and Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico.

Diego Mier y Terán is cofounder and director of Innovando la Tradición and Colectivo 1050º and is interested in the social and ethical dimension of design and its power as an agent of change. He holds a master’s degree in type design from Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Netherlands. Terán teaches across many universities in Mexico and previously ran the Workshop of Utopias at the Universidad Iberoamericana which prepared students to challenge the conventions of contemporary society and design practice.

Image: On-site filming of the potter Doña Amelia for the Innovando la Tradición documentary series "Living Treasures," Ixtlán de Juárez, Oaxaca, Mexico, 2023. Courtesy Innovando la Tradición. Photo: Adrián Gutiérrez

Visit the Graham Foundation Bookshop during a two-day sale to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the bookshop, designed by Chicago-based designer Ania Jaworska and commissioned by the Graham Foundation in 2013. To mark the occasion, the bookshop will take over the Madlener House first-floor galleries, and all purchases will be 20% off with select titles discounted up to 50% off.

SALE HOURS
Saturday, June 24, 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Sunday, June 25, 12–5 p.m.

The Graham Foundation Bookshop offers a selection of publications produced by the Foundation's grantees and titles related to our public programming, as well as new, historically significant, and rare publications on architecture, urbanism, art, and related fields.

Advance registration not required 

2 p.m.—Performance
3 p.m.—Closing Reception for A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing

Jared Brown and Regina Martinez present a live score in response to Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing.

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In past work, Brown broadcasted audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM) in live DJ sets and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah's description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of Black American subculture, history, and technology. They repurpose these fragments in audio, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history, digital, immaterial space. Brown holds a bachelor’s degree in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2016, Brown returned to Chicago to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.

Regina Martinez is a sound centered artist based in Chicago. Her current experiments draw from an archive of infinitely personal recordings she relates to as soundmarks: her father’s hands cleaning dried beans, drumline rehearsal after school, her mother praying the rosary the night before her heart procedure, and the creak of the front gate to home. Each recorded moment becomes its own instrument, its own layer of composition, and a washing and wringing out of memory meant to be overheard like a poem again and again. She grew up in Saint Louis, Missouri where she was artistic director of the Pink House neighborhood art space for creative exchange with children and their families. She is co-creator of “the clothesline” monthly one-night audio-visual installation in St. Louis. More recently she was program manager for Threewalls in Chicago and received a master’s degree in sound arts & industries from Northwestern University.

Photo: Katherine Simóne Reynolds

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

To mark the 25th anniversary of Lampo, Marcus Schmickler has composed new multi-channel music, concerned with spectral transformations of percussion instruments and bells. “Let’s expect the kind of playful electronic music that we crave,” writes Marcus, “deploying technology at the service of creating uncanny sensations.”

Marcus Schmickler is a composer who works at the intersections of computer music and ensemble composition, performance, and research. He is interested in data sonification, or the translation of data into sound, as well as in psychoacoustics and the compositional potential in various auditory illusions, from Shepard tones to ring modulations. His writings about computer music have appeared in MusikTexte, among other publications. His discography consists of over 50 titles, including choir- and chamber music pieces, computer music compositions, electroacoustic works, and his post-rock project Pluramon. Since 2010, Schmickler has taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, at CalArts in Valencia, CA, and at the Robert Schumann Hochschule in Düsseldorf, Germany. He currently lives in Rome, as a Villa Massimo Rome Prize Fellow of the German Academy.

Marcus Schmickler has performed several times for Lampo, most recently in February 2018 with Thomas Lehn. His first Lampo performance was in September 2002.

Presented in partnership with Lampo, additional support provided by the Goethe-Institut Chicago

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Tyondai Braxton premieres Vali, a sprawling set of new electronic and sample-based music for Lampo, built on ideas of space and contrast, stasis and forward motion.

Tyondai Braxton has been writing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively, under various group titles, since the mid-1990s. He is the former front man of experimental rock band Battles. Braxton has composed commissioned pieces for ensembles such as the Bang on a Can All Stars, Alarm Will Sound, Brooklyn Rider, Third Coast Percussion and Yarn/Wire. In 2012, he collaborated with Philip Glass during the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror festival. He has also performed his orchestral work Central Market with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and New York’s Wordless Music Orchestra. In 2013, Braxton premiered the multimedia piece HIVE at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, with subsequent performances at Sacrum Profanum Festival, Krakow; the Barbican, London; and at the Sydney Opera House. His 2022 album Telekinesis is an 87-piece work for electric guitar, orchestra, choir and electronics (Nonesuch). Braxton was recently appointed to Princeton University’s Music Composition faculty as an Assistant Professor of Music.

Presented in partnership with Lampo

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

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