Recognized as one of the leading improvisers working to expand the limits and expectations of contemporary trumpet, Nate Wooley comes to the Graham Foundation to perform a new electro-acoustic work, "For Kenneth Gaburo," as well as solo amplified trumpet improvisations.

In his new project “For Kenneth Gaburo,” Wooley continues to explore the concept of combinatory sound, now using linguistics as an oral-mechanical source for affecting the acoustic sound of the trumpet. Wooley’s new piece takes texts by composer Kenneth Gaburo and combines synthesized tones on tape with manipulated trumpet techniques “to create shadings of the phonetic sounds inherent in the text.” The composition pays homage to two of Gaburo's masterpieces, "Maledetto" and "Mouthpiece II for Trumpet Sextet."

Nate Wooley (b. 1974) was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a town of 2,000 people in the timber country of the Pacific Northwest. He began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of thirteen. Since moving to New York in 2001, he has become a leading trumpet player in the burgeoning Brooklyn jazz, improv, noise, and new music scenes. He has performed regularly with John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Eliane Radigue, Ken Vandermark, Fred Frith, Evan Parker and Yoshi Wada, and collaborated with Chris Corsano, C. Spencer Yeh, Peter Evans, and Mary Halvorson. Wooley’s combination of vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback, and compositional rigor has led one reviewer to call his solo recordings "exquisitely hostile."

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo. Founded in 1997, Lampo is a non-profit organization for experimental music, sound art, and intermedia projects. Visit www.lampo.org.

Image: Photo Peter Gannushkin.

Founding Fluxus member Alison Knowles will read selected works, including sections from her seminal piece House of Dust (1968-71). One of the first computer-generated poems, House of Dust evolved into an abstract environmental sculpture built out of five thousands pounds of concrete and fiberglass. Initially installed in New York, the structure was later moved to Los Angeles in 1971. To inaugurate the installation, Knowles and poet Normal Kaplan organized a “visual, physical poetry experience” where a helicopter dropped a one-thousand-foot-long printout of the poem onto the structure. With its multiple iterations in New York and Los Angeles, the House of Dust became a piece of serial architecture generated rather than designed by a set of procedures and heuristic constraints.

House of Dust is currently on view in the Graham Foundation's exhibition Everything Loose Will Land.

Alison Knowles is a visual artist known for her sound works, installations, performances, and publications. A founding member of the experimental avant-garde group Fluxus, Alison Knowles continues to create work that incorporates performance, radio and sound, papermaking, and printmaking. Knowles has exhibited her work at numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, and has received multiple awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1968) and a Documenta Professorship at the Kunstakaedmie Kassel (1996-7).

Image: Alison Knowles, House of Dust, 1971. Photograph, 10 ½ x 8 ½ inches. Copyright Alison Knowles. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts, Institute Archive. Photo Joshua White.

For more information on the exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land, click here.

Please joins us to celebrate the opening of Everything Loose Will Land, with remarks by curator Sylvia Lavin.

6PM  Remarks by curator Sylvia Lavin
6:30-8:30PM  Opening Reception

Sylvia Lavin is a leading figure in contemporary architectural history, theory, and criticism. Lavin is the recipient of a 2011 Arts and Letters Award, as well as previous awards from the Getty Center, the Kress Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council. In addition to her most recent book, Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press, 2011) Lavin is the author of Quatremere de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (MIT Press, 1992); Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture (MIT Press, 2005); and the forthcoming The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity (recipient of a Graham Foundation grant). She initiated a series of architectural projects for the Hammer Museum, and has been a guest curator for the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, and Ace Galleries.

Image: Ron Herron (Archigram), Manzak in Griffith Park, 1969. Collage, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches. Copyright Ron Herron (Archigram). Courtesy of Simon Herron.

For more information on the exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land, click here.

Molly Hunker, inaugural Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at the School of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago, joins the Graham Foundation April 7 for a presentation on her current research and culminating fellowship project, Myth.

Hunker’s fellowship research has centered on kitsch artifacts and their potential to recalibrate contemporary notions of atmosphere and engagement.  Myth, opening at UIC School of Architecture April 1, focuses specifically on the home shrine, re-envisioning the richly decorative and kitsch accretion through the lens of the architectural installation.  The discussion will explore how home shrines and related assemblies can provoke new understandings of visual opulence and lead to the production of emotionally resonant architecture.

Molly Hunker grew up in Wyoming and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College and Master of Architecture degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Hunker has worked for architecture studios and art workshops in Seattle and Los Angeles and has taught at UCLA, Woodbury University and University of Illinois at Chicago.  She is the co-founder, with Greg Corso, of SPORTS, a design collaborative that aims to reconcile the intelligence and sensibilities dormant in the crafty, cute and commonplace with that of the high-tech, couture, and complex to distill the opportunities born at this intersection.

Image: Molly Hunker, "Myth" Candles.

This event brings together the editors and several contributors to the Graham-funded book Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural Speculation, which interrogates Chicago’s history of fomenting and transmitting radical architectural and urban visions. Editor Alexander Eisenschmidt will introduce the project and short presentations by Penelope Dean, Ellen Grimes, Sam Jacob, and Mark Linder, which will be followed by a discussion, moderated by editor Jonathan Mekinda. The event will highlight some of the most productive episodes in the city’s past and explore what made Chicago function so effectively as a mediator of ideas and an instigator of speculation. The book launch also marks the opening of the exhibition “Chicagoisms” at the Art Institute of Chicago. Building on the premise of the book, this exhibition mines the history of the city to define principles of architectural action and urban engagement to which architecture practices were invited to respond via speculative proposals for the contemporary city.

Copies of Chicagoisms: The City as Catalyst for Architectural Speculation will be available for purchase at the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

This event is co-sponsored by the Architecture & Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alexander Eisenschmidt is a designer, theorist, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work investigates the productive tension between the modern city and architectural form – a topic on which he has published and lectured extensively. Eisenschmidt is the editor of City Catalyst (AD, 2012), curator of City Works for the 13th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, and founding partner of Studio Offshore.

Jonathan Mekinda is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a joint appointment in the Department of Art History and the School of Design. His research focuses on the history of modern architecture and design during the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly in Italy, which is the subject of his current book project, Building the House of Man. His writing can be found in journals such as the Journal of Design History and Design Issues and in the forthcoming volume Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias (Courtauld Books Online, 2015).

Penelope Dean is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her writings have appeared in Architectural Design, Harvard Design Magazine, hunch, Log, Praxis, and TransScape. Her research has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and a Visiting Scholars Residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture at Montreal. She is founding editor of the architectural magazine Flat Out.

Ellen D. Grimes is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches architectural design, technology, and theory. Previously she has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and served as the executive editor of the Journal of Architectural Education.

Sam Jacob is an architect and critic. He was co-founder of FAT, where he was responsible for a range of internationally acclaimed projects, and now directs his own architecture and design studio. He is Director of Night School at the Architectural Association in London and teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is also a columnist for Dezeen and Art Review and contributing editor to Icon. Currently, he is co-curating the British Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale.

Mark Linder is Associate Professor in architecture and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Humanities at Syracuse University. He is the author of Nothing Less than Literal: Architecture after Minimalism (MIT Press, 2004) and is currently at work on a book titled Three Easy Mieses: That’s Brutal, What’s Modern? on the alternative mid-century modernisms of Alison and Peter Smithson, Walter Segal, and John Hejduk.

Image: "Route Via Chicago Rock Island & Pacific Railroad Around the World," 1870. The map celebrates Chicago's status as a metropolis simultaneously distant from and intimately connected to the rest of the world.

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