David Hartt, for everyone a garden, image courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago. © David Hartt

Graham-funded artists David Hartt and Karthik Pandian will discuss new work currently on view in two concurrent exhibitions in Chicago that both engage various strategies and critiques of 1960s avant garde architecture, art, and design practices with curator Hamza Walker. In his current exhibition for everyone a garden, Hartt references utopian projects by architects Moshe Safdie and Jean-Louis Chanéac from the late 1960’s to explore the complex relationship between form and ideology. Similarly, Pandian takes on 1960s artistic strategies in The Incomparables Club, the conclusion of a cycle of recent exhibitions that features the moving image and sound installation Reversal. Concerned with artistic labor, technologies of vision, and nostalgia for the avant-garde, previous iterations of the work took place in different forms at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and Vilma Gold, London in 2012.

Exhibitions:

David Hartt: for everyone a garden

On view through May 11, 2013

Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago

Karthik Pandian: The Incomparables Club

On view through April 20, 2013

Reversal

On view through June 1, 2013

Rhona Hoffman, Chicago

David Hartt was born in Montréal in 1967 and lives and works in Chicago. He graduated with an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. His exhibition Stray Light is currently on view at the Studio Museum in Harlem and will travel in the fall to the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and in 2014 to the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2012), Golden Age, Chicago (2011); Howard House, Seattle (2009); Deven Golden Fine Art (1998, 1997); Andrew Kreps, New York (1996); L’Observatoire-Galerie, Brussels (1995); and Ten in One, Chicago (1995). In 2012 he was named a United States Artists Cruz Fellow. He is a 2012 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Hartt’s exhibition, for everyone a garden is on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey until May 11, 2013.

Karthik Pandian has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles amongst others. In 2013, his work will be featured in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels. Pandian's work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Durfee Foundation and in 2011, he was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. Pandian’s exhibition, The Incomparables Club is on view at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago through April 20 and the moving image and sound piece Reversal, will remain on view in the second floor space through June 1.

Since 1994, Hamza Walker has served as Director of Education/Associate Curator for The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago - a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art. Recent exhibitions he has curated include Black Is, Black Ain’t, (2008), Several Silences, (2009), Anna Shteynshleyger, a survey (2010), The Age of Aquarius (2011), William O’Brien, a survey of the ceramics (2011), Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven: In a Saturnian World, (2011), Local Metrics (2012), and John Neff, Photographs 2010-2012 (2013)..  He was the recipient of the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for curatorial achievement, a 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Award for the exhibition Black Is, Black Ain’t, and the 2010 Ordway Prize. He has written for numerous artists’ monographs in addition to publications such as Artforum and Parkett. Walker is the president of Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts board of trustees.

John Bischoff’s work is precise and textured, spare, and at times delicate. By juxtaposing a performer’s interactions with an analog circuit and raw digital audio generated from a laptop, Bischoff creates instances of pulsed and modulated sound that intimately combine the analog and digital. "In these pieces, the detailed nature of the performer's actions with the circuit—the initiation of sound events, the timing between them, and their spectral characteristics—are analyzed in real-time and used to construct an extended computer-generated response,” Bischoff explains.

Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References and featured project Hedge House, Wijlre, the Netherlands, 1998-2001.

Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References (Birkhäuser, December 2012) offers a unique and unparalleled view of Arets, an internationally renowned architect and recently appointed dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Arets’ optimistic outlook towards the future, which he calls ‘A Wonderful World: A New Map of the World’, underlies his global philosophy. This new book presents Arets’ lectures on that topic, debates between him and other thinkers and makers, 60 exemplary designs from his studio, and an extensive series of interviews with Arets. Within these texts his background, education, projects, and teachings are interwoven in a discussion that highlights the evolution of his career.

At this book launch event, a discussion between Arets and Robert McCarters, editor of the book, will offer a comprehensive introduction to the work of Wiel Arets Architects. The talk will be followed by a reception in the Madlener House library where signed copies of the publication will be available for purchase.

Wiel Arets is a Dutch born architect, educator, industrial designer, theorist, and urbanist. Arets’ architecture and design firm, Wiel Arets Architects, has offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, Maastricht, and Zurich, and has been nominated numerous times for the European Union’s Mies Van der Rohe award. Before being appointed dean at IIT, Arets was dean of the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam from 1995-2002 and a professor of building, planning, and design at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Robert McCarter is a practicing architect, author, and Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. He previously taught at the University of Florida, where he was director of the School of Architecture from 1991-2001, Columbia University, University of Louisville, and North Carolina State University. He is the author of Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as Experience (with Juhani Pallasmaa, 2012); Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References (2012); Frank Lloyd Wright: Critical Lives (2006); Louis I. Kahn (2005); Frank Lloyd Wright (1997), and other books.

This event was originally scheduled for February 1, 2013.

Peter Fend, Sequence of Acts to Build A Gulf, 2011

Please note that due to unfavorable weather conditions this event has been cancelled.

Volume 5 of the Graham-funded New Geographies journal aims to recast the Mediterranean as a contemporary phenomenon and spatialize its region-making processes as a larger geographic entity in the twenty-first century. On April 18, Antonio Petrov, editor-in-chief of Volume 5, considers major topics of the new issue with Sean Keller, Clare Lyster, and Hashim Sarkis in a panel discussion moderated by Stephen J. Ramos. A reception and book signing will follow.

New Geographies is a Harvard University Graduate School of Design journal that aims to examine the emergence of the geographic, to articulate it and bring it to bear effectively on the agency of design. As the synthesizing role that geography aspired to play among the physical, the economic, and the sociopolitical is now being increasingly shared by design, New Geographies encourages designers to reexamine their tools and develop strategies within the design disciplines.

Cofounder and editor of New Geographies, Antonio Petrov is a professor at the University of Texas in San Antonio. He is currently program director at Archeworks in Chicago, founder and editor-in-chief of DOMA, a bilingual magazine published in Macedonia, and the director of WAS, a think tank located in Chicago. Petrov’s research explores new discourses in regionalism and architecture with a focus on the Mediterranean. His book, Superordinary: New Paradigms in Sacred Architecture,is forthcoming. Petrov received his doctoral degree from Harvard University.

Sean Keller (Assistant Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology; Ph.D. Harvard University) is a historian and critic of modern and contemporary architecture. He has taught at Harvard and Yale universities and is a trustee of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum and has written for numerous anthologies and journals, including Grey Room, Perspecta, Journal of Architectural Education, and Art Journal. He has two books forthcoming: Semi-Automatic: Motivating Architecture After Modernism (University of Chicago Press) and, with Christine Mehring,Munich ’72: Art and Architecture (Yale University Press).

Clare Lyster, Assistant Professor at University of Illnois at Chicago, is an architect, writer, and educator and founding principal of Claire Lyster Urbanism And Architecture (CLUAA) in Chicago. Her work explores the city from the perspective of its landscape and networks and the implications of this for architectural design. She is editor of Envisioning the Bloomingdale: 5 Concepts (Chicago Architecture Club, August 2009) and 306090 vol. 09 Regarding Public Space, with Cecilia Benites (Princeton Architectural Press, August 2005). Her writings have appeared in many publications including Cabinet, Journal of Landscape Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education and The Landscape Urbanism Reader and her design work has been exhibited locally and internationally including the Art Institute of Chicago. Current work toward a publication exploring the relationship between architecture and logistics was funded by a research grant from the Graham Foundation.

Stephen J. Ramos is an Assistant Professor in the College of Environment and Design at the University of Georgia. He is author of Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography (Ashgate Press,2010), and co-editor of Infrastructure Sustainability and Design (Routledge, 2012). He is a founding editor of the journal New Geographies and editor-in-chief of New Geographies Volume 1: After Zero (GSD/Harvard University Press, 2009). He received his Doctor of Design degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Hashim Sarkis is the Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Sarkis is a practicing architect in Cambridge and Lebanon, working on urban and landscape projects. He has authored and edited many books and articles including Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953–1969 (coedited with Eric Mumford, 2008), Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis (2003), CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital (2001), and Projecting Beirut (coedited with Peter G. Rowe, 1998).

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