5:30 p.m. Comments by artist Sergio Prego with curators Patxi Eguíluz, Carlos Copertone, and Iker Gil

6:00–8:00 p.m. Opening reception

Please join us for a reception and introductory remarks to celebrate the opening of our winter exhibition Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac.

The exhibition Poured Architecture establishes a dialogue between the late Spanish architect Miguel Fisac and the contemporary work of the Basque-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sergio Prego. Through a new body of work supported by a Graham Foundation Fellowship, Prego explores the possibility and synchronicity of materials and processes across architecture and visual art in a new series of sculptures and drawings inspired by Fisac’s innovative architecture and construction techniques. Here, Prego plays with scale and texture and creates his pneumatic and concrete structures within the context of Fisac’s methodology—chiefly arquitectura vertida (poured architecture), the patented cast concrete system that Fisac created. Drawings by Prego, displayed alongside facsimiles of material culled from Fisac’s archive, further illustrate the confluence of the two practices that both employ themes of material fluidity and malleability and investigate using materials such as plastic, concrete, and aluminum. This exhibition invites a multifaceted conversation about architectural imagination, experimentation, and material expression.

Sergio Prego (b.1969) is a Basque artist, part of the experimental 1990s Artelekuproject in San Sebastián, and is currently based in Brooklyn. His mainly sculptural practice embraces a sensitive approach to materials and technical strategies while maintaining the presence of the hand of the artist. Among his most celebrated projects are Primer Proformaat the MUSAC in León (2010) together with the artists Txomin Badiola and Jon Mikel Euba, the experimental pedagogical project Kalostra(2015) in San Sebastián, and the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale (2019) with the artist Itziar Okariz.

Miguel Fisac (1913–2006) was a key figure in Spanish architecture of the second half of the twentieth century and his works contributed to the modernization of architecture in Spain. He graduated from the School of Architecture of Madrid in 1942, and his first work, the Church of the Holy Spirit, was completed that same year. He was awarded the Gold Medal for Spanish Architecture (1994) and the National Architecture Award (2002).

Carlos Copertone received his PhD from the University of Extremadura, specializing in urbanism and regional planning. He is an editor of books on art and architecture at Caniche Editorial and has curated and developed several exhibitions, programs, and projects with Spanish cultural organizations. Copertone has lectured extensively in Spain and abroad and has been published in MAS Context, Openhouse, and Architectural Digest.

Patxi Eguíluz is an architect, curator, researcher, and critic focused on construction and urbanism. He is an editor of books on art and architecture at Caniche Editorial and has curated several exhibitions and developed projects at various institutions across Spain. His writing has been published in MAS Context, Openhouse, and Architectural Digest.

Iker Gil is an architect and director of MAS Studio, an architecture and urban design firm based in Chicago. He is also the editor-in-chief of the journal MAS Context and editor of the book Shanghai Transforming (ACTAR, 2008). He has curated exhibitions for the Chicago Architecture Biennial and the US Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale. Additionally, he is the executive director of the SOM Foundation and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Image: Detail of the facade of Iglesia de Nustra Señora del Carmelo (Church of Our Lady Flor del Carmelo), Madrid, designed by Miguel Fisac, 1983. Photo: Carlos Copertone

For more information on the exhibition, Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac , click here.

Join us for a talk by urban designer Emmanuel Pratt, recently named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow, as he discusses his approach to growing historically redlined neighborhoods through community-driven initiatives and shares current and upcoming projects.

Emmanuel Pratt is cofounder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation. His work explores architecture, urbanization, race, identity, gentrification, art and social praxis, and transformative processes of community economic development through intersections of food security and sustainable design innovation. He was a Loeb Fellow, Charles Moore Visiting Lecturer at Taubman College or Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and is currently a visiting lecturer for Environmental and Urban Studies at the University of Chicago.

Sweet Water Foundation practices regenerative neighborhood development, a creative social justice method, that creates safe and inspiring spaces by establishing healthy, intergenerational communities that transform the ecology of once-“blighted” neighborhoods. The Foundation utilizes a blend of urban agriculture, art, and education to transform vacant spaces and abandoned buildings into economically and ecologically productive and sustainable community assets that produce engaged youth, skilled workers, art, locally-grown food, and affordable housing. These principles are realized in the flagship Foundation project, the Perry Avenue Commons, encompassing approximately three acres on the South Side of Chicago.

Image: Re-Root + Redux, Perry Ave Commons,  Sweet Water Foundation, Chicago, IL. Presented in conjunction with the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

For more information on the exhibition, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Unraveling Modern Living, click here.

For an afternoon, the Graham Foundation will host an “open rehearsal jam” for Anna Martine Whitehead’s new project Force. Force is a dance opera about queer and trans women of color waiting to get into prison featuring an all qt+ bipoc cast and crew (qt+ = queer and/or trans and/or more; bipoc = black/brown/indigenous/person of color). Force’s open rehearsal will be an opportunity for anyone interested (regardless of background or ability to pick up an instrument) to move their body free from expectation. While this jam will be open to all, queer, trans, and gender nonconforming black, brown, and indigenous folks of color are especially encouraged to come through and take up space.

Anna Martine Whitehead does performance. She has been presented by venues including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Chicago Cultural Center; Links Hall; AUNTS; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, Jesse Hewit, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards from Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Graham Foundation, 3Arts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Djerassi. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and has contributed chapters to a range of publications including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017), Organize Your Own: The Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements (Sobsercove, 2016), Platforms: Ten Years of Chances Dances (2016), and Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU, 2009). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).

Image: Anna Martine Whitehead performance at Hyde Park Art Center in collaboration with Jamie Hayes/Production Mode, 2017.  Photo: Sarah Pooley

Catherine Lamb is a violist and composer who blends West Coast experimentalism with the structures and intonations of ancient Hindustani music. Her music reveals a slow-changing spectrum of microtonal colors and temporal effects, in stunning works that explore the interaction of sounds in specific physical spaces or rooms.

Lamb and frequent collaborator Rebecca Lane (bass flute/voice) will perform Prisma Interius IV with special guest Olivia Block. The piece is the fourth in a series of nine works constructed around the Secondary Rainbow Synthesizer, an instrument that spectrally filters live sound picked up from microphones outside.

“The intent is to extend the harmonic space and shapes occurring in the musical piece (defined by the acoustic instrumentalists in the room) to discover the edges of our listening perceptions, by pulling an infinite thread to it,” Lamb writes.

This is Lamb's Chicago debut and Lane's first U.S. performance.

Catherine Lamb is a composer and performer interested in how precise frequencies of pitch interact harmonically and sonically. She has been studying and composing music since a young age. In 2003 she turned away from the conservatory in an attempt to understand Hindustani classical music, later finding Mani Kaul in 2006. She also studied experimental composition at the California Institute of the Arts under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro, who were both integral influences. It was during this time that she began diving deeply into her own practice of what she later termed “the interaction of tone.”

Lamb is the co-founder of Singing by Numbers (2009-11), an experimental vocal ensemble formed with Laura Steenberge. She has written for ensembles such as Ensemble Dedalus, Konzert Minimal, the London Contemporary Orchestra, NeoN, Plus/Minus, and Yarn/Wire. Lamb is involved in ongoing research with Marc Sabat on intonation; with Johnny Chang on Viola Torros; develops work regularly with musicians such as Rebecca Lane, Dafne Vincente-Sandova, and Frank Reinecke; as well as taking part in Triangulum with Julia Holter and Laura Steenberge.

She is the recipient of an Emerging Composers Award from the Wallace Alexander Gerbode and William and Flora Hewlett Foundations for Dilations (2008-09); a travel grant from the Henry Cowell Foundation, allowing her to pursue work with Eliane Radigue (2012); a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude (2016); was a Staubach Fellow at the International Summer Course for New Music in Darmstadt (2016); and received the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2018). Her writings and recordings have been published by Another Timbre, Black Pollen Press, Kunst Musik, NEOS, Open Space Magazine, Q-O2, Sacred Realism, Sound American and Winds Measure. She graduated from CalArts in 2006 and received her MFA from Bard College in 2012. Lamb lives in Berlin, Germany.

Rebecca Lane is a Berlin-based musician who investigates sounds on the edge of perception, focusing on the experiential qualities of sound, but also on phenomena that only emerge through particular ways of working together. Thus, her practice is informed by ongoing collaborations with like-minded artists, including Catherine Lamb, Marc Sabat and Clara de Asís, among others, and within small ensembles, using various flutes (flute, quarter-tone bass flute, recorders) and voice.

Artist Talk: Ahead of her performance, Catherine Lamb presents a new performative lecture. In The Form of the Spiral, she draws something other than a straight line from artists like James Tenney and Maryanne Amacher, to things she has learned from Dhrupad, an ancient style of Hindustani classical music, making connections with her own recent work. Lampo Annex, Monadnock Building, 53 W. Jackson Blvd. #1656. Friday, December 13, 6pm. FREE; CLICK HERE TO RSVP VIA LAMPO

Supported by the Farny R. Wurlitzer Foundation Fund

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.

Join us for a screening of Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, with an introduction by Laura Ekasetya, director and head horticulturalist of Chicago's Lurie Garden. Directed by Thomas Piper, the film immerses viewers in the work of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf, giving insight into his creative process from his abstract sketches, to theories on beauty, to the ecological implications of his ideas.

To watch the trailer, click here.

Laura Ekasetya is the director and head horticulturist at the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park where she works to maintain the integrity of Piet Oudolf’s perennial plant design. Laura enjoys stalking insects, birds, and other creatures that make the garden their home and is learning to identify the various birds that migrate through Chicago along the Mississippi Flyway. Laura has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and studied horticulture at Harold Washington City College of Chicago. Before joining the team at the Lurie Garden in 2017, she tended to perennials grown under research evaluation at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Lurie Garden in Millennium Park combines naturalistic plantings and ecologically sensitive maintenance practices to create an urban oasis for city dwellers and wildlife alike. The garden offers a four-season experience and pays homage to Chicago’s transformation from flat marshland to a city heralded for investing in extensive green spaces, or “Urbs in Horto” (City in a Garden). Lurie Garden was designed by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. and Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf, and opened in 2004.

For more information on the exhibition, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio: Unraveling Modern Living, click here.

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