Welshman Rhodri Davies confronts traditional concepts of the harp through his use of preparations, de-tuned, bowed and e-bowed strings.

On April 9, in his Chicago solo debut and first local appearance since 2002, Davies will present recent works for both lap harp and concert pedal harp.

In 1965, Joseph Kosuth first exhibited One and Three Chairs, an artwork comprised of a manufactured chair, a photograph of the chair, and a typed definition of a chair all placed in proximity within a gallery. Soon, other triads followed, including One and Three Shovels, One and Three Plants, and One and Three Photographs. As the interchangeability of the readymade objects he selected attests to, Kosuth was less concerned with the aesthetic value of the art he displayed than with the questions it raised. What, for example, is the relationship between the three items presented- an object, a depiction, and a description? Or, alternatively, between an idea, an instance, and an image?

Sarah Blankenbaker, the 2015–16 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at the UIC School of Architecture, will discuss her culminating fellowship exhibition, One and Three. Like Kosuth’s series, from which the exhibition borrows its name, One and Three presents sets of three versions of the same thing—a photograph, a façade, and a window—as an exploration of the translation of images into architecture and vice versa.

Sarah Blankenbaker is a clinical assistant professor at the UIC School of Architecture and the 2015-16 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow. She first moved to Chicago as an undergraduate, earning a BA in mathematics and visual art from the University of Chicago. While photographing buildings and spaces across the city, she was drawn to the architecture she encountered and subsequently departed for Los Angeles to study at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).  Blankenbaker has worked for Terreform in New York and Zago Architecture in Los Angeles. While at Zago Architecture, she was part of a team that participated in Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream at MoMA in New York. In 2011, she returned to Chicago to join the faculty at the UIC School of Architecture, where she has been teaching design studios, technology seminars, and YArch, a summer program for people who, like herself, discover architecture while pursuing other interests. Her work has been shown as drawings in Chicago and Los Angeles and appeared as writing in Log, Future Anterior, and Time + Architecture.


About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship, supported with a grant from the Graham Foundation, provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation and an exhibition at the UIC School of Architecture in the spring. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.

Image: Sarah Blankenbaker, A photograph, a façade, a window, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

The creation of an African education curriculum and improved access to education have been central to the continent’s development goals from the dying days of colonization to the present. During Africa’s early independence era of the 1950’s and ‘60s, a significant number of school building projects were commissioned to respond to this need. This period of architectural production in Anglophone West Africa coincided with the constellation of a final tranche of colonial funds, international aid, and the presence of a cadre of young modernist architects, many of whom were affiliated with the Architectural Association’s Tropical School. Ola Uduku will explore the architecture, historic symbolism, and legacy of some of the most significant schools built during period and the architects and other actors who contributed to their design.

Ola Uduku is reader in architecture and Dean International for Africa at Edinburgh University’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA). She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, was Smutts Fellow in African Studies, and has lectured at Liverpool and Strathclyde Universities. Her research interests include: the history of educational architecture in Africa, gated communities, and issues surrounding social infrastructure provisions for minority communities in cities. In 2014 she completed the British Academy-funded Alan Vaughan Richards Archive Project. Currently she is involved in the Conserving West African Modernism Project (with KNUST, Kumasi) and is founding member of ArchiAfrika, a non-profit dedicated to improving architectural education and knowledge of architectural history in Africa. She is also a member of Docomomo International and is supporting Ghana’s membership application. Her publications include chapters and articles in Architecture Beyond Europe (2015); Radical Pedagogies Project (2015); and Designing Schools: Space, Place and Pedagogy in the Twentieth Century (Taylor and Francis, forthcoming), among others.


Image: Fry and Drew, CMS Primary School Lagos, c.1950s. From the exhibition AA in Africa, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, 2002.

For more information on the exhibition, Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, click here.

In 2004, architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko made the decision to build her own house in Accra, Ghana, where she grew up. In an era where middle-class Ghanaian aspirations tend firmly towards neo-Classicism, Lokko’s “Miesian mud house” provoked much criticism. ‘Is it a petrol station?’, one passer-by asked indignantly, referring to the white, square Shell petrol stations, first introduced in Accra in the early 1960s, few of which are still standing in their original state. In conjunction with the Graham Foundation’s new exhibition, Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, Lokko will explore the relationship between form, memory, identity, and independence.

Lesley Lokko is head of the Postgraduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg and the author of nine best-selling novels. She received her BSc(Arch) and MArch from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and her PhD in architecture from the University of London. She has taught at schools of architecture in the US, the UK, as well as South Africa, where she was Visiting African Scholar at the University of Cape Town. She is the editor of "White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture" (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) and has been an on-going contributor to discourses around identity, ‘race’, African urbanism and the speculative nature of African architectural space for almost twenty years.

Image: House Lokko. Completed July 2005, Accra, Ghana. Photo by Lesley Lokko.

For more information on the exhibition, Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, click here.

Join us on Thursday, March 17 for a special screening of the short film, Afronauts, with director Frances Bodomo and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart. Based on true events, Afronauts tells the story of the short-lived Zambian space program and its attempts to join the space race in the late 1960s. Afronauts is Bodomo's second short film and premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2014. (Total runtime: 14 minutes)

Frances Bodomo is an award-winning Ghanaian filmmaker who grew up in Ghana, Norway, California, and Hong Kong before moving to New York City to study film at Columbia University (BA) and the Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Her first short film, Boneshaker (starring Oscar-nominee Quvenzhané Wallis), premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and played at over 20 film festivals. Bodomo was named a 2015 Sundance Institute/Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and aspires to make conceptually strong films that bring African images to the forefront. 

Jacqueline Stewart is a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005). Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, Film History, and The Moving Image. She is completing a study of African American actor, writer, and director Spencer Williams. She is co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Her film work in Chicago includes founding the South Side Home Movie Project and serving as Curator of Black Cinema House, a neighborhood-based film exhibition venue run by Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation. 

This event is presented in conjunction with the Graham Foundation's current exhibition Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, on view through April 16.

To view the trailer for Afronauts, click here.

Image: Diandra Forrest as Matha. Afronauts. Dir Frances Bodomo, 2014.

For more information on the exhibition, Architecture of Independence: African Modernism, click here.

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