Get Out The Vote: Empowering the Women's Vote
Aug 22 - Nov 15, 2020 

VIEW AIGA EXHIBIT ONLINE 

VIEW EXHIBITION PHOTOS ONLINE 

Get Out The Vote Pittsburgh Edition: Pittsburgh Artists and Designers include Stephanie Alona, Fran Flaherty, atiya jones, Ashanté Josey, Christina Lee, Bekezela Mguni, Jayla Patton, Jameelah Platt, Anna Shepperson, and Mary Tremonte

Featured artists have been nominated by local organizations including BOOM Concepts, SisTers PGH, Pullproof, Justseeds, and Casey Droege Cultural Productions.

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2020 marks the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote in 1920. It was the first legislation for women’s voting rights. Not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 were voting rights of ALL women protected and enforced.

The Get Out the Vote: Empowering the Women’s Vote poster campaign, in partnership with the League of Women Voters, commemorates this milestone. A core group of invited female designers submitted the first 65 non-partisan posters, to launch the initiative with their vision and voices. Through these posters, these women joined forces to collectively contribute to dialogue in design and society. This moment in history is an incredible opportunity to catalyze women in design, voting rights, citizenship, community, and diversity. The collection aspires to not only support present day voterparticipation, but to also serve as a backdrop for discourse and examination of the history of voting rights and women’s fight for equality.

In addition to exhibiting AIGA’s Get Out the Vote: Empowering the Women’s Vote poster campaign, the Miller ICA will also launch a Pittsburgh presentation of posters.

Featured artists have been nominated by local organizations including BOOM Concepts, SisTers PGH, Pullproof, Justseeds, and Casey Droege Cultural Productions. The PGH Edition will amplify the voices of women, transgender, nonbinary and gender-nonconforming Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) artists.

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We are now open to visits from the CMU Community. Bring your CMU ID + check in at our front desk.

NEW HOURS: Tues - Fri 2-6pm 

MAKE A RESERVATION OR SCHEDULE A VIRTUAL TOUR
Email miller-ica@andrew.cmu.edu

REGISTER TO VOTE
www.vote411.org/register

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The AIGA poster initiative continues at aiga.org/vote, where AIGA members can contribute posters to motivate the American public to register and turn out to vote in the 2020 general election, as well as local elections to come. 


The AIGA portion of this exhibition is in partnership with AIGA Design for Democracy and the League of Women Voters

On October 26th-29th, during the week leading up to the 2020 presidential and congressional elections, the Miller ICA will project a selection from Jenny Holzer's YOUVOTE campaign on the outside of our building on CMU's campus. YOUVOTE focuses on key areas through the swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania to champion broad political engagement, issue awareness, and voter empowerment. This project will be visible from Forbes Ave in front of Carnegie Mellon University, and is part of a broader effort to expand the Miller ICA exhibition practices to include public spaces during the pandemic when access to our space is limited.

Holzer's medium–whether formulated as a T-shirt, a plaque, or an LED sign–is writing, and the public dimension is integral to the delivery of her work. Starting in the 1970s with the New York City posters, and continuing through her recent light projections on landscape and architecture, her practice has rivaled ignorance and violence with humor, kindness, and courage. For more than 40 years, Jenny Holzer has presented her astringent ideas, arguments, and sorrows in public places and international exhibitions, including 7 World Trade Center, the Venice Biennale, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

No Tutorial
2020 Senior Art Exhibition
Friday, May 15, 2020

This virtual exhibition goes live on May 15!
View the exhibit here.

As the culmination of the undergraduate experience at the CMU School of Art, the senior exhibition presents final projects from graduating students. The title for this year's show, No Tutorial, was a prescient title chosen before spring break, before classes became remote, and before our orderly plans for the exhibition were thrown in disarray by stay-at-home orders. Rising to the challenge of our new online-only world, seniors self-curated a digital exhibition that takes full advantage of the web-based presentation of their work. This online platform provides insights into each student's artistic practice and facilitates connections between their work in a way that would not be possible in a physical gallery exhibition.

Co-produced by CMU School of Art

Miller ICA - Remote Control

Issue 3.  - Harm, Care, and The Contemporary Imagination  |  7.27.20

Read full ePublication
 
About four months after stay at home orders began, we find ourselves within a globally shifting paradigm. The conditions of the pandemic have converged to emphasize and raise a broader consciousness around the oppressive systems that structure our lives. Led by the organizers of the Black Lives Matter movement, and other activists, the world faces a reckoning.

The inertia of pre-pandemic life helped to enforce the oppressive machinations of day-to-day life, but COVID-19 has presented a disruption to the steady motion of business as usual. The world as it was has been shut down and this has opened up a liminal space to create something new and better. To repair, recover, and to heal from the effects of the harmful systems we’ve lived within will require care-- for ourselves and for each other, as well as for a world that mostly lives in our imaginations, but is already on the way.

Artists play a key role in conjuring this new world. This issue of Remote Control looks at ideas of how healing plays a role in making art, the way art influences how we shape the world around us, different resources for enacting care in our lives, and how we can better understand how to care for each other and for the planet, so when we emerge on the other side of the pandemic, it is into a something better than what we left.
Remotely wishing you
good health and safety,

Elizabeth Chodos, Miller ICA Director

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Issue 2. - What Does Not Bend | 04.27.20

Read full ePublication

In the fall of 2018, the Miller ICA opened the exhibition Paradox: The Body in the Age of AI. It explored how disembodied environments for interaction have proliferated with the emergence of new technologies that provide endless opportunities for social life to play out in virtual space, with no physical contact. The work by the eleven artists included in Paradoxlooked at how this new reality powerfully connects millions of people, while the disembodied nature of these interactions can also facilitate dehumanization. At the core of the exhibition was the premise that the sensorimotor habitat of the body is deeply influential in shaping our awareness, imagination, and socio-political structures. As we are now spending an unprecedented amount of time staying physically distant from each other and taking our personal and professional interactions to the internet, we thought it was a good opportunity to revisit aspects of this exhibition and to think about how it impacts on our bodies, our interactions, and our value systems.

While the total effects of this pandemic will be unknown for a long time, what is clear about this moment is that what cannot bend, morph and reconstitute, will break, or fade away. As artists are responding in real time to the new conditions of creative production, they are reimagining the purpose, value, and distribution strategies for their artwork. They are examining everything from the efficacy of a sculpture that cannot occupy physical space with a viewer to the ability to generate solidarity through dancing in solitude. This is a time where we all have more questions than we do answers, but on the other side of this shut down, we will gain a deeper understanding of what it is exactly that physical distance dismantles, and what the possibilities are of what we build in its place.Remotely wishing you
good health and safety,

Elizabeth Chodos, Miller ICA Director

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Issue 1. Functional Openness   | 04.02.20

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In just a few weeks the foundations and structures supporting our lives have shifted, evaporated, and morphed in unthinkable ways. The COVID-19 pandemic is a threshold: there was life before and a different life after. We are currently occupying an interstitial space where the past does not resemble the present and the future is uncertain. What this moment demands is a radical reconfiguration of our daily lives, routines, and of our personal and professional worlds. Many of us will be drawing on every ounce of our flexibility and resourcefulness to survive this time of massive change. The world has changed and the way we think and live must change as well.

Remote Control is an e-publication that takes shape in this shifting landscape. Its aim is to respond in real time to the complex ramifications of this moment of upheaval by consulting with contemporary artists and disseminating their work and ideas. It will provide moments of reflection, opportunities for connection, and ventures into looking ahead. The goal of this first issue, Functional Openness, is to look at how these changing circumstances require us to adapt how we think, how we live, and how we function.Remotely wishing you
good health and safety,

Elizabeth Chodos, Miller ICA Director


 

Andrea Zittel: An Institute of Investigative Living
Curated by Elizabeth Chodos
Jan 25–Mar 8, 2020

Jan 24, 6-8pm: Reception

RSVP on Facebook

Miller ICA is opening a solo exhibition of new and existing work by Andrea Zittel from January 24th-March 8th. 

Andrea Zittel’s work rests at the intersection of art, architecture, and design. A world-builder, Zittel’s practice manifests within her live/work residence A-Z West– an artwork and homestead located on over seventy acres in the California high desert next to Joshua Tree National Park. Since its inception A-Z West has functioned as an evolving testing grounds for living—a place in which spaces, objects, and acts of living all intertwine into a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today. “How to live?” and “What gives life meaning?” are core issues in both Zittel’s personal life and artistic practice. Answering these questions has entailed exploring complex relationships between our need for freedom, security, autonomy, authority, and control—observing how structure and limitations often have the capacity to generate feelings of freedom beyond open-ended choices. This exhibition surveys work spanning many years, and a wide range of media including furniture, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, painting, and two newly commissioned room-sized patterned tile-floors. The exhibition demonstrates the immersive gestalt of Zittel’s all encompassing practice where every material aspect of daily life is examined and her ethos for living guides all action. 

About the Artist

Andrea Zittel was born in 1965 in Escondido California. She received her BFA in painting and sculpture (1988) from San Diego State University, and MFA (1990) in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design. In the early 1990s she first established her practice in New York. One of her most visible projects in NY was A-Z East, a small row house in Brooklyn turned into a showroom or testing grounds for her prototypes for living. In 1998 she moved back to the west coast, eventually settling in the High Desert region next to Joshua Tree National Park where she founded A-Z West in 2000. A-Z West is the current site of her studio practice, as well as other living experiments including the Wagon Station Encampment and the Institute of Investigative Living. In 2002 Zittel cofounded High Desert Test Sites, a series of experimental art sites in the High Desert that supports works by both emerging and established artists.

Works by: Asher Blackburn, David Chikowski, Rachel Farn, Anna Gross, Samantha Ho, Rachel Kim, Yoon Young Kim, Janet Lee, Matthew McGehee, Laura Rospigliosi, Max Stropkay, Supawat Vitoorapakorn, Ethan Ye, Maddy Cha, Allissa Chan, Katie Chen, Stephanie Chen, Rachel Glasser, Madison Headrick, Chloe Kim, Sharon Lee, Zoe Lehn, Serina Liu, Robert Managad, Christopher Reyes, Helen Reynolds, William Su, Liam Van Oort, Sherry Wu, Mason Young-Shor, Audrey Zheng, Jackie Chou, Erin Ryan, Christian Walsh, Tammar Zea-Wolfson, Beth Rispoli

Join the CMU Design Seniors as they celebrate their accomplishments and share their most recent projects! The work featured in the show offers insight into the culmination of four years of study, pushing the boundaries of medium and method in the field of design.​

Curated by Liz Park

Artists: Kader Attia, Matty Davis & Ben Gould, Victoria Fu & Matt Rich, Byron Kim, Kiki Kogelnik, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Wilmer Wilson IV

We sense the world through this skin of ours. It is the surface that brokers our relationship to external forces and translates them as pain or pleasure. This organ gives each of us an identifiable shape, on which accrues a lifetime of experiences. With its distinct tone and texture, the skin is perhaps where we most frequently deposit ideas of the self and the other. We test the limits of our physical selves through contact—violence and intimacy both necessitate that our skins touch and communicate. If the skin is a site of injuries and insults that each body has had to bear, it is also a site of potential repair. A scar suggests both past violence and the body’s capacity to enclose the lips of a wound.

The skin is also a site of a formal investigation. It is a medium—an elastic and responsive layer—through which the artists grouped here explore pain and hurt, redemptive possibilities of healing, and the meeting of private and public lives. Imagine that the works in the exhibition comprise a collective sensing organ, pulsing with colors and texture. Imagine also this organ’s capacity to feel and empathize the pain of others as well as the pleasure from tender touch. This is a proposal to collectively feel our way through this world where we will inevitably emerge scarred, but in the shared experiences that allow for a deeper understanding of the other.

Thurs, Oct 31, 6:30pm: Byron Kim
& Carl Phillips in Conversation  in Simmons Auditorium A, Tepper, CMU. Co-sponsored by CMU, Center for the Arts in Society with support from University of Pittsburgh, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics.

Sat, Nov 16, 2pm: Bearance, a performance by Matty Davis & Ben Gould at Braddock Carnegie Library​​

About the Curator
Liz Park is Curator of Exhibitions at UB Art Galleries in Buffalo, New York. She was most recently the associate curator of the 2018 Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. She has curated exhibitions at a wide range of institutions including the Western Front in Vancouver, the Kitchen in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon. Her writing has been published by Afterall Online, Afterimage, ArtAsiaPacific, Performa Magazine, Fillip, Yishu: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Pluto Press, and Ryerson University Press, among others. She was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2011-2012 and Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at ICA Philadelphia in 2013-2015.

Image credit: Kader Attia, Scars Have the Strange Power to Remind Us that Our Past Is Real, 2015. Chromatic print, 23 5/8 x 35 7/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Featuring artists and collectives including: Addie Wagenknecht, Aman Tiwari + Gray Crawford, Angela Washko, Ayanah Moor, Bill Shannon + Cornelius Henke, Claire Hentschker, CLOUDS, Deep Lab, Jacob Tonski, Jill Miller, Jon Rubin + Dawn Weleski, Suzie Silver + Hilary Harp, Madeline Gannon, Moon Arts Group, Tahir Hemphill, Teenie Harris Archive Investigation, The Last Billboard, and the Warhol Data Recovery Project.​

This 30th anniversary group exhibition celebrates the atypical, anti-disciplinary, and inter-institutional spirit of the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the research laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University's College of Fine Arts. The exhibition will highlight intersections of the arts, science, technology, and culture through a survey of cutting edge projects, cultivated at the STUDIO and developed by national and international artists. 

South Ivan Human Heads are an extension of Allahyari’s Material Speculation: ISIS series. The heads in this series are reproductions of reliefs that were originally located at the ruins of Hatra, an ancient city in Iraq. Hatra was one of the ancient sites targeted by ISIS and in 2015 a video was released of a fighter shooting these heads with an AK-47. These heads were above ground and visible in ancient times. They survived for thousands of years in the open air. Each 3D printed sculpture contains a USB drive, which the viewer can connect to in order to download Morehshin’s openly available research material (images, maps, pdf files, and videos) in addition to the 3D printable object file of the piece King Uthal, one of the reconstructions from her Material Speculation: ISIS series.

This work simultaneously grapples with the reparative and destructive uses of technology in an ever increasingly networked and surveilled world. Her work investigates questions of how technology is used to create current political events, while restoring historical and cultural artifacts. At the heart of this work is an inquiry into the power of technological advances and how they can be used for generative or ruinous goals depending on the ethics of the individuals who deploy them. This is what Allahyari has called “Digital Colonialism”; a term which describes the tendency for information technologies to be deployed in ways that reproduce colonial power relations. 

This installation is part of a partnership between CMU’s K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies and the Miller Institute for Contemporary Art. This partnership advances public discourse around the ethical implications of AI and new ubiquitous technologies through an engagement with contemporary art. 

Morehshin Allahyari was born and raised in Iran and moved to the United States in 2007. She is an artist, activist, educator, and an organizer. Her work deals with the political, social, and cultural contradictions we face every day. Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Archittectura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Tate Modern, Queens Museum, Pori Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum für Angewandte Kunst. She is the recipient of the Leading Global Thinkers of 2016 Award 
by Foreign Policy magazine.

On view at CMU, College of Fine Arts, Great Hall 

​October 17, 5-6:15pm - Steiner Lecture Series: Morehshin Allahyari
Location: Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, CMU CFA 111​
Lecture presented by Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, co-sponsored by Miller ICA.
This lecture is made possible by the Sylvia and David Steiner Speaker Series
 

An Atlas of Commoning: Spaces of Collective Production
An ifa exhibition in collaboration with ARCH+ 

The international premier is presented in Pittsburgh in cooperation with the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture at the Miller ICA.

Facebook, Airbnb and other companies whose business models are based on the commercialization of social relationships, have transformed words like “community,” “sharing” or “we” into empty concepts that no longer represent solidarity or a progressive social agenda, but rather form the basis for an emerging platform capitalism. This economic development is accompanied by a global political shift fueled by traditional community notions of identity and affiliation, exclusion and discrimination. Against this background, the exhibition and publication project An Atlas of Commoningaims to recapture and redefine the open and emancipatory space of “we” as a concept. The project focuses on urban commons—here commons are to be understood as a set of practices dealing with the collective production and management of (material and immaterial) resources and spaces in general, rather than with the resources themselves, hence “commoning,” the verb, takes center stage.Commoning is a process of dealing with differences and conflicts between the individual, the community and society. A process of spatial organization in the relations between production and reproduction, ownership and access to resources. A process that brings together solidarity networks and redefines individual and collective rights. The project questions the prevailing social and political structures and seeks new forms of collective, yet pluralistic, governance.

The starting point of the exhibition is an Atlas, a visual archive with a diverse selection of contemporary and historical case studies­. The Atlas, which is being developed by ARCH+ in collaboration with the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, will consist of 25 projects related to commoning.­ This initial selection is being complemented with new ones, added in collaboration with local partners as the exhibition tours from city to city. As a result, the “Atlas of Commoning” continues to grow as an open knowledge archive, producing an invaluable documentation of local grassroots projects from all over the world. 

From the Atlas, the exhibition develops along three axes of investigation, each one illustrating the tension inherent in practices of sharing. The resulting chapters are: Ownership – Access, Production – Reproduction, Right – Solidarity. Artistic works open up further access to the subject. Part of the exhibition is an edition of ARCH+ magazine that delivers a broad insight into important theoretical positions and practical examples.   

The Urban Design program at the CMU School of Architecture is hosting the international premier of the travelling exhibition after its German premier in Berlin last year. The Pittsburgh edition of the exhibition includes local practices of commoning and examples of citizen-led urban regeneration. Throughout the summer, a series of workshops, discussions and tours will provide a platform for the exchange of experiences, knowledge and skills about gaining agency in collectively producing the environment and communities we live in. In times of rampant cynicism, An Atlas of Commoningshows that there are boundless hopeful alternatives—alternatives that are already in the making all around us.

PUBLIC EVENTS

Opening: Sat. June 29, 5:30-7:30pm 
Open Space Workshop: Commoning Pittsburgh, Sat. June 29, 1-5:30pm

Salon Series: Neither Public, Nor Private 
Facilitator, Dana Bishop-Root Supported by The Heinz Endowments
Thurs. July 18, 6-8pm

Symposium: Designing for a Commons Transition
A forum for exchange between local and international practices of commoning
Thurs. Sept. 19–Sat. Sept. 21

Curatorial team: Anh-Linh Ngo, Mirko Gatti, Christian Hiller, Max Kaldenhoff, Christine Rüb (ARCH+); Elke aus dem Moore (ifa); Stefan Gruber (CMU)

Research partners: School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh and and Technische Universität Berlin, Institute of Architecture, Prof.  Rainer Hehl

Curators of Pittsburgh edition: Stefan Gruber, Elizabeth Chodos (CMU)

With contributions from: 
Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke; clemens krug architekten & Bernhard Hummel Architekt (Team: Oliver Clemens, Anna Heilgemeir, Bernhard Hummel, Emma Williams); Assemble & Granby Workshop; Iwan Baan; Brandlhuber + Christopher Roth; DAAR Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency; Theo Deutinger; Eureka; Manuel Herz; Sandi Hilal, Philipp Misselwitz & Anne Misselwitz; Immo Klink; Kotti & Co; Kuehn Malvezzi; Angelika Levi; Golan Levin (F.A.T. Lab) & Shawn Sims (Sy–Lab); Makoko Waterfront Community; Tukano Maloca; Miethäuser Syndikat; National Union of Sahrawi Women; NLÉ Architects; PlanBude Hamburg, Svenja Baumgardt & Sylvi Kretzschmar; Common Ground e.V. & Nachbarschaftsakademie; Quest – Florian Köhl / Christian Burkhard; Martha Rosler; Harald Trapp / Robert Thum; Urban-Think Tank, Chair of Architecture and Urban Design ETH Zürich; WiLMa GmbH; Samson Young.

The “Atlas of Commoning” also includes works by: 
Airbnb; ARGE ifau | HEIDE & VON BECKERATH; Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée; BARarchitekten; Bau- und Wohngenossenschaft Spreefeld Berlin eG; Carpaneto Schoeningh Architekten; City in the Making; FATkoehl Architekten; Die Zusammenarbeiter; El Campo de la Cebada; Genossenschaft Kalkbreite; Genossenschaft Kraftwerk1; Go Hasegawa and Associates; IBeB GbR; Müller Sigrist Architects; Refugee Accommodation and Solidarity Space City Plaza; Schneider Studer Primas; Stiftung House of One – Bet- und Lehrhaus Petriplatz Berlin; Gemeinde Yoshino; ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles]. Pittsburgh initiatives include Breathe Project; City of Asylum; Community Forge; Garfield Community Farm; General Sisters, General Store; Latham Street Commons; Manchester Bidwell Corporation; The Braddock Carnegie Library.

Drawing collages by:
Students from Carnegie Mellon’s Master of Urban Design program, and the studio “Commoning the City” co-taught by Stefan Gruber and Jonathan Kline: Ernest Bellamy, Tamara Cartwright, Nickie Cheung, Yang Gao, Jianxiao Ge, Yidan Gong, Chase Kea, Rebecca Lefkowitz, Sai Narayan Ramachandran, Paul Moscoso Riofrio, Deepanshi Sheth, Sujan Das Shrestha, Gautam Thakkar, Aditi Thota, Yirui Wang, Alvin Wong, Chi Zhang, Chun Zheng, Lu Zhu.

Architectural models by:
Students from the Technical University Berlin taught by Rainer Hehl: Aaron Barnstorf, Sarah Baur, Sebastian Georgescu, Alexander Grams, Mirko Hahn, Nicolas Herre, Gerrit Jasper, Rosanna Just, Jakob, Köchert, Laura Lüttje, Miriam Möser, Stefan Neumaier, Daiki Ori, Canan Öztekin, Luisa Pöpsel, Nadine Reppert, Selina Schlez, Hans J. Walter (TU Berlin), as well as Martin Edelmann (ifa) and Quest – Florian Köhl / Christian Burkhard.

The production of the Pittsburgh edition was supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the research by CMU’s School of Architecture Margaret B. Gruger Fund, the Berkman Faculty Develop-ment Fund and the Fund for Research and Creativity of the College of Fine Arts.

ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)
The ifa (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations) is the oldest German intermediary organization and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2017. It is committed to the peaceful and enriching coexistence of people and cultures worldwide. Its programs pursue five core topics: Art & Culture Exchange, Civil Society Dialog, Flight & Migration, Culture & Conflict and Europe. The ifa promotes the exchange of art and culture in exhibition, dialog and conference programs and acts as a competence center for foreign cultural and educational policy. The institute is globally networked and focuses on long-term, partnership-based cooperation. It is funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the state of Baden-Württemberg and the state capital Stuttgart. 
www.ifa.de/en

ARCH+
ARCH+ is Germany's leading discursive journal for architecture and urbanism. The name is also a policy: more than architecture. Each quarterly issue details a specific topic, picking up on current discussions from other disciplines with regard to the cultural and political frameworks of spatial production. Founded in the wake of the 1968 movement, the focus of ARCH+ is the critical reflection of the social aspects of architecture. www.archplus.net

© Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V. (ifa), Stuttgart, Germany; artists; authors

Works by: Xavier Apostol, Parley Belsey, Shannon Case, Ashley Chan, Andrew Chang, Katrina Chaudoin, Odelia Cheng, Anne Crumley, Ariana Daly, Chloe Desaulles, October Donoghue, Kianna Gonzalez, Rebecca Groves, Mariah Hill, Lingdong Huang, Grace Huddleston, Hanna Kang, Adela Kapuscinska, Sarah Kim, Jennifer Kong, Isadora Krsek, Robertus Lawantara, Kearnie Lin, Catherine Luo, Paola Mathus, Tatyana Mustakos, Ariana Nathani, Rhea Nayyar, Brandon Ngai, Christine Phang, Vic Reyes, Anna Schulz, Daniel See (Yong Xin), Grace Simmons, Sofia Syjuco, Aman Tiwari, Jett Vaultz, Olivia Yi, Shelby Zasacky

Our final exhibition of the season marks a milestone for the School of Art BFA and Interdisciplinary Art Degree senior class. Filling all three floors of the galleries, students present final artworks and research as the culmination of their undergraduate experience. 

Co-organized by the School of Art

Works by: Sai Prateek Narayan, Henry Yoon, Nikhita Bhagwat, Hannah Martinez, Jianxiao Ge, Zain Islam-Hashmi, Kerrian France, Rebecca Lefkowitz, Emily Melillo, Chi Zhang, Kelly Li, Veronica Wang, Deepanshi Sheth, Sujan Das Shrestha, Aditi Thota, Yang Gao, Alvin Wong

Join the CMU Architecture Seniors to see the work of Thesis, the final year studio where architectural ideas are developed to operate critically within the discipline. The project installations illustrate challenging proposals that explore contemporary questions. During the exhibition, students will present their work for discussion and critique.

Co-organized by the School of Architecture

Works by: ­­Nicholas Crockett, Joy Poulard Cruz, Shohei Katayama, Erin Mallea 

Featuring new work by 2019 School of Art MFA candidates, Above, Below, After, Until examines the dynamic relationships between land, labor, and cultural memory through experiential installation, sculpture, and video. In a moment marked by political and ecological precarity, the artists create spaces of ritual, reflection, and fantasy in search of moments of solidarity and human / non human kinship. 

Co-organized by CMU School of Art

Works by: Maayan Albert, Juan Aranda, Gautum Bose, Emma Brennan, Cameron Burgess, Grace Cha, Hee Seo Chun, Dahye Chung, Lydia Chung, Heidi Chung, Remy Davidson, Aisha Dev, Kailin Dong, Anna Gusman, Conner Harden, Jenny Hu, Monica Huang, Faith Kim, Joo Hee Kim, Soonho Kwon, Hilary Lai, Tiffany Lai, John Lee, Susie Lee, Kyle Lee, Yvette Lee, Shannon Lin, Marisa Lu, Jessica Nip, Lucas Ochoa, Helen Wu

Join the CMU Design Seniors as they celebrate their accomplishments and share their most recent projects! The work featured in the show offers insight into the culmination of four years of study, pushing the boundaries of medium and method in the field of design.

Generous Feedback has been generated through a series of conversations, thoughts and interactions by the School of Design, Class of 2019. It is a collection of work, rooted in discourse around topics that span across time and context. The works are about taking up space in the issues we face in our lives, and navigating the ambiguity with an open posture. We’ve realized, over the course of our four years, we’ve each developed a framework for thinking and communicating about how the world is and how it could be. The translation of that framework is the work that we have put forward.

As a collective, we are curious. The questions we ask address the everyday topics and speculate the possible futures we will face. Our work probes, provokes and scopes interesting problems and attempts to address them. The things we put out into the world have an ecosystem, an impact and a built-in discourse. This show is about that discourse.

The discourse we have as a social community is just as powerful. We support each other, challenge each other and respect each other immensely. Our work is a potent product of our years of personal and professional growth as a class. We value our social fabric and our relationships and we hope that translates in the work you will see.

Curated by Elizabeth Chodos 

Works by: Zach Blas, Brian Bress, Nick Cave, Kate Cooper, Stephanie Dinkins, Jes Fan, Claudia Hart, Eunsu Kang, Jillian Mayer, Sarah Oppenheimer, Siebren Versteeg

This exhibition explores the primacy of the human body as it’s poised on the precipice of a potential fusion with artificial intelligence. Inspired by the Moravec Paradox, the show looks deeper into the unconscious role the body’s sensorimotor habitat has in shaping our awareness, imagination, and socio-political structures. Society tends to privilege reason and logic because it is conscious and quantifiable. But beneath this thin “veneer of human thought” is a deeper, more complex knowledge system within the body. As technologists imagine the potentials of merging humans with AI, these artists consider the body’s elusive and underestimated power. Their various investigations across multiple media offer room to speculate about the exchange between the unconscious and conscious, and ask questions about what the body knows. Before we enter a generation where cyborgs are as ubiquitous as the internet, in a time when we still inhabit human bodies, the urgent questions to ask are what lessons can our mortal vessels teach us and what unknown paradox might we contain?

Exhibition Statement

Disembodied environments for interaction have proliferated with the emergence of social media, which have provided endless opportunities for social life to play out in virtual space, with no physical contact. This new setting has powerfully connected millions of people, but the disembodied nature of these interactions also facilitates dehumanization. The increased access to strangers across the globe fans the flames of xenophobic ideologies, nationalism, and us vs. them mentalities. The fact that technology’s abilities to connect and to divide are equally powerful is a paradoxical outcome of these advances that previous generations could not have foreseen. 

In the late 80’s, artificial intelligence and robotics scientists had promised huge developments that they then struggled to deliver. The Moravec Paradox was one the many challenges delaying progress. It showed that high-level reasoning and logic problems required only little computation, whereas basic sensorimotor skills like walking, or seeing, required enormous amounts of computational resources. CMU faculty, Hans Moravec, theorized that this paradox could be explained by the process of human evolution. He writes, “Encoded in the large, highly evolved sensory and motor portions of the human brain is a billion years of experience about the nature of the world and how to survive in it. The deliberate process we call reasoning is, I believe, the thinnest veneer of human thought, effective only because it is supported by this much older and much more powerful, though usually unconscious, sensorimotor knowledge.” This paradox reveals that there is fundamental information stored in the dialogical relationship of the mind and body; its unconscious nature belies its critical role and its levels of complexity.

At about the same time as the discovery of the Moravec Paradox, Donna Haraway was imagining the cultural implications of new technologies, and published her influential essay, The Cyborg Manifesto, in 1984. In her feminist text, the human/machine amalgam presents a theoretical framework where the category-blurring cyborg breaks down traditional social and political boundaries. Her essay offers a utopic premise that the cyborg might provide the conditions to imagine structures outside of the sexist, classist, and racists systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. In it she writes, “Liberation rests on the construction of consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility.” Since this essay was published, some of the dystopian influences of AI have been brought to bear through data surveillance, privacy breaches, and election meddling. Could the paradox in the age of the cyborg be technology’s equal role in liberation and oppression? 

Today, access to much faster computers, big data, and more sophisticated machine learning has allowed the AI field to overcome many of the challenges Moravec and his colleagues faced in the 80s. Unprecedented advances and applications of AI are causing a techno-social paradigm shift to rapidly take hold. Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk actively develop technological enhancements, through products like Neuralink, to embed software into the body that can merge humans with AI. Before the turn of the next century the cyborg may be the new status quo.

This exhibition explores the primacy of the human body as it’s poised on the precipice of a potential fusion with artificial intelligence. Inspired by the Moravec Paradox, the show looks deeper into the unconscious role the body’s sensorimotor habitat has in shaping our awareness, imagination, and socio-political structures. Society tends to privilege reason and logic because it is conscious and quantifiable. But beneath this thin “veneer of human thought” is a deeper, more complex knowledge system within the body. As technologists imagine the potentials of merging humans with AI, these artists consider the body’s elusive and underestimated power. Their various investigations across multiple media offer room to speculate about the exchange between the unconscious and conscious, and ask questions about what the body knows. Before we enter a generation where cyborgs are as ubiquitous as the internet, in a time when we still inhabit human bodies, the urgent questions to ask are what lessons can our mortal vessels teach us and what unknown paradox might we contain?

Work by CMU alumna Carrie Schneider ushers in the 2018/19 academic year. The exhibition, Reading Women, explores the power of reading, studying, and being absorbed by knowledge. In the artist’s words, the work “reveals a constellation of influences among my creative peers.” This series is a rhizomatic view of thinkers who contribute to the intellectual capital of the artist’s community. “It’s a man’s world,” as the saying goes, but this exhibition offers a countervailing proposition. The ideas in these books shape thought, and by shaping thought, form a world made entirely by women. In repeating the same elegant and matter-of-fact gesture he exhibition forces us to consider what a world would look like if we were all reading women.

Exhibition on first floor.

Works by: Olanrewaju Adetola, Melanie Anderson, Joshua Archer, Sydney Ayers, Anna Baldi, Katherine Cao, Adrienne Cassel, Hizal Celik, Kelli Clark, Matthew Constant, Christopher Copeland, Lucy Denegre, Andrew Edwards, Emily Giedzinski, Ella Hepner, Jenna Houston, Zaria Howard, Cindy Hsu, Youhyun Jang, Vanessa (Yookyung) Kim, Kasem Kydd, Summer Leavitt, Samantha Mack, Rebecca Marcus, Lisa Park, Faye-Belle Quinn, Sarah Stinson Hurwitz, Chantal Striepe, Gowri Sunder, Jack Taylor, William Taylor, Jessica Tsai, Charlotte-Alyss Weissglass, Kate Werth, Grace Wong, Morgan Rolland

"The threshold to the future has been hijacked. Bullies, bad language, and bellicose antics have set it on fire and outfitted it with a small film crew to capture everyone who dares to run through it. The noble feats of the willing are then broadcast live, in a non-narrative reality show for all to watch.

Try to recall that once-glittery future, when a networked commons democratized access and made way for many silenced voices. That promise, too, was hijacked, or perhaps handed over—and then weaponized—to weaken democracy itself. Now get offline: there are books to read.

As you consider the efforts within this modest catalog, know that this threshold is real, and that the present is tense for those who aspire to transform it. But also leave space for levity, empathy, and the abstract. Yes, the promise of the butterfly is dead, and in its place a whipworm persists, infects, and multiplies. The body politic is a host to horrors. Some say the cycle will last only four years, others say eight; a handful insist it will be longer. Either way, we clearly have work to do to survive it.

In this moment, is it fair to look into the void? Can we shop, browse, like, or swipe left any longer? Should we break plates or throw rocks? Did we usher in this darkness, or have these worms been spreading through us all along? Never mind. Quick—focus—your debt is accruing! There are jobs to gain, memes to post, relationships to record. Hey, did anyone read about the very good pope and the virtuous Federal Bureau of Investigation?

Stop scrolling, and look up.

Tomorrow is imminent, and in this simple truth there is a light. The end of complacency marks the starting line for action, for belief in oneself and others, for the potential of transformation. So we begin here, branded in fire, a generation engaging the future with eyes wider and minds wiser than decades have seen. Things fall apart, and from these pieces we rebuild. This is a cycle; the end of one era and the start of another. To those in these rooms, on these walls and screens, and in these spaces: you shoulder the burden and reap the benefit from this rebuilding. You are a turning point, and everyone is watching. "

- Charlie White, Regina and Marlin Miller Professor, Head of the School of Art 

Co-organized by the School of Art

Join the CMU Architecture Seniors to see the work of Thesis, the final year studio where architectural ideas are developed to operate critically within the discipline. The project installations illustrate challenging proposals that explore contemporary questions. During the exhibition, students will present their work for discussion and critique.     

"In this exhibition, the thesis students from the School of Architecture's Bachelor's of Architecture and Master's of Urban Design interrogate value - social, cultural, economic, ecologic - as it pertains to contemporary spatial practice. Capitalist value influences not only the profession’s ongoing fascination with sanitized understandings of building in the sociospatial landscape, but also its (in)ability to consider mediums that offer alternative readings on the cataclysmic trajectory of the path that it carves.

Clearance provides a space for this necessary discussion, emphasizing the importance of a transhistorical conception of space as both the producer and the product of culture. It seizes the latencies such a view offers in shaping a situated understanding of the contemporary built environment. Further, the exhibition offers a clearance of processes, ideas, and practices drawn from this education. It gives a public face to the candid adaptation of architectural skills as a form of critical practice, cultivating a space for their expanded use in the new present."

-School of Architecture class 2018

B Arch: 
Nickie Cheung - Contesting Vacancy: Exploring the Multiplicity of Space in Wilkinsburg, PA 
Sinan Goral - Mycelium as a Remediator of the Anthropocentric Condition: Rethinking the Brute Force Implications of Progressive-Assembly with Organic Self-Assembly 
Nadia Islam - Transcending Bounds: Addressing issues of marginalization within and of the Muslim community through mosque design 
KelliLaurel Mijares - Subverting Borders: Examining Barriers in Urban Space 
Ivy Faye Monroe - Art Capital: Mapping Postwar New York City Art Culture 
Cesar Neri - Mexico 44: Speculative Futures of the Chiapas Highlands 
Trent Wimbiscus - Life at the Crossroads: Emergent Landscapes and the Cultural Politics of Automobility 
Kyle Wing - Oikonomikos / Polis: The new politics of living 
Francis Yang - Existential Schema: Exploring the qualitative design method

MUD: 
Ernest Bellamy - patch-works
Tamara Cartwright - Hotel to Home: Commoning the Princess Hotel
Yidan Gong - Commoning Gejiaying Village Amidst Metropolitan Wuhan
Paul Moscoso Riofrio - Public accessibility in contested spaces: Imaging a spatially and programmatically diverse approach to the waterfront in the Suburbio of Guayaquil, Ecuador
Chun(Pure) Zheng - Mobile Street Encroachment: Shared Living Space in Lilong, Shanghai
Lu Zhu - Incremental Community

Co-organized by the School of Architecture

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries the first retrospective exhibition of the influential feminist artist who played a key role in the formation of the Feminist Art Program at California State University in Fresno in 1970 and at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1971.

Wilding was a major contributor to the historically significant month-long collaborative installation Womanhouse, sited in an abandoned mansion in Los Angeles in 1972, where she performed her highly celebrated work Waiting.

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries includes a selection of works from Wilding’s studio practice spanning the past forty years, highlighting a range of works on paper – drawings, watercolors, collage and paintings – exhibited together here for the first time. Taking up key, allegorical imagery in Wilding’s work, the exhibition focuses on themes of “becoming,” both the transformative event itself, and the threshold to transfiguration. This state of in-between-ness is articulated through imagery of leaves, the chrysalis, hybrid beings, and liminal circumstances themselves, such as “waiting,” the subject of Wilding’s two prominent performances Waiting and Wait-With.

Wilding’s work manages to be both delicate and harsh in its exploration of the pivotal moment between private revelation and public manifestation. Viewed together in this exhibition, her work makes a powerful impression about psychological and physical transition and transformation. In the depiction of the chrysalis and the embryo, for example, gestation is suggested, while in imagery of tears, wounds, and “recombinant” bodies, emergence and materialization are pronounced. The sum of these parts provides a unique account of how themes of emergence were central to Wilding’s articulation of feminism, and her own reflections on a childhood growing up in an intentional Christian commune. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring original writings by Irina Aristarkhova, Mario Ontiveros, and Faith Wilding.

Faith Wilding: Fearful Symmetries is a traveling exhibition curated by Shannon R. Stratton in collaboration with Faith Wilding. The exhibition originated at Threewalls in Chicago, Illinois in January 2014 with an archive, reading room and screenings curated by Abigail Satinsky. It has since been exhibited at: Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee (September 5 - October 4, 2014); Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California (September 26, 2015-January 3, 2016) and University of Houston-Clear Lake Art Gallery, Houston, Texas (September 2 - December 8, 2016).

Works by: Adella Guo, Albert Yang, Alex Palatucci, Angee Attar, Anqi Wan, Benal Johnson, Bettina Chou, Carolyn Zhou, Chris Perry, Christie Chong, Deborah Lee, Deniz Sokullu, Emily Mongilio, Faith Kaufman, Gillan Johnson, Hae Wan Park, Hee Jung Koh, Jake Scherlis, Jasper Tom, Jeong Min Seo, Jesse Klein, Jessica Headrick, Ji Tae Kim, Julia Ainbinder, Kate Martin, Kevin Gao, Lily Fulop, Lily Kim, Lois Kim, Lucy Yifan Yu, Maggie Banks, Max Plummer, Maximilien Stein, Meredith Newman, Natalie Harmon, Natapitt (Popo) Sethpornpong, Nina Flores, Noah Johnson, Raphael Weikart, Rufeng (Steven) Ji, Sara Remi Fields, Selena Norman, Sharon Yu, Tiffany Jiang, Tina Park, Treat Swarstad, Ty Van de Zande, Youjin (Juliana) Nam

The Senior Class of the 2018 welcomes you to Assemblage, a collection of work produced by the first class to complete the new Bachelor of Design program. Projects will be featured from all three design concentrations: Products, Communications and Environments. 

Throughout the new curriculum, we are often encouraged to think about the long-term effects of our decisions and how those decisions affect the larger environment around us. At the beginning of our process we ask questions that lead to more questions, talk to people who matter, and reflect on lessons learned from the past. We do all of this while considering aesthetics and form to go beyond the components of a traditional design education. 

This approach often leads us to help others speak in order to build empathy around the user’s experiences. To convey our intentions, we craft outputs, whether a carefully communicated message or thoughtfully crafted artifact, that respond to our research and reflection. However, as creatives, we often look to express and strengthen our own voice in our personal work. So, as design professionals, when do we speak and when do we listen?

In the show, visitors will experience a wide variety of works from deeply personal narratives, to community building projects, and even future oriented artifacts. In each piece, the designer’s presence is balanced with the message of the project, whether prompted in studio or self defined. Join us as we share how the Class of 2018 has developed their individual voices and built their own design practices throughout their four years at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design." 

- Senior Design Class 2018

Co-presented by CMU School of Design

Works by: Kristy Balliet / Kelly Bair (BairBalliet), Andrew Heumann, Dana Cupkova, Golan Levin, Benjamin Snell, Kyuha Shim, Zach Lieberman, Jürg Lehni, Carl Lostritto, Joseph Choma, Jonah Ross-Marrs 

Curated by Daniel Cardoso Llach

Designing the Computational Image/Imagining Computational Design showcases a selection of previously unseen or lesser-known drawings, films, and high-quality reproductions, as well as interactive software reconstructions, illuminating the twentieth-century emergence of new methods for design representation, simulation, and manufacturing linked to digital computers' capacities for information processing and display. Examining the formative period of numerical control and computer graphics technologies between 1949 and 1976, the exhibition traces their evolution from elemental geometric constructions into highly structured semantic models—and from government-funded research in universities into industry standards—shedding light on the social, technical, and aesthetic origins of present architectural production techniques. From blips on radar screens to perspectival representations and free-form surfaces, the exhibition uniquely reveals the confluence of technical innovations in software, data structures, and hardware with a new cultural imaginary of design, endowing computer-generated images with both geometric plasticity and a new type of agency as operative architectural artifacts.

The historical materials featured in the exhibition are drawn from the archives of institutions key to the development of these technologies, including Carnegie Mellon University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Cambridge, UK; and the Computer History Museum, among others.

Daniel Cardoso Llach is assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate architecture courses. His work explores problems ranging from social and cultural aspects of automation in design, the politics of representation and participation in software, and new methods for using data to visualize design as a socio-technical phenomenon. His recent research includes Builders of the Vision: Software and the Imagination of Design (Routledge, 2015), a book on the cultural history of computer-aided design and numerically controlled machinery, which examines how postwar technological projects shaped conceptions of design informing current architectural practices. He holds a PhD and an MS (with honors) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BArch from the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. He has been a research fellow at MECS, Germany, and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge.

Co-presented by wats:ON? Festival

Curated by Spike Wolff 

Through an elegant combination of drawing, painting and sculpture, Hadi Tabatabai's work describes a place that is as much an idea as a physical location. These compositions embody liminality: that is, they create a constant experience of sensations that exist at the limen, or edge, of perception. To bring about this state, Tabatabai has removed all possible distractions. Narrative and figuration, even figure and ground, have been excised from these delicate combinations of squares, rectangles and floating lines.

Tabatabai uses the physical nature of the materials to create subtle shifts within the surface plane.  The lines are delineated by slightly raised or lowered edges of materials to create works that straddle the realm of the pictorial and the sculptural.  Through the use of light and shadow, depth of field, and other optical obfuscations, the positive and negative space in the paintings becomes indeterminate.  His work evokes the relationship between what is imagined on the surface and what is actually rendered—in a sense questioning what is being “looked at” or “seen.”

For the past twenty years Tabatabai has devoted his attention to a very tiny area—an area that comprises the physicality of a line and functions as the transitional space between two entities. He views the ‘line’ as empty space without an agenda or allegiance; it is neither here nor there. Tabatabai believes that by paying attention to this tiny, subtle, yet detailed space, one is forced to turn away from the outside world and focus inward on one’s own interior space.

As art historian, Peter Lodermeyer, described the work in a catalogue essay, “You have to look closely, as close as possible, then steadily until you can see the seeing itself. Watch yourself as you look in order to perceive.”

Works by: Rob Kesseler, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny, Edwin H. Reiber

Co-presented with Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation

Curated by Lugene Bruno and John Carson 

Worlds Within opens our eyes to the generally unseen world of plants and their internal architecture, textures, patterns and functions. It reveals repeating patterns in nature: generic structures and forms, which recur on a macro and micro scale.

The graphic impact of historical instructive botanical wall charts and models alongside monumentalized, hand-colored micrographs of seeds and pollen by Rob Kesseler creates a remarkable visual bridge between the conventional purpose of scientific illustration as used in educational materials, and the aesthetic interpretation of scientific imagery in contemporary art. 

Worlds Within is a unique collaboration between the Hunt Institute and The Miller Gallery. The two venues, at either end of the Carnegie Mellon University campus, will be exhibiting work by British artist Rob Kesseler, alongside 19th-century botanical wall charts from Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny’s series Botanische Wandtafeln. Complementing the forms represented in these charts and photographs will be a selection of models of marine organisms made of glass in the 19th-century by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and made of glacite in the early 20th-century by Edwin H. Reiber. The glass models have been kindly loaned by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The work in the Hunt Institute offers a more comprehensive comparison between the micrographs and the historical charts and models, while the Miller Gallery exhibition features a fuller range of Kesseler’s recent art work. Both sections of this joint exhibition celebrate the extraordinary aesthetic interrelationships between historically different methods of visually interpreting the wonders of botanical phenomena, which are not readily visible to the naked eye.

Viewers are encouraged to visit both venues to experience these stunning visual juxtapositions, in which the many complexities of representing plants are concentrated into mesmeric visual images and objects. 

ABOUT THE CURATORS 

Since 1996, Curator of Art Lugene Bruno has held a position at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, where she has immersed herself in the botanical art and library collection. She is responsible for all activities of the Art Department and curates the art collection and twice-yearly exhibitions in the Institute's gallery, including the triennial International Exhibition of Botanical Art & Illustration. She designs the exhibitions and companion catalogues; provides talks and tours related to collection items to the public and at botanical conferences; responds to research requests; and makes available for study selections of the art collection to visiting scholars, students and botanical artists. She is an honorary member of several botanical art and florilegia societies in the United States and abroad.  She is also a practicing artist working with gestural abstraction that is inspired by street markings, employing the mediums of photography and water-soluable graphite drawing. She is a member of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and exhibits her work regionally.

For the past 30 years, working in various media, John Carson has wittily and provocatively explored the interface between high and low culture and has sought to widen the audience for contemporary art practice. He has exhibited and performed internationally and has made works for television and radio. He is best known for performative projects such as I’d Walk from Cork to Larne to See the Forty Shades of Green (a 320 mile,14 day photographic journey) and A Bottle of Stout in Every Pub in Buncrana (a one day endurance test). From 1986 to 1991 he was Production Director of Artangel, a London-based organization presenting temporary artworks in public locations. He has been a visiting lecturer at various schools and colleges in Ireland, UK, Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He taught at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Ireland and at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, England, where he was Course Director of the BFA program from 1999 to 2006. He was Head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University from 2006 to 2016, and is currently a member of the teaching faculty.

Works by: Edda Fields-Black, John Carson and Jennifer Keating-Miller, Larry Shea

Co-organized by The Center for the Arts in Society

Every three years CAS reinvents itself with a new themed initiative, where two coordinators, an artist and a scholar, structure a topic and select projects that engage in a focused exploration of that topic. We approached “Performance” as an expansive form, looking beyond the traditional relationship between an audience and an actor to consider how people performatively frame their lives through social rituals, athletics, digital capture devices, and everyday acts. The rubric of "Performance" has also been a fruitful springboard for CAS's ongoing consideration of how the distinctions between the work and place of “artist” and “scholar” might be reassessed and transformed through collaborative work. Directed by James Duesing, and co-organized by Wendy Arons of the School of Drama and Kristina Straub of the English Department, the CAS Performance Initiative (2014-2017) has drawn together faculty members who undertook three major projects: Ghosts in the Machines, by Larry Shea (School of Drama); Performing Peace in the North of Ireland, by John Carson (School of Art) and Jennifer Keating-Miller (Dietrich Dean’s Office and English Department); and Requiem for Rice, by Edda Fields-Black (History Department). The three-year initiative has involved speakers, workshops, panel discussions, and an evening of performances titled "Drama Queens." The projects have developed courses that included field trips to Ireland and brought in outside experts to engage with students at Carnegie Mellon and constituencies outside the university. This exhibition presents selections from the scenes that have been caused over the past three years by the CAS Performance Initiative.

The Center for the Arts in Society (CAS) is a collaborative research effort comprised of artists and scholars from the CMU faculty. Situated between the College of Fine Arts and of the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, CAS aims to explore the role, place, and impact of the arts both in the workings of social power and in processes of social change.  CAS is dedicated to the exploration of the ways diverse forms of social and political engagement have shaped the history of the arts and might drive their transformation in the future. 

Works by: Elizabeth Agyemang, Isabella Katarina Antolić-Soban, Clare Burdeshaw, Bonnie Chan, Clair Chin, John Choi, Becca Epstein, Madeline Reed Finn, Ethan Gladding, Jarel Grant, Autumn Hill, Miranda Jacoby, Amanda Jolley, Maya Kaisth, Sandra Kang, Nat Rose Kent, Janice Kim, Bronwyn Kuehler, Kira Melville, Rachel Moeller, Natalie Moss, Miles Peyton, Bridget Quirk, Anna Azizzy Rosati, Gwen Sadler, Caroline Santilli, Kaitlin Schaer, Christine Shen, Charlotte Stiles, Joni Sullivan, Lauren Valley, Gerald Warhaftig, Nicole Yoon, Chengcheng Zhao

The Dilemma of the Now

The great modernist thinker and architect Adolf Loos stated in his defining essay, Ornament and Crime, that “[t]he speed of cultural development is hampered by the stragglers.” In this pithy observation, Loos points to the truth that the future is made by those who live most in the present, and although we may imagine that we all share the same time period, we do not. This could not be more palpable than in art school, where propositions are perpetually arising and the future is in a continual cycle of germination and formation. However, this process no longer entails the creation of the new, because that idea’s very nature has been corrupted by capitalism’s desire to remake, remarket, and resell. Instead, what is occurring is the now—art’s counterpoint to progress: a formlessness that has no polish, no promise, and no utopian ideals. The now is the real that exposes the artifice of the new by sharing conceptual conclusions in advance of any form or figure. Art is no longer charged with solving problems, as much as it is driven to present them within and to contemporary culture. In this position, art can refuse to be either product or brand, resigning itself instead to mapping a trajectory of ideas and expressions across time. Art is thinking and theorizing manifest; it is a cousin of philosophy and a sibling to science, whose threads have exceeded the body and body politic to confront change through a series of radical proposals that have mapped humankind’s progression from the caves of Lascaux to contemporary conditions of post-humanism. With all of this in mind, I invite you to take part in the now, as this exhibition is a testament— a Roll Call—to the vision and voices of those who bear witness to the present and offer us a brief glimpse of tomorrow.                 

- Charlie White Regina and Marlin Miller Head of the School of Art.

Co-organized by CMU School of Art

Thesis: CRITICAL MASS, Dyani Robarge | ARCHITECTURE BY THE LANDSCAPE, Scott Holmes | MAKING MINDFULNESS, Matt Porter | SOFT: An Investigation of Gender Expression in Architecture, Amy Rosen | PETROCHEMICAL LANDSCAPES, Sophie Riedel | PALIMPSEST FUTURE, Kirk Newton

Independant Projects: PP : PLASTIC PAVILION, Cy Kim + Bobby Esposito | AID.E+ Alexa Roberts | HOUSE-FREE, Ana Mernik | OSTRANENIE, Sam Day

Join the CMU Architecture Seniors to see the work of Thesis, the final year studio where architectural ideas are developed to operate critically within the discipline. The project installations illustrate challenging proposals that explore contemporary questions. During the exhibition, students will present their work for discussion and critique.     

"After taking a year or the spring semester respectively, the thesis and independent project collaborators have dedicated themselves to the process of revealing latent potential in a diverse set of architectural focuses. Despite the varied scope of the thesis topics, they all reach far past the safe confines of conventional architecture. Some literally expand the scope of the profession, demanding that we as designers address issues that demand civic attention—how and why do we design for transient populations, for those living in a pollution zone, against hunger, or for the public realm? Others investigate the physicality of architecture, asserting that potential exists in found and recycled materials. Finally, there are projects that question the goals of the design process itself, railing against latent hierarchies and demanding a more mindful process.

Each of the installations asks a pointed, politically charged question, and provides some equally radical reactions. This exhibit is not a collection of work, but the manifesto of a new generation of architects graduating into the world. What do we know? Come in and find out."

-School of Architecture class 2017

Works by: ­­Kevin Brophy, Brittany De Nigris, Hannah Epstein, Adam Milner, Moses Williams

“The concept of family has been hijacked by privilege, defined by heteronormative structures, and destroyed across decades of global expansion and individual attrition. So what is the family—the “fam”—that we claim today? ... The reality of family is far messier than anything on screen: no credits will roll at the close of our days, no wardrobe changes will remove the stains of guilt and regret. A family fills this gallery, in all of the complexity, anxiety, and turbulence of the real thing. This is Fam today.”

- Charlie White, Regina and Marlin Miller Professor, Head of the School of Art

Curated by Angela Washko

Works by: Addie Wagenknecht (Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry Fellow 2014), Anne-Marie Schleiner, Annina Rüst, Cat Mazza (CMU Alumna, SoArt 1999), Channel Two, Dara Birnbaum (CMU Alumna, SoArch 1969), Elisa Kreisinger, Kathy High, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Mary Flanagan, micha cárdenas, Morehshin Allahyari, Myfanwy Ashmore, Olia Lialina, Rachel Rampleman, Rachel Simone Weil, RAFiA Santana, Skawennati, Soda Jerk and VNS Matrix, Sondra Perry, and Suzie Silver (CMU Professor of Art)

HACKING / MODDING / REMIXING as Feminist Protest is an exhibition of twenty two artists, designers and developers working at the intersection of art and technology to intervene on dominant voices in tech and popular culture, producing critical works that give visibility to women's perspectives and experiences often marginalized, ignored, or dismissed.

Angela Washko is an artist, game developer and organizer devoted to creating new forums for discussions of feminism in spaces frequently hostile toward it. Since 2012, Washko has operated The Council on Gender Sensitivity and Behavioral Awareness in World of Warcraft, an ongoing intervention inside the most popular online role-playing game of all time. 

Washko’s practice has been highlighted in Art in America, Frieze Magazine, Time Magazine, The Guardian, ArtForum, the New York Times and more. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at venues including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milan Design Triennale, and the Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennial. Her writing has been published in Creative Time Reports, FIELD Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Copenhagen University Peer Reviewed Journal, Neural Magazine, VASA Journal of Images and Culture, .dpi Feminist Magazine of Art and Digital Culture and more.

Additional support for Hacking / Modding / Remixing as Feminist Protest comes in part from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the CMU School of Art, and Conflict Kitchen.

Works by: Ji Young Ahn, Zainab Aliyu, Leah Anton, Kate Apostolou, Rachel Chang, Lea Cody, Kaleb Crawford, Justin Finkenaur, Linna Griffin, Ruby He, Rae Headrick, Jeff Houng, Eileen Huang, Vicky Hwang, Jackie Kang, Jonathan Kim, Brandon Kirkley, Daniel Kison, Alisa Le, Zac Mau, Gabriel Mitchell, Jillian Nelson, Courtney Pozzi, Vivian Qiu, Temple Rea, Hannah Salinas, Diana Sun, Praewa Suntiasvaraporn, Albert Topdjian, Kaitlin Wilkinson, Julia Wong, Brian Yang, Lauren Zemering, Catherine Zheng

The work featured in the show offers insight into the culmination of four years of study, pushing the boundaries of medium and method in the field of design.

"Amidst the freshman year excitement of becoming designers, our class often gravitated towards social activity rather than schoolwork. As a reminder to stay focused on our work instead of distracting each other, we came up with 'Friends Only Cause Ugly Sketches,' a tongue-in-cheek motto that has helped us stay grounded.

However, as we progressed through the four years of our education, we all naturally began to refine our concentrations and iterate on what we each believe design to be. We were all able to individually develop a personal design focus, without losing sight of what ties us together as a whole.

This exhibition is a collection of our talents, interests, and values – our focus in design. Through this exhibition we hope to demonstrate not only our work and accomplishments, but also highlight the personal moments we’ve shared with each other, and how they have shaped our communal experience here at the School of Design."

- CMU School of Design 2017 Seniors

co-prersented by the CMU School of Design

Works by: Sara Adhitya, Ahmed Ansari, Laurens Boer and Jared Donovan, Eva Brandt, Deepa Butoliya and works from the Speculative Critical Design class CMU, Tentative Collective, Beck Davis,Tricia Flanagan, Raune Frankjaer, Jennifer Gabrys, William Gaver, Joachim Halse, Thomas Binder, Eva Brandt, and Brendon Clark, Interplay, Terry Irwin, Tie Ji, Cyrus Kabiru, Tobie Kerridge, Onkar Kular, CMU HCI and robotics Create Lab, Golan Levin, Zoe Mahony, Mike Michael, Katherine Moline, Manar Moursi, NoamToran, Pedro Oliveira, Liliana Ovalle and Colectivo 1050º, Nestor Pestana, Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, Luiza Prado, Tristan Schultz, Srishti, Superflux, Laurene Vaughan, Alex Wilkie

Climactic: Post Normal Design focuses on design and activism surrounding issues of coloniality, crises of culture and race climate change in both the Global South and North. The curatorial premise of the exhibition is to engage audiences in thinking about the ongoing moment of contingency and precarity that characterize contemporary life and challenge the design disciplines. Our exhibition, panel discussions, and workshops aim to present alternative models for design that broaden human capacity to understand and intervene in accelerated social and environmental crises. Climactic: Post Normal Design is the fourth iteration of a series of exhibitions and symposia led by Feral Experimental: New Design Thinking, shown at UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia, in 2014. 

Curatorial team: ­­Katherine Moline, Ahmed Ansari, Deepa Butoliya
Curatorium: ­­Katherine Moline, Ahmed Ansari, Deepa Butoliya, Laurene Vaughan, Brad Haylock, Beck Davis, Peter Hall
Provocateur: Cameron Tonkinwise
Co-organized by CMU School of Design

Additional support for Climactic: Post Normal Design comes in part from Carnegie Mellon School of Design.

José Oubrerie architecte/ Atelier Wylde-Oubrerie 
Associate Curator Spike Wolff

José Oubrerie is Professor Emeritus at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University. An internationally renowned French architect and protégé of Le Corbusier, Oubrerie was the project architect for the Saint-Pierre de Firminy Church, seeing the final design through to completion in 2006. Other projects include the French Cultural Center in Syria, the Miller House in Kentucky, and The Chapel of the Mosquitoes in New York. Oubrerie is Honorary AIA, author of the recently released Architecture With and Without LeCorbusier, and is currently visiting professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Additional support for Architecture With and Without Le Corbusier comes in part from the Steven Myron Holl Foundation, the Knowlton School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and the Alan H Rider Distinguished Lecture fund. Special thanks to Frost Engineering (Waterjet Cutting) Cincinnati and NBBJ Architects, Columbus OH, Brian Polgar, Alex Mann, Cory Frost and Dustin Page, Benjamin Wilke, Mark O’Bryan, Romain Chazalon, Luis Burriel-Bielza Chuck Paros, Mark Pataky and Alicia Civile.

Willful Wondering features large-scale mixed media drawings and prints by Patricia Bellan-Gillen.  The exhibition also includes a new installation by the artist.

“Somewhere in my brain, personal narrative mixes with fairytales.  Historical events intertwine with the imagined and the veil of nostalgia blurs the border between fact and fiction.  Archetypal imagery moves about in the temporal lobe with cartoon characters and recent news flashes picked from the Internet join the sagas of black and white television. My work uses these bits and pieces of visual history: the stones and bones of memory to suggest a narrative and remix our stories.  These disorderly notions are exploited and employed in an attempt to engage the viewer’s associative responses and to jar the senses of wonder and wondering that lay quietly below the surface.” – Patricia Bellan-Gillen

Works by: Zoe Ambinder, Audrey Banks, Jacqueline C.J. Barnes, Christin Bongiorni, Raquel Caticha, Lindsay Cavallo, Heather Cowie, Jamie Earnest, Darrius Fletcher, Hannah Gaskill, Max Emilio Gonzales, Madalyn Gryger, Claire Hentschker, Jennifer Huang, Nivetha Kannan, Swetha Kannan, Daniel Kim, Ralph Kim, Melanie Kim, Steven Kosovac, Maryyann Landlord, Tate Leone, Emily Drew Miller, Christian Murphy, Angelina Namkung, Maggy Navin, Rachel June Park, Paul Peng, Nicholas Sardo, Ticha Sethapakdi, Maddy Varner, Carolina Vogt, Paul Alex Walker.

"I have discovered the secret of perpetual youth. Every year I meet a group of talented young students and I join them on a four-year journey of excitement, exploration and discovery. I get to share their interests and enthusiasms. As a consequence I attain an ever-changing generational perspective on life, and on the world of art; to the point where I forget what age I am supposed to be. It is a pleasure to experience the unpredictable uniqueness of each year group and to enjoy their creative development, from high school hopefuls, arriving nervously for interviews and portfolio reviews, to confident and sophisticated young artists, ready to make their marks on the cultural landscape. This year’s group have called their exhibition Free Germs. One dictionary definition of the word germ is “an initial stage from which something may develop”. The example of usage is “the germ of a brilliant idea”. This exhibition is full of brilliant ideas, given form in a variety of artworks: from painting to animation, from materiality to virtual reality. The subject matter is wide ranging: sometimes playful, sometimes challenging. There is something for everyone among the intimate personal narratives, dark fantasies, bouncing flesh, willful antagonism, internal dreams and desires, absurdities, constructed identities, and musings on sexuality and death. What is on display is the germination of a wealth of artistic talent, which I am sure will develop in all sorts of wonderful ways in the years ahead. I wish all these young artists well in their future careers. It has been a pleasure to enjoy their company over the last four years. I would like to thank them for the original work they have produced, for their industry, ingenuity and sense of adventure, and for keeping me forever young."

-- John Carson Regina and Marlin Miller Professor Head of the School of Art

Thesis: Christopher Ball, Avanti Dabholkar, Gloriana Gonzalez, Laura Gonzalez, Tom Sterling, Andrew Viny, Leah Wulfman

Independent Projects: Shanna Chan, Colleen Clifford, Liz Madigan, Nikhil Sambamurthy 

The 2016 Thesis group - Ball, Dabholker, Gonzalez, Gonzalez, Sterling, Viny and Wulfman - has spent a full year and the Independent Project group - Chan, Clifford, Madigan and Sambamurthy - has spent this Spring semester exploring platforms of contention. Though each of these 5th year students has been working at a different margin of the architectural discipline, threads of ideas weave across from one to the other. Diversions, obstructions and difficulties are to be expected when traversing uncharted territory and the results of their work are exhibited in the Miller Gallery. Here the installations are designed to provoke a conversation in the reviews, and questions abound;

Can architecture undermine power and privilege?
What subtle potential could lie in the biometric control of a sensory interface?
Is social integration responsive to a dynamic toolset in a rural context?
Could a dense urban context be overlaid with incremental, autonomous public space?
How can we find ways to imagine futures for the uninhabitable world?
Is there a new digital/tactile zone of collaborative design?
An architecture of tenuous stability could maybe both receive and issue narrative enactment?
Does dressing form a part of the architecture of couture?
How is the world changed with a soft, squishy architecture?
What does the car leave behind it?
Are we temporary players in someone else’s reality?

It is at times uncomfortable to be walking on the edge of architecture, even in the protected zone of academia. This group has worked to expand our definitions and the results of their leaps of imagination and the rigor of their thinking is both provoking and exciting. We are delighted to be ushering these students into the profession and await the impact of their work as it sends ripples through the establishment.

Works by: Dan Allende, Zhiwan Cheung, Nima Dehghani, Ada-Scarlett Hopper, Jesse Kauppila, Tucker Marder, and Daniel Pillis

"Travellers’ Tales

The unpredictability of the MFA program at CMU is one of its strengths and joys. It is a three year journey of exploration led by student curiosity, experiment and adventure.

In this final year MFA exhibition, we will experience: a belly aching performance full of gut wrenching bathos; a heartfelt search for identity within and beyond ethnicity; concern with exile, diaspora, displacement and virtuality; the body in extremis, biologically, physically and philosophically; intellectual gamesmanship, exploring the relationship between technology and craft; surprising collisions between human culture and animal behavior; and the interface between personal and technological histories, emotional and artificial intelligence.

All of this with depth and intensity, approached variously with humor and candor, passion and politics, deliberation and determination. This group of young artists have been test driving ideas on a tough course. Students bring ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, expectations and practices which are challenged, examined and developed through intense discussion and debate with faculty and peers.

Having had attentive instructors over the last three years, they have ultimately found their own sense of direction, and are now totally into self-driving mode. I am sure that the road ahead is filled with wonder and discovery, and I look forward to the travellers’ tales, which will come back over the years. Congratulations and bon voyage to the MFA class of 2016."

- John Carson, Regina and Marlin Miller Professor, Head of the School of Art
 

Curated by Josh Reiman and Suzanne Slavick

Works by: Ben Bigelow, Felipe Castelblanco, Peter Coffin, Ron Desmett, Maggie Haas, Institute for New Feeling (Scott Andrew, Agnes Bolt and Nina Sarnelle), Laleh Mehran, Shana Moulton, Zak Prekop, Paul Rouphail, Diane Samuels, Carrie Schneider, Jina Valentine, Rebecca Vaughan, and Gregory Witt. (Participating artists, all alumni of the Carnegie Mellon School of Art)

This exhibition features artists whose work eludes maximalist or minimalist classification. They probe or collapse extremes, whether ideological or aesthetic. Multiple dualities run parallel or intersect in their practices. Co-curators Josh Reiman and Susanne Slavick selected works in which these seemingly opposing qualities — both separately and together — coalesce.

Works by: Sam Ahmed, Zachary Bergeron, Max Brown, Angeline Chen, Samantha Chiu, Suzanne Choi, Rachel Ciavarella, Aya Demler, Uriel Eisen, Abby Frankola, Katherine Frazer, Samantha Freedman, Morgan Fritz, Adriana Garcia, Emily Hacker, Christopher Henley, Anu Jayasinghe, Keith Joseph, Jennifer Kang, Daniel Kaufman, Hyun Doug Kim, Jiyoon Kim, Min Kyung Kim, Liana Kong, Sahana Kumar, Ji-Young Lee, Junho Lee, Sunny Li, Yaakov Lyubetsky, Vivian Ma, Alexandra "Oshie" Merski, Samuel Murray, Celine Nguyen, Antonio Ono, Hyunsoo Park, Susan Park, Chanda Patel, Julia Shen, Hayden Smith, Victor Song, Adria Spivack, Jessica Uphoff, Sebrand Warren, So-Hee Woo, Zhuoshi Xie, Jane Yoon

Join the CMU Design Seniors as they celebrate their accomplishments and share their most recent projects! The work featured in the show reflects the unique identity, both of individuals and of the design class.

"Our understanding is that designers create for an external entity. The goal of a designer is often to create functional, meaningful solutions for users within a problem space. A critical view of design might label this relationship as a limitation on personal values and expression. Creating designed solutions could be considered idealistic or even imposing.

We, the Design Class of 2015, would certainly refuse to fit into any rigid definition. We don’t like to play by the rules. We take creative risks. We want to produce beyond convention, beyond the expectations set for us. Our work is both practical and experimental. We are diverse in our interests, and our careers will take divergent paths within and outside of the field of design.

Deliverables, will represent our class as the individualists and free-thinkers that we are. The show’s title acknowledges the constraints of our discipline but visually challenges that notion. The collateral takes what the public expects and transforms it. It alters visual design tropes to incite curiosity and dialogue about what design can be. We proudly highlight our work and we acknowledge how we’ve grown. We use what we’ve learned about form, material and composition in our curriculum to construct a functional, conceptual, communicative, expressive, and most of all, thoughtful public image for our show."

- Senior Design Class 2015

Works by: Ben Boesel, Miriam Buchwald, Kristen Chon, Mackenie Dunn, Joshua Eiten, Sam Gao, Lauren Goldstein, Stowe Hammarberg, Gene Hua, Gina Huang, Stephanie Jeong, Irene Joung, Daniel Hyo Kim, Mina Kim, Yoon-ji Kim, Yooyoung Ko, Robyn Lambert, Julia Larrabee, Celina Liao, Lucy Mou, Solomon Ng, Lizzy Nolin, Danae Paparis, Sophie Parrinello, David Power, Zach Schwemler, Ismael Sobek, Jessica Shen, Linny Tan, Sophie Vennix, Andro Zuzul

Throughout our time at the School of Design, our class has embraced design as an endeavor to improve the way people connect, live, work, and play. We welcome you to Mind the Matter, our exhibition showcasing the myriad of ways we as a class have put this mindset into action and creation. Mind the Matter is a statement of purpose for our class. Mind references what truly matters to us: positively impacting people, uncovering and communicating challenges, and reflecting on perspectives we take for granted. Matter refers to the intent, materiality, and the process of making behind each work. Designing responsibly requires us to be mindful of underlying motivations and circumstances surrounding our work. It asks us to consider the thought processes we use, the materials we choose, and most importantly, the impact our design has in people’s lives. Each piece here was conceived, designed and crafted by students in the School of Design’s class of 2016. This is how we Mind the Matter.

-CMU School of Design Senior Class 2016

Curated by Melissa Ragona and Margaret Cox 

Sound has entered contemporary art in profound and unexpected ways. This exhibition explores sound’s infiltration into contemporary discussions of aural and visual culture, with a particular focus on sound visualization, the physics of sound, political uses of sound, i.e. sonic warfare and DIY, as well as the resurgence of neo-metaphysical experiments with sound as a portal to new sensory experiences.

Works by: Paul DeMarinis, Michael Johnsen, Victoria Keddie, Caroline Record, Marina Rosenfeld, Jesse Stiles, Sergei Tcherepnin, and more

Pioneers of Sound + Archive: Maryanne Amacher, Cathy Berberian, John Cage, George Crumb, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and more

Featured Visual Scores: Roger Beebe, Lin Culbertson, Luca Forcucci, Kraig Grady, Scott Kiernan, Jonna Kina, Zach Layton, Golan Levin, Eric Normand, Eric Raynaud, Dmitry Shubin, Matt Wellins and more in the gallery + online

Additional support for Aftersound comes in part from The Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry. Funding for the VIA 2015: Marina Rosenfeld Site-specific event comes from Ideate, and Listening Spaces media initiative from the Center for Arts in Society. Special thanks to the Arts Library and Special Collections, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries with a very special thanks to Mo Dawley, Art and Drama Librarian, Mary Catharine Johnsen, Senior Librarian, Special Collections Librarian for Fine & Rare Book Room, Liaison Librarian to the School of Design; and Kristin Heath, Music and Catalog Librarian, Liaison Librarian to the School of Music.

Works by: Marlena Abraham, Reese Adams-Romagnoli, Nicole Anderson, Sarah Anderson, MacKenzie Bates, Melissa Bryan, Charles Burlingham, Daniel Campos Zamora, In Sang Chang, Stephanie Cheung, Sarah Croop, Connie Dai, Lisa Imas, Emily Keener, Mishq Laliwala, Kathy Lee, Dervla McDonnell, Laurel Michel-Schottman, Thomas Ndiaye, Katie O’Connor, Justin Old, Sejal Popat, Tyler Porten, Samuel Poulos, Taylor Preston, Jolyn Sanford, Veda Sun, Andrew Sweet, Samantha Ticknor, Jamie Walters, Ruby Yen-ting Wang, Samantha Ward, Anna Wettergreen, Rachel Willen, Minnar Xie, Crystal Yip

Experiments and brave new statements, our final exhibition of the season marks a milesone for graduating Bachelor of Fine Arts and Interdisciplinary Art Degree students. Artworks spanning painting, video, interactive works, sculpture and installation occupy all three floors of the gallery and represent a culmination of the Class of 2015's undergraduate experience.

Works by: Zachary Bauer, Rain Chan-Kalin, Edwin Cho, Ellie Hopen + Jillian Sabella, Amir - Behan Jahanbin, Joel McCullough + Jose Pertierra, Kevyn McPhail, Stephanie Park, Brett Perl, Peter Salim

Join the CMU Architecture Seniors as they showcase their accomplishments and inquiries, sharing their most recent projects with the public. Their thesis projects present a unique opportunity for students to propose their own set of questions about the field of architecture based on their interests. The thesis tests critical issues related to the subject along a coherent line of thought rather than answering the posed questions directly.

Projects in the exhibition represent inquiries into the many aspects of architecture which may overlap with the classical thought of architecture as “building,” sometimes directly addressing it.       

“In this exhibition you are invited to contemplate the metaphysical propositions of an aesthete philosopher, consider the analytical observance of conditioned human behavior and response, witness explorations of interrelationships between natural and mechanical systems, marvel at a playfully incisive commentary on economic collapse, share the fantastical emotionally layered life journey of an onion, and reflect on an investigation of futures past and what life might hold beyond an MFA education.

In their various ways these young artists are examining and commenting on the distance between human aspiration and experienced contemporary reality.

The work in this exhibition demonstrates how art can resist conformity, present critical viewpoints, and communicate alternative values. Art can counter prevailing commercial and ideological imperatives and provide a broader consideration of what
is important in our lives.

Whatever Dakotah, Elizabeth, Isla, Jae Wook, Lucia, and Rafael do in the wider world beyond their Carnegie Mellon MFA experience, I hope they do it with the conviction and daring which they have demonstrated in their time here. I have high hopes for their futures and I look forward to learning of their impact in the years ahead.”

- John Carson, Regina and Marlin Miller Professor, Head of the School of Art

Co-presented by the CMU Carnegie Mellon School of Drama

"Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?" 
- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

This USA National exhibit is reflective of those issues consuming American performance makers today: issues of identity, healing, and obsessions with death and loss after 9/11 and hurricane Katrina; the pull of conscience that is inevitable when engaged in war; anger directed toward the obliviousness of many to the destruction of our planet; the conundrum of eating; rising political polarities (and ambiguities) in reaction to the first African-American to be elected president; tensions relative to race and gender; anxieties about technology; the role of religion in society and the challenges of the those marginalized whether they be immigrants, differently-abled or queer.

The viewer will find works that push the limits of how performance design is imagined in the USA today. Seminal founders and long standing ensembles of performance makers are recognized. Vital new designs are celebrated.

Welcome to our country on edge.

Susan Tsu- Artistic Director and lead curator
Chris Barreca- Scene Design curator
Linda Cho- Costume Design curator
Allen Hahn- Lighting Design curator
Don Tindall- Sound Design curator
With Randy Gener as curatorial advisor

Curated by April Greiman
Co-presented by the CMU School of Design
Organized by the LA Architecture and Design Museum

For Armin Hofmann, lecturing at design schools and working as a freelance graphic artist went hand in hand: his activities as an educator invariably provided inspiration for his own work. Rather than a doctrinaire approach, Hofmann’s teaching style centered on the students’ engagement with their own experiences and abilities, so enabling them to hone their individual perception of design issues.  

During his many years as a teacher at various institutions across the world, including the Basel School of Design in Switzerland and the Yale University School of Art, Hofmann accumulated a treasure-trove of experiences and findings on the subject of color. Following his retirement, he produced 20 silkscreen portfolios, each containing 12 compositions.

The exhibition will showcase one of Hofmann’s portfolios as well as 16 studies of the prints as a part of Farbe / Color. The legendary Swiss graphic designer and educator has described his silkscreens as an account of his pedagogical activities. 

As an educator for 44 years, Hofmann has had immeasurable influence on generations of designers and shaped the world’s perception and understanding of color and design.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

April Greiman is a thinker, artist, designer, and educator, whose transmedia projects, innovative ideas and projects, and hybridbased approach have been influential worldwide over the last 30 years. Her explorations of image, word, and color are often integrated into the built environment and select projects with architects, fusing art with technology. A former student of Hofmann’s, Greiman curated this exhibition for its first u.s. showing in Los Angeles.

Curated by Patricia Maurides
Presented in collaboration with the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

Works by: Marie Barcic (A 14’), the Alison Barth Lab, JoAnna Commandaros (BFA '86), Erin Crowder, Greg Dunn, Kevin Jarbo and Tim Verstynen, Rob Kesseler, Clayton Merrell, David Plaut, Jena Tegeler (SHS 13’), Aaron Regal (A 13’ MAM’14), JoanaRicou (BSA 04’), Qiong Zhang and Nicolas Kim, Yu Zhao (BHA’14)

Neurons and Other Memories gathers together the work of artists and scientists whose investigations offer a bridge between and among the fine arts and neuroscience or neuropsychology. These investigations may occur in the studio, laboratory or somewhere in between. Many of these works share the exploration of common territories of anatomy, memory and perception, but with varied sets of tools and perspectives. These investigators ask questions, search, wonder, invent, reflect and offer us a diversity of expressions to enrich our own perceptions of our brain and its mysteries.

This exhibition also offers homage to Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1954), gifted artist and “father of modern neuroscience” whose intricate drawings of individual neurons (or as he called them, his ‘butterflies of the soul’) revealed the exquisite architecture of the brain.

Neurons and Other Memories was created in collaboration with the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), specifically Dr. Marlene Behrmann, Co-Director, CNBC and Dr. Michael Tarr, Head, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon. This exhibition coincides with the CNBC’s 20th Anniversary Celebration.

Patricia Maurides is a visual artist and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon who designs and teaches courses that bridge the fine arts and natural sciences/social sciences. These courses include Art and Biology, NeuroPhoto and most recently Art+theBrain. Maurides has a BS in Biological Sciences from the University of South Carolina and an MFA in Art from Carnegie Mellon.

Neurons and Other Memories is supported in part by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the School of Art.

A special thank you to Dr. Juan A. De Carlos, Instituto  Cajal (CSIC) Madrid, Spain and Charlotte Tancin, Librarian, Research Scholar, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation (HIBD), Lugene Bruno, Curator, Research Scholar, HIBD, Carnegie Mellon.

Co-organized by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Mattress Factory, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Glass Center

Curated by Casey Droege

This fall, the Miller Gallery is pleased to participate for the second time in the Pittsburgh Biennial. This collaborative city-wide exhibition project is presented by Pittsburgh Center for the Arts in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Mattress Factory, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Glass Center. The Biennial celebrates the region’s most compelling artists as well as our unique visual arts landscape. Through partnership with seven of the city’s leading visual arts organizations, the Pittsburgh Biennial showcases a cross section of the diverse, fresh-faced and multifaceted artists who have close connections to Pittsburgh.

The Miller Gallery’s exhibition features an eclectic group of artists and cultural producers living in or connected to Pittsburgh. Using processes in painting, sculpture,  video, and sound, these artists collect and reconfigure the data and debris of today’s world, producing works with a fresh perspective. Throughout the exhibition, a rotating roster of presentations will showcase innovative experiments in dance, social practice, performance, and more. The exhibition aims to present the wide range of approaches to art making present in Pittsburgh, provoking viewers beyond a “pedestrian” reality without fully giving way to fantasy, as each artist speaks in their own way to the dynamics between the quotidian and the cosmic, the social and the spectacular, the local and the global.

Support for the Pittsburgh Biennial has been provided by The Fine Foundation; Hillman Family Foundations; the James L. Baker Memorial Fund, the Hollen Bolmgren Fund, and the W. Alfred Turner Memorial Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation; Richard King Mellon Foundation; Highmark; and an anonymous donor.

Artists: Edith Abeyta and Michael Lewis Miller, Gavin Benjamin, David Bernabo, Alexis Gideon, Ulric Joseph, Jessica Langley, Celeste Neuhaus

Featured Presentations: Drew Droege, Janks Archive, Lightlab Performance Series

Casey Droege was raised by two artists and a mime. Their incessant side hustles, ranging from chimney sweep to insurance sales, created the time management monster/slightly organized tornado that is Casey.  She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. And while her mother made it clear to her that she should go into computers, she now lives and works as a creative hustler in Pittsburgh. 

Co-organized by the Center for the Arts in Society

Projects: Listening Spaces, SocialChange101, and Trans-Q Television

The Center for the Arts in Society is a collaborative effort of scholars and artists. The Center aims to explore the role, the place and impact of the arts both in the workings of social power and in processes of social change.  It is dedicated to the exploration of the ways diverse forms of social and political engagement have shaped the history of the arts, and might drive their transformation in the future.

We approach “Media” as an emergent Media Studies field and with interest in exploring the terms “new” and “social” media. The Initiative challenges us to evaluate “old” media: forms of narration, representation, social and political engagement, in context.  It continues our consideration of how the distinctions between the work and place of “artist” and “scholar” might be reassessed and transformed through collaborative work. Directed by Paul Eiss, Co-organized by James Duesing of the School of Art and Kathy Newman of the English Department, the Media Initiative (2011-2014) draws together faculty members from Carnegie Mellon’s Colleges of Fine Arts and of Humanities and Social Sciences to undertake three major projects: Listening Spaces, directed by Richard Purcell and Richard Randall; SocialChange101, by Nico Slate and Trans-Q Television by Suzie Silver.  CAS initiatives include events, conferences, performances, and courses that bring in outside experts to engage with students at Carnegie Mellon and partner with constituencies outside the university. This exhibition presents selections from the three media projects.  

Artists: Adelaide Agyemang, Marie Barcic, Ashley Baron, Michael Bennett, Andrew Bueno, Lynda Choi, Zechariah Choi, Adelaide Cole, Christina Conway, Melanie Danver, Cristina David, Hank Ehrenfried, Robb Godshaw, Claire Gustavson, Kayla Heglas, Fabienne Hudson, Michael Importico, Sarah Keeling, Danielle Kogan, Keith Lafuente, Lazae Laspina, Alexander Lee, Christina Lee, Justin Lin, Lorena Lopez, Janet Lorenz, Eric Mackie, Alex Mallard, Anna Mohr, Ryan Murray, Anna Nelson, Max Perim, Caroline Record, Lauren Ruoff, Matt Sandler, Anna Shepperson, Stephanie Shulman, Jenny Sorracco, Rachel Tadeu, Nathan Trevino, Mitsuko Verdery, Nico Zevallos, Andres Zighelboim

“With over 40 different artists on display, you can choose the work that most appeals to you!
Each of the gallery’s three floors offers a different ambiance in which to view your favorite pieces.
The opening reception is an incredible opportunity to get to know a young artist before s/he becomes famous!
Our exhibition catalogue is an excellent resource to find out more about these talented artists.
Don’t forget to jot down that contact information!”
- Carnegie Mellon School of Art Class of 2014

"One of the most challenging, yet exciting aspects of art education is encouraging risks and accepting unpredictability. These three artists certainly embrace that ethos. For this culminating exhibition of their three year MFA, they are all exploring new territory. An inventor of kinetic mechanical metal machines decides to go multi-sensual. A sculptor recycling post-industrial waste creates a ritualistic performance for an immersive video experience. A videographer concerned with the perceptual relationship between the virtual and the real, delves into the psychology of the quotidian.

The MFA program at Carnegie Mellon University is a life changing journey, where assumptions and ideas are challenged and tested. It allows time for research, and reflection. There is no route map, and no one can predict the discoveries or outcomes of the experience. However the experience equips graduates with the skills, knowledge, awareness and commitment to succeed as independent artists and to be critical creative contributors in myriad cultural contexts. At this point of departure, I would like to congratulate Carl, Oreen and Yun Mi on their achievements at Carnegie Mellon, and wish them success for the future."

- John Carson
  Regina and Marlin Miller Professor, Head of the School of Art

Curated by Astria Suparak + Ceci Moss

Works by: Ginger Brooks Takahashi (Pittsburgh), Tammy Rae Carland (Oakland), Miranda July (Los Angeles), Faythe Levine (Milwaukee), Allyson Mitchell (Toronto), L.J. Roberts (Brooklyn), Stephanie Syjuco (San Francisco)

Alien She is the first exhibition to examine the lasting impact of Riot Grrrl on artists and cultural producers working today. A pioneering punk feminist movement that emerged in the early 1990s, Riot Grrrl has had a pivotal influence, inspiring many around the world to pursue socially and politically progressive careers as artists, activists, authors and educators. Emphasizing female and youth empowerment, collaborative organization, creative resistance and DIY ethics, Riot Grrrl helped a new generation to become active feminists and create their own culture and communities that reflect their values and experiences, in contrast to mainstream conventions and expectations.

Riot Grrrl formed in reaction to pervasive and violent sexism, racism and homophobia in the punk music scene and in the culture at large. Its participants adapted strategies from earlier queer and punk feminisms and ‘70s radical politics, while also popularizing discussions of identity politics occurring within academia, but in a language that spoke to a younger generation. This self-organized network made up of teenagers and twenty-somethings reached one another through various platforms, such as letters, zines, local meetings, regional conferences, homemade videos, and later, chat rooms, listservs and message boards. The movement eventually spread worldwide, with chapters opening in at least 30 states and 26 countries.* Its ethos and aesthetics have survived well past its initial period in the ‘90s, with many new chapters forming in recent years. Riot Grrrl’s influence on contemporary global culture is increasingly evident – from the Russian collective Pussy Riot’s protest against corrupt government-church relations to the popular teen website Rookie and the launch of Girls Rock Camps and Ladyfest music and art festivals around the world.

Alien She focuses on seven people whose visual art practices were informed by their contact with Riot Grrrl. Many of them work in multiple disciplines, such as sculpture, installation, video, documentary film, photography, drawing, printmaking, new media, social practice, curation, music, writing and performance – a reflection of the movement’s artistic diversity and mutability. Each artist is represented by several projects from the last 20 years, including new and rarely seen works, providing an insight into the development of their creative practices and individual trajectories.

In various ways, these artists have incorporated, expanded upon, or reacted to Riot Grrrl’s ideology, tactics and aesthetics. For instance, many continue to cultivate and nurture alternative communities. Ginger Brooks Takahashi creates spaces for conversation and exchange with jubilant publications, dance parties, mobile reading rooms and soup delivery service. Through photography and video, Faythe Levine documents groups committed to DIY independence and handmade aesthetics, such as crafters, off-the-gridders, and, in her new book and documentary, traditional hand-lettered sign painters. L.J. Roberts fabricates declarations of protest and solidarity with evocative banners and textile works.

Riot Grrrl thrived through the establishment of DIY networks and information sharing, an aspect manifest in Stephanie Syjuco’s project for freely distributing copyrighted critical texts and in Miranda July’s video chainletter for “lady moviemakers.” Recalling forgotten her/histories was also central to Riot Grrrl, and in that vein, Allyson Mitchell pays homage to key writings, feminist presses, bookstores and libraries with lesbian feminist library wallpaper, while Tammy Rae Carland reveals intimate relationships in her autobiographical photo series. All of the artists included here have worked collaboratively and many have built platforms for other artists and under-recognized groups to connect, encourage, share resources and self-publish.

The exhibition’s historical section is designed to be plural and open-ended; this is a living history, not a sealed past. By representing numerous voices and experiences, rather than outlining one single definitive story, we hope it will reflect the multiplicity that was such an integral part of the original movement. Toward this end, a sampling of the Riot Grrrl movement’s vast creative output is included here. Hundreds of self-published zines and hand-designed posters were solicited from institutional and personal archives through open calls, word-of-mouth and invitations – similar to the way Riot Grrrl expanded. Music playlists represent different Riot Grrrl scenes across the U.S., Canada, South America and Europe, guest curated by musicians, DJs and label owners, and accompanied by records, cassettes, set lists, band T-shirts and other ephemera. Video interviews and an ongoing, online Riot Grrrl Census provide an expanded oral history.

The exhibition’s title, Alien She, is a reference to a Bikini Kill song of the same name. The lyrics are about the negotiation of normalized gender roles, the uneasy line between feminist critique and collectivity, and the process of coming to a feminist consciousness, with the repeated refrain, “She is me, I am her.” More broadly, Alien She conjures the possibilities of identity, self-determination and subversion. In the face of alienation and bigotry, Riot Grrrl fostered community, action and creation. This exhibition provides a view into the passion and diversity of the original Riot Grrrl movement, and highlights how these ideas have broadened, evolved and mutated in the work of contemporary artists. 

Archival Materials from: dumba collective; EMP Museum, Seattle; Interference Archive; Jabberjaw; the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library & Special Collections, NYU; and many personal collections

Collaborative Projects and Platforms include: Counterfeit Crochet Project, Feminist Art Gallery (FAG), General Sisters, Handmade Nation, Joanie 4 Jackie, Learning to Love You More, LTTR, projet MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project, Sign Painters and more

Regional Music Curators: Tammy Rae Carland of Mr. Lady Records and I (heart) Amy Carter zine (American South); Pete Dale of Slampt Records and Pussycat Trash (England); Donna Dresch of Chainsaw Records and Team Dresch (Pacific Northwest); Maaike Muntinga of Riot Grrrl Benelux and Ladyfest Amsterdam + Jessica Gysel of Girls Like Us magazine (Belgium + the Netherlands); Lynne T + Bernie Bankrupt of Lesbians on Ecstasy (Canada); Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile, Girl Germs zine and Ladyfest Olympia (D.C. + Olympia); Elisa Gargiulo of Dominatrix (Brazil); Ceci Moss + Astria Suparak, exhibition curators and former Riot Grrrls (California)

Alien She was curated by Astria Suparak and Ceci Moss, former Riot Grrrls from Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and organized by the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University. Support for Alien She is provided in part by Vox Populi.

The curators would like to thank Sara Marcus, Vega Darling, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Lisa Darms and exhibition intern Rose Hermalin.

* From data compiled in the Riot Grrrl Chapters Map, an online collaborative project created for the exhibition that assembles research from various people and the public: www.bit.ly/RGmap

Artists: Jessica Aguero, Derek Anderson, Harrison Apple, Elizabeth Brophy, Lelia Byron, Sarah Ceurvorst, Mirrie Choi, Molly Cook, Emma Eichner, Lauren Faigeles, Sondra Hart, Max Hawkins, Allison Huey, Rachel Jonas, Marine Kambara, Eunhee Kang, James Krahe, Alexine La Sala, Caroline Landau, Paul Miller, Chloe Newman, Emma Olsen, Aaron Regal, Stephanie Ross, Alexander Rothera, Shephaly Soni, Claire Sullivan, Carolyn Supinka, Mary Tsang, Rachel Wagner, Carter Warren, Courtney Wittekind, Emily Wobb

“Browse our art collection.
Surf our web of works.

When you contact your missed connection,
When you skype a long distance companion,
When you facebook chat for hours
with the person in the next room,
When you google search yourself,
...take a screenshot.

Search terms for the soul:
I’m Feeling Lucky”

- Carnegie Mellon School of Art Class of 2013

"They say that some people have gone into the basement of Carnegie Mellon’s Doherty Hall and never been seen again. It is a warren of twisting corridors and bewildering levels - a labyrinth of leftover spaces that no one seemed to know what to do with, until the art students arrived and made it their own. Just as artists renovate derelict buildings and revitalize areas of urban neglect, so the graduate students of the School of Art, over time, have turned the basement floors of Doherty into an incubator of incredible creative activity. In subterranean classrooms, workshops and studios, they have performed their alchemy - ingeniously transforming everyday materials, objects, and devices into extraordinary constructions, challenging propositions, outrageous performances, political statements, conceptual conundrums, and imaginative imagery.

Now, seven young artists are stepping into the light. Their work is presented for you in the 2013 MFA Thesis Exhibition. Behold the miracle of art."

- John Carson
  Head of the School of Art + Regina and Marlin Miller Professor,
  Carnegie Mellon University

Curated by Giovanna Borasi + Mirko Zardini
Organized by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal

We observe — and suffer daily from — the unforeseen consequences of our actions on the environment. We are anxious about ground pollution, food safety, pollen allergies, smog, asthma, cancer, obesity, epidemics, and ultimately, aging. Now that everything is perceived as a possible source of disease, the health, defense and fortification of our own bodies have become obsessive pursuits. We have begun to think of all aspects of our lives in medical terms.

Architecture, urban design, and landscape design are addressing these fears, incorporating medical issues and related concerns in their projects. Their new ideas and solutions are based on the optimistic premise that design has the capacity to deliver individual and collective well-being. Projects propose allergy-free gardens, more trees, cleaner air, soil remediation, and new quarantine spaces to prevent epidemic outbreaks. On the other hand, in addressing health issues, design also introduces new levels of complexity in projects that test industrial methods for food production, stairs that re-educate the obese and infirm, and the segregation of communities by age.

Imperfect Health is not a comprehensive survey of the relationships between health, architecture, cities and the environment. On the contrary, these projects for buildings, interiors, and open spaces are meant to highlight uncertainties and contradictions present in the ideas of health that are emerging in Western countries today, particularly in Europe and North America.

We are exposed to a lot of solutions, but at what cost?

Is the future of architecture in its medicalization?

- Giovanna Borasi + Mirko Zardini

Health is a focus of contemporary political debate in this moment of historically high anxiety. Are architects, urban designers and landscape architects seeking a new moral and political agenda within these concerns?

The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University is proud to present the U.S. premiere of Imperfect Health: The Medicalization of Architecture. This exhibition has particular resonance in Pittsburgh, a city that has recovered from the collapse of its steel industry through its new health care, education and technology industries, and at Carnegie Mellon, a research institution focused on innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and creating and implementing solutions for real problems. Despite decades of revitalization, Pittsburgh still ranks as one of the most polluted cities in the United States, with higher rates of cancer, asthma, and obesity than the national averages.*

Imperfect Health features a wide range of works, including photographs, sculpture, video, research and archival materials, design projects, and architectural models and drawings, that together examine the complex relationships between design and health. The exhibition includes works by an international group of architects, artists, designers, and institutions, including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Berkeley Institute of Design and Intel Labs, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Mel Chin, Todd Haynes, Henry Dreyfuss Associates, Steven Holl Architects, Gordon Matta-Clark, Niall McLaughlin, MIT AgeLab, Morphosis, MVRDV, New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), Philippe Rahm, François Roche, SANAA, and Alison and Peter Smithson.

Accompanying the exhibition are a book extending the research (published by CCA with Lars Müller and available as an e-book and in print in the gallery), an online TV channel, and public programs including a lecture series, panel discussions, screenings and tours.

* According to the American Lung Association, 2008; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2010; Pennsylvania Department of Health, 2011. 

Support for Imperfect Health at Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery is provided in part by The Heinz Endowments.

CURATORS

Giovanna Borasi is an architect, curator and editor. As Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) since 2005, Borasi has worked on several major exhibitions and their companion books, with a particular interest in how environmental and social issues are influencing urbanism and architecture today. Borasi was editor and writer for Lotus International (1998-2004) and Lotus Navigator (2000-2004), and recently joined the editorial board of Abitare as Deputy Editor in Chief.

Mirko Zardini, an architect, has been the Director and Chief Curator of the Canadian Centre for Architecture since 2005. His research engages the transformation of contemporary architecture by questioning and relooking at the assumptions on which architects operate today. Zardini has been editor for Casabella and Lotus International magazine and his writings have been widely published. He has taught design and theory at architecture schools in Europe and the United States, including Harvard University GSD, Princeton University SoA, Swiss Federal Polytechnic University (ETH) at Zurich, and the Federal Polytechnic at Lausanne (EPFL).

Artists: Ashley Baker, Madeleine Barnes, Christina Baxter, Mahsa Borhani, Caitlin Boyle, Ashley Bravin, Julia Cahill, Helena Chan, Yuri Chung, Spencer Diaz, Jay Miriam, Charlotte Gilmore, Natalia Gomez, Allison Gozion, Tara Helfer, Soo, Jin Hong, Si Yeun Hwang, Jiyoo Jye, Meen Jung Kim, Na Hyun Kim, Stacey Lu, Chelsea Lupkin, Julie Mallis, Naeem Martinez-White, Steven Mentzer, Meghan Mills, Ju Young Park, Honor Randall, Megan Ratliff, Alexis Roberto, Elizabeth Rudnick, Tome Saidon, Laurie Shapiro, Emily So, Youshin Song, Ann Stone, Martin Swift, Lindsay Taylor, Hannah Thompson, Meagan Trott, Anya Weitzman, Benjamin Welmond, Audra Wist

“Here at Carnegie Mellon University, we strive for excellence, value, and superior customer service. We believe in hard work, balance, and beauty. This exhibition is our way of showing you how much we think, make, and do. We are excited to share with you our most recent line of merchandise. For the last four years, the School of Art has developed a new collection for premium existence in the contemporary world. In multiple clinical studies, we have found that our employees have made numerous ascensions in identity and community. Using this research, each of our members has developed a new cutting-edge tool, both exciting and beautiful, to make you feel good. We are excited to share with you the products of the future. Together at the School of Art we put forth tools for both living and considering in contemporary times, satisfaction guaranteed.*”

*Terms & Conditions apply.

- Carnegie Mellon School of Art Class of 2012

"The Magnificent Seven

Unpredictability is one of the joys of art. Just when you think you have seen everything; just when you think you have got it all figured out; along comes Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Mutt’s Fountain, Campbell’s Soup Cans, and The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind of Someone Living.

Here it comes again. This group of seven artists are certainly not bound by convention, and enjoy ruffling sensibilities, and posing awkward questions with their work. They each have very different practices, but what unites them is the exploratory nature of their approach, their irreverent (yet intensely serious) attitude, the critical rigor which they have developed in their three years at Carnegie Mellon, as well as the mutual respect and the supportive bond which they have formed, through the highs and lows of this MFA experience. I will miss their pizzazz and good humor. WTF will they do next?"

- John Carson
  Head of the School of Art + Regina and Marlin Miller Professor,
  Carnegie Mellon University

Curated by Andrea Grover 

The most recent manifestation of artists working at the intersection of art, science and technology demonstrates a distinctly autodidactic, heuristic approach to understanding the physical and natural world. Intimate Science features artists who are engaged in non-disciplinary inquiry; they aren’t allied to the customs of any single field, and therefore have license to reach beyond conventions. This kind of practice hinges on up-close observation, experiential learning, and inventing new ways for the public to participate in the process. And through their engagement with “intimate science,” a more knowledgeable public might well be able to influence what research is supported and adopted by the larger culture, and the walls of science can become more transparent.

For four months in the fall of 2010, I worked at a cozy desk in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon as a research fellow hosted jointly by the Miller Gallery and the STUDIO. On a daily basis, students, faculty and visiting artists would stop by my front row seat at this frenetic concourse of technoscience dispatches.

While my initial line of inquiry was artists embedded in scientific or industrial environments in the 1960s, I began to uncover a new narrative — a tactile shift in discourse and practice between that moment and this one. While artists two generations ago were dependent on access to technicians, labs, computer time or manufacturers to realize works of scientific or technological complexity, those I was presently meeting had far greater agency to conduct this kind of work themselves. Even ambitious endeavors such as independent biological experiments, materials research and micromanufacturing can be conducted by today’s working artist — and not at a naive or removed distance.

Roger Malina, physicist, astronomer and executive editor of Leonardo, a leading journal for readers interested in the application of contemporary science and technology to the arts, describes this direction as “intimate science.” He writes:

“In an interesting new development in the art world, a generation of artists [is] now collecting data about their world using technological instruments but for cultural purposes. Shared tool-using leads to overlapping epistemologies and ontologies. These artists both make powerful art and help make science intimate, sensual, intuitive.[1]”

And unlike the rare “Leonardo” polymath of the Renaissance, contemporary artists who operate across disciplines employ the expertise of the network: the network, not the individual, is encyclopedic. The Internet has provided unprecedented access to shared knowledge assets, materials, fabrication processes, microfunding, and audiences. This exhibit examines how networked communication and open source culture have contributed to this shift from artists aiding science to doing science, and the impact this imparts on the way scientific knowledge is acquired, utilized and disseminated.

Andrea Grover was the 2010 Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery and STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

A densely illustrated publication, New Art/Science Affinities (2011), accompanies the exhibition. Co-authored by Grover, Régine Debatty, Claire Evans and Pablo Garcia, and designed by Thumb, the book features more than 60 international artists and collaboratives.

1 R. Malina, “Intimate Science and Hard Humanities,” Leonardo Vol. 42, No. 3, page 184, 2009.

Organized by Astria Suparak

Setting a new precedent for city-wide collaboration among major art institutions, the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial is co-organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, The Andy Warhol Museum, and Biennial founders Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Each of the five partner institutions will present a distinct exhibition of work by artists connected to the Pittsburgh region, reflecting each organization’s curatorial focus.

The Miller Gallery at CMU’s presentation, organized by gallery director Astria Suparak, features artists who work collaboratively, harmonizing individual perspectives, ideas, and talents. Embodying self-sufficiency within a cooperative spirit, the collectives and collaborators encourage us to reassess our assumptions and values, reveal the global in the local and the personal in the political, and imagine alternate realities and possible futures. The exhibition unveils four new installations and two recent projects, and includes sculpture, printmaking, painting, video, publications and workshops.

The artists in the Pittsburgh Biennial at the Miller Gallery at CMU choose to work with others, negotiating their individuality for the sake of the group or project. This collaborative approach echoes the long labor and union histories of the area, as well as the Biennial’s new partnership among local art organizations. This multigenerational selection of artists, who currently live in Pittsburgh or spent significant time here, also exhibit internationally, reflecting the connection Pittsburgh has to the global art world and broader discourses. The projects included here demonstrate the strength of collective voices in deciding the future of neighborhoods, cities, nations, and societies, and the importance of intimate conversations and compassionate listening.

Co-organized by the Carnegie Museum of Art, Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh Filmmakers/ Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, and The Andy Warhol Museum.

Support for the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial is provided by Hillman Foundation, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Kreider Printing. General operating support for the Miller Gallery is provided by Carnegie Mellon University. The exhibitions and programs are supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as well as the CMU College of Fine Arts and the School of Art. 

Global Cities, Model Worlds was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and created during an Art and Technology Residency at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry in partnership with the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University for the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial. Support for the residency was provided by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

"Carnegie Mellon has no house style, and the work produced by this year’s graduating class reflects the variety of interests and particular talents of each individual in the program. The 2011 Senior Exhibition includes work that is weird, glamorous, poetic, delicate, provocative, cryptic, outrageous, beautiful, ingenious, contemplative and more. Always searching and exploratory, their final exhibition is the culminating expression of their time at Carnegie Mellon, as they strive for greater achievement. As well as developing their own work, they have built a set of artistic relationships, which will sustain them well into the future. They have sought to identify their similarities and broader concerns through a playful acronym – M.E.G.A.

I remember their faces on the first day of student orientation: hopeful, expectant, slightly nervous, but excited and keen. I look at them now and they are confident, savvy and ambitious. These students have excelled as individuals and as a class, meeting the challenges of a rigorous fine art education, and exponentially developing their talents. They have built a strong esprit de corps, not just artistically around ideas and aesthetic concerns, but personally around hard work, mutual respect and support for each other.

Sadly, one of the group, and a promising young artist, Jee Hoon Choi died in a tragic car accident, just a few weeks before he was due to graduate. Jee was a popular presence in the school, with his positive, lively, good natured and good humored spirit. He epitomized his peer group: using his time at college to the full, searching, striving, working hard, seeking new knowledge, developing his skills and thinking about how his art might make a worthwhile difference in the world. We will all miss him terribly, but we will remember him fondly and take strength and inspiration from his example.

I would like to thank this senior class for their magnificent, exceptional, gobsmacking art - and I wish them all a mighty, glorious, extraordinarily awesome future."

- John Carson,
Head of the School of Art + Regina and Marlin Miller Professor,
Carnegie Mellon University

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Multicultural Environmental Guerrilla Abomination - Zahra Ahmed
Meticulous Engrossing Graphic Aesthetic - Amanda Bowers
Meditation Elusive Gentle Antiquated - Keilah Boyles
Maverick Explosive Glittering Apocalypse - Casey Brander
Mustache Exotic Geeky Atomic - Boris Brenman
Meta Etc. Genuine Atomic - M. Callen
Mystical Electric Glittering Aesthetic - Elyse Carr
Mystical Electric Grunt Apocalypse - Jee Choi
Magical Elusive Grilled Adjective - Sibel Ergener
Make-believe Excessive Geometric Aesthetic - Rebecca Feeney
Multicultural Elusive Glittering Atomic - Sarah Habib
Misbehaving Excessive Giraffe Automatic - Jennifer Hwang
Magical Earnest Geeky Adventurous - Jessica Jackson
Magical Employed Geeky Abomination - Susan Lin
Meta Elusive Grilled Abstract - Dana Lok
Magnetic Electric Gold Aesthetic - Lara Mann
Multicultural Employed Guerilla Agent - Haydee Naula
Mystical Explosive Geeky Antique - Laura Paoletti  
My Excessive Glittering Addiction - Heejin Park
Moving Engrossing Genuine Aesthetic - Su Min Park
Meticulous Elusive Geometric Addictive - Emily Raffensperger
Magnetic Explosive Geeky Atomic - Rebecca Reed
Make-believe Elusive Gentle Aesthetic - Isabelle Richardson
My Environmental Got Artificial - Alexis Rideau
Mystical Elusive Grotesque Ambiguous - Katherine Roettges
My Electric Giraffe Apple - Anya Rosen
My Etc. Gold Aesthetic - Michael Royce
My Explosive Gentle Abomination - Zena Ruiz
Meticulous Elusive Gentle Apple - Gaby Schmulevich
Meditation Etc. Genuine Apocalypse - Sara Schoenberger
Massive Erotic Grotesque Anus - Lizzee Solomon
Meta Etc. Geometric Aesthetic - Kristen Staab
Meticulous Engrossing Geometric Apocalypse - Heather Stanco
Misbehaving Edgy Guerrilla Agent - Peter Stanick
Malleable Exotic Grotesque Adorable - Ah Young Sun
Meticulous Excessive Gutsy Abomination - Maria Tartaglia
Malleable Effects Grotesque Abomination - Zachary Wallnau
Multicultural Evolution Graphic Apocalypse - Adrienne Wilson
Meticulous Excessive Grunt Aesthetic - Norman Wright
Make-believe Emote Gutsy Amusing - Vicky Yuh

"I am writing on the threshold of the MFA thesis exhibition, where each year the graduate students extend themselves to produce something extraordinary. This stretching of imagination and ambition creates an adrenaline-fueled run-in for all concerned. Jesha will push the envelope; Sean will produce yet another magical bricolage; Dan will combine the poetic and the profound; Rob will puzzle us with some photographic conundrums; and Courtney will present us with a wry intellectual challenge. This year’s exhibit promises to be bold, ingenious, thought-provoking, and tinged with humor. I have seen them develop their work and grow in confidence over the last three years, through a mutually supportive camaraderie, which has seen them through their Carnegie Mellon journey. All have had to reappraise the notions they arrived with, and have undergone a rigorous period of critical evaluation, in order to recognize their fundamental motivations and to refine their mode of practice. Not only does this exhibit showcase their talent and considerable achievements, but it also represents the philosophy of the MFA program, which is to produce self-defined artists of exceptional ability and initiative, able to create opportunities for themselves and connect meaningfully with the communities and cultures around them.

Courtney, Dan, Jesha, Rob and Sean have certainly met these aspirations and I look forward to their further success."

- John Carson,
Head of the School of Art + Regina and Marlin Miller Professor,
Carnegie Mellon University

Curated by Jon Rubin + Astria Suparak

If space aliens landed in Pittsburgh, what would they determine was the dominant culture that unified the populace? It could only be Steelers culture.

Steelers culture is Pittsburgh’s popular culture, and the fans are its primary producers. Often overlooked in discussions of pop culture, much less “high” culture, sports fans are portrayed as immature, uncritical, and passive consumers blindly following a branded product. Whatever It Takes: Steelers Fan Collections, Rituals, and Obsessions looks at the particular and ingenious methods Steelers fans use to construct their own personal and social identities in relation to the team, and in the process, create an active community of cultural producers. Through countless fan sites, gameday rituals, costumes, tattoos, videos, unlicensed merchandise, and more, Steelers fans brilliantly remix and meld the team’s identity with their own. Take Jim Shearer’s weekly, low-budget Web-show, Yinz Luv ‘Da Stillers, whose new season of episodes will be screened in the gallery. Shearer produces the entire show from his bedroom using homemade props and a remarkably clever remix of footage from the week’s game, popular movies, homemade puppets, hand-painted cutouts, and his own engaging persona. His show takes the basic conventions of a major network post-game telecast and reinvents it as a platform for his idiosyncratic creativity and earnest fandom. This do-it-yourself ethos of many Steelers fans reflects larger pop cultural trends in which enthusiasts of TV shows, bands, and movies build fan communities that create their own narratives and aesthetics out of the objects of their passion. 

Of course not all Steelers fans produce a weekly Web show—many simply relate to the team by quietly performing gameday rituals in the privacy of home. Most are fairly common, but there is a more intricate and obsessive form of ritual, such as setting aside 62 minutes to kiss every Steelers item in the house prior to kick-off; following the offense on one TV set and the defense on another; watching the game alone with a painted face; wearing a Terrible Towel throughout the day, even in the shower; defeating that day’s opponent on PlayStation football right before the game; or reciting a customized Lord’s Prayer that cites the Steelers’ owner and the opposing team to be vanquished. And most of these examples are from Steelers fans living outside of Pennsylvania. The Steeler Nation is vast, existing in every American state and at least 27 countries, including over 2,000 self-proclaimed Steelers bars and fan clubs worldwide.

What could cause such intense obsession and devotion? In the 1970s, the fall of the steel industry coincided with the rise of the Steelers football team, generating a perfect storm for the development of a die-hard Steelers fan base. The team mirrored the values and desires of its working class fans: they were owned by a self-made local family, named after the local industry, and had a relentlessly hard-nosed playing style. As coach Chuck Noll used to say, the team would do “whatever it takes” to win. But most importantly, as the city struggled under mill closures and massive layoffs, forcing an exodus of residents in search of new jobs, the Steelers kept winning championships. The result is a demographically diverse community of fans that crosses lines of race, class, gender, political affiliation, and even city and country. "We don't just have fans,” offensive tackle Max Starks explains. “It's bigger than that. It's a devotion. Like a child with its parent.” Even in death, some choose to be remembered foremost as a Steelers fan. Rather than use a traditional casket at the wake, one family decided that their loved one would be last viewed as he would have been on game day: laid out on a recliner, dressed in black and gold, with a beer at his side and remote control in hand, watching a continuous loop of Steelers highlights on a TV set.

A common way fans bridge the gap between team and self is by collecting team-related merchandise and signed memorabilia. What’s interesting about many Steelers fans is that they often take collecting a step further: Shawn Spinda has over 100 signed footballs; the Pittsburgh Sports and Mini Ponies blog details “Great Moments in Unlicensed Pittsburgh Sports Merch”; Denny DeLuca transformed his basement into a Steelers Room (moved in its entirety into the gallery for this exhibition) crammed floor to ceiling with hundreds of handmade and altered objects, each with its own story that describes both the biography of the team and Denny’s autobiography. Other fans dedicate their bodies to expressing their allegiance. For instance, Ron Vergerio has spent the past eight years tattooing his entire torso with a stream-of-consciousness mural of players, plays, trophies, the cigar-smoking team owner, and a stadium full of fans, all intermingled with the Pittsburgh skyline and flowing hot metal.

Whatever It Takes: Steelers Fan Collections, Rituals, and Obsessions presents the participatory popular culture of Steelers fandom. The exhibition, a first of its kind, focuses not on fans as consumers, but on fans as producers—a creative force that modifies dominant culture into something much more personal, and collectively creates the Steeler Nation.

Works by: Alexandra Rubinstein, Alexandre Binder, Alicia Ledden, Alissa Osial, Alyssa Reuter, Andrea Meythaler, Angela Wang, Anna Navasardian, Anna-Claire Harkness, Austin Redwood, Brittany Stanley, Carolina Ramos, Caroline Berger, Chan Hee Soh, Christie Lau, Elise Walton, Hee Ree Kim, Hye Jin Lee, Jackie (Seung-yeon) Kook, James Chan, Jen Inman, Joo Hyun Lee, Joo Young Kang, Julia Kennedy, Katie Kuzko, Kyu lee Viviane Kim, Marc Poirier, Missy Dunaway, Morgan Sanders, Paul Rouphail, Rachel Dorrett, Robin Scheines, Ryan Woodring, Seung Yeon Kim, Seung-Youn Sara Lim, Su Youn Lee, Tessa Park, Xiaoyuan Jiang

"I will always have a special fondness for this cohort of students, because they arrived in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon at the same time as I did, in August 2006. We discovered the mysteries of Pittsburgh together and the hard working ethos of Carnegie Mellon.

I have seen these young artists explore a range of themes during their time here, revealing courage and a sense of discovery in much of their work. Art school is, and should be, challenging both conceptually and technically. These students have risen to the challenge by using a wide range of media to examine their own sense of identity: in terms of morality, sexuality, ethnicity, social background, and economic or political position.

The 2010 Senior Exhibition presents a rawness of emotion, fantasy and reality through sumptuous paintings, conceptual constructs, sculptural statements, animated anxieties and digital discourse. In many ways, these artists have found a means to deal with the duality of pleasure and pain in the pornographic realities, hermaphrodite fantasies, psychological obsessions and mystical journeys that are part of our human condition.

I have enjoyed the vitality of this group and have appreciated the opportunity to share their sense of discovery across the last 4 years. I wish them well and I am sure that they will have significant artistic impact in the years beyond Carnegie Mellon."

- John Carson,
Regina and Marlin Miller Professor and
Head of the School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University

"Elements of risk and experimentation are present throughout the three-year graduate program at Carnegie Mellon School of Art. The unpredictability of the final result is what makes the process challenging and exciting. What you see here in the gallery is more propositional than conclusive.

The work is presented for critique. This happens internally with faculty, peers and invited guests, and externally with artists’ tours, which are open to the public.

You are cordially invited to come on one of the tours, hear the artists talk about their ideas and intentions, and offer your own interpretation of the works through open discussion.

The students work collaboratively to plan a final group show in the Miller Gallery. They must consider how their disparate practices can work together in a joint presentation.

While faculty advise, and the Miller Gallery staff assist, there is no one person working towards a predetermined curatorial vision.

Initial concepts for the final exhibit are presented and discussed, and from that point on ideas can develop, change, shift and shuffle. The architecture of the space, and the effects of works in proximity to each other, create the need for continual refinement of ideas, and negotiation of territory.

The result is a combination of individual ambition, and group dynamics. This organic process means that the content and composition of the final exhibition may not be apparent until the eleventh hour."

- John Carson,
Regina and Marlin Miller Professor and
Head of the School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University

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"In the MFA program at Carnegie Mellon we encourage the exploration of every available territory for artistic practice. These 6 emerging artists will delight the eye, stretch the mind, arouse the senses, warm your heart, touch your wallet and give you cause for concern.

Brian Brown paints scenes of mystery and wonder. Hyperreal, yet dreamlike environments are inhabited by strange characters, or creatures, in search of a reassuring narrative. These inscrutable scenarios are redolent of final screen sequences, which leave you anticipating the next episode. Amanda Long creates mesmeric meditations in color and light, which draw us into intense worlds of psychedelic mysticism, erotic allusion and aleidoscopic fantasy. She pulls us physically into projected constructs with seductive imagery and invitational environments, which encourage us in playful interaction with chimeric realities. Leslie McAhren is ever the effervescent performer. Recognizing the cult of personality and acknowledging the relationship between art and commerce, the golden girl has laid her plans for total art world domination and entrepreneurial success. The art of Gian Carlos Silva de Jesus is in his embrace, his engagement with strangers, and his benign intent to make meaningful communication and interaction between disparate people, by confronting emotion and breaking the trammels of social and racial conditioning. He is a sculptor whose studio is the street and the sidewalk. With drawings, photography, found imagery and text, Jonathan Trueblood’s graphic skills and wry humor combine to satirical effect, as he examines aspects of celebrity, popular culture, and macho representations in sport and in the media. Derk Wolmuth’s ideal home is the igloo, yurt, garden shed, or upturned boat. He is the ingenious fixer who will set up and make it work anywhere. His kinetic sculptural propositions and impromptu dwellings, question value systems, with their frugality and impermanence.

I would like to congratulate this year’s grad students, on the quality of their final show, the culminating achievement of their time here at Carnegie Mellon, and I wish them all well in their future artistic endeavors."

- John Carson,
Regina and Marlin Miller Professor and
Head of the School of Art, Carnegie Mellon University

Curated by Nato Thompson
Organized by iCI (Independent Curators International)  

Works by: Francis Alÿs, AREA Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), e-Xplo, Ilana Halperin, kanarinka (Catherine D'lgnazio), Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, Lize Mogel, Multiplicity, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ellen Rothenberg, Spurse, Deborah Stratman, Daniel Tucker, Alex Villar, Yin Xiuzhen

Experimental Geography is an exhibition that explores the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, as well as the juncture where the two realms collide (and possibly make a new field altogether). The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice through a wide range of mediums including interactive computer units, sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography created by 19 artists or artist teams from six countries as well as the United States.

Geography benefits from the study of specific histories, sites, and memories. Every estuary, landfill, and cul-de-sac has a story to tell. The task of the geographer is to alert us to what is directly in front of us, while the task of the experimental geographer—an amalgam of scientist, artist, and explorer—is to do so in a manner that deploys aesthetics, ambiguity, poetry, and a dash of empiricism.

The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound art of the breaths exhaled in running Boston’s evacuation route. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from a poetic conflation of humanity and the earth to more empirical studies of our planet. Francis Alÿs, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega, Cuauhtémoc Medina, and 500 volunteers, created a human comb to move a sand dune outside Lima, Peru. Although the actual displacement was infinitesimal, its metaphorical resonance was colossal. Creating projects that are more empirically minded, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, explores the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface, embracing a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling its mission. Using skill sets culled from the toolbox of geography, CLUI forces a reading of the American landscape (which includes man-made islands, submerged cities, traffic in Los Angeles, and the broadcast antennas in the San Gabriel Mountains) that refamiliarizes the viewer with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.

Nato Thompson is a curator at Creative Time, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, a project by Paul Chan in collaboration with The Classical Theatre of Harlem, and Democracy in America: The National Campaign. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, where his exhibitions included The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere and Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue co-published by iCI and Melville House Publishing. The catalogue includes essays by Nato Thompson, art historian Jeffrey Kastner, and artist Trevor Paglen; artist’s statements; and brief texts on forms of artistic practice.

Experimental Geography is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The exhibition, tour, and catalogue are made possible, in part, by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the iCI Advocates, the iCI Partners, Gerrit L. and Sydie Lansing, and Barbara and John Robinson.

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING

Oct. 16, Fri.
6-8pm: A Continental Reception

Nov. 14, Sat.
11pm (new time): The Body Double Explorers Club, organized by Dawn Weleski and Jon Rubin
 @ The Waffle Shop, 124 S. Highland Ave. at Baum
Join us Saturday night at the Waffle Shop when six fascinating people from around the world will take the stage for a not-to-be-missed edition of the talk show. The only catch is you, the audience, have to sit in for guests or their voices won't be heard. Audience members will act as local physical avatars for global guests from countries including Iran, Finland, and India. As our host asks questions, participants in the shop will wear headphones and repeat the virtual guests verbatim.
Contact Dawn Weleski to reserve your 30 minute slot, starting at 11pm, or just show up for your chance to let a global voice be heard. THE BODY DOUBLE EXPLORERS CLUB is an open league whose members explore the world through the bodies of others.

Jan. 28-30, 2010 Thurs.-Sat.:
Contestational Cartographies Symposium
@ Carnegie Mellon University + Brillobox Upstairs, organized by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry + Miller Gallery

Jan. 28, 2010 Thurs.
5pm: School of Art Lecture Series: Trevor Paglen
@ McConomy Auditorium, Carnegie Mellon University Center, 5000 Forbes Ave. at Morewood

Curated by Andrea Grover

In 1938, the visionary designer R. Buckminster Fuller wrote Nine Chains to the Moon, his radical proposal for improving the quality of life for all humankind via progressive design and maximization [1] of the world’s finite resources. The title was a metaphor for cooperation – if all of humankind stood on each other’s shoulders we could complete nine chains to the moon. Today, the population of the planet has increased more than three times to 6.7 billion (we could now complete 29 chains to the moon), and the successful distribution of energy, food, and shelter to over 9 billion humans by 2050 requires some fantastic schemes. Like Fuller’s revelation from five decades earlier, 29 Chains to the Moon features artists who put forth radical proposals, from seasteads and tree habitats to gift-based cultures, to make the world work for everyone.  

Nostalgia for our alternate future is in the ether on this convergence of anniversaries: 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the centennial of Futurism, and the quadricentennial of the Newtonian telescope. Over the last year, major art museums have presented exhibitions of visionary design and architecture [2] , meant to reignite that spark of collective imagination that the 20th century saw via world fairs [3] , the formation of international space agencies, and the promise of better living through technology.

Among the surveys was the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 exhibition, Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe. Viewers familiar with Fuller’s pragmatic geodesic domes and octet truss structures were introduced to his lesser-known concepts for tomorrow’s cities, like Dome over Manhattan (Midtown Manhattan acclimatized by a 2-mile diameter glass dome); Cloud Nine (a spherical cloud city that could levitate an entire community), and Triton City (a modular seastead for 100,000 inhabitants). Despite having a hallucinatory, science fiction veneer, these proposals were serious enough to be examined by agencies like the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commissioned the study for Triton City, and, along with the U.S. Navy, approved the design.

If one of Fuller’s futuristic communities had been realized, it would not have been the first time that science fiction became science fact. In 1945, author, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke predicted geostationary communications satellites, some 15 years ahead of NASA’s launch of Echo, the agency’s first experimental communications satellite project [4]. In 1941, Isaac Asimov popularized the term “robotics” in his short story, Liar, over three decades before Carnegie Mellon University founded The Robotics Institute in 1979. Aldous Huxley foresaw cloning decades before Dolly the sheep was made incarnate (again), and countless other authors and artists envisioned technological milestones – from the creation of the atomic bomb to nanotechnology – and their social implications in advance of their manifestation.

It’s not so easy to instill in the public the same brand of wonder and nationalist pride that the Space Race evoked from 1958 to 1975. One seismic shift of late has been the redirection of major scientific exploration from countries to private corporations and citizens [5]. Unbridled individual potential is one outcome of the information age, but so is ambient fear of the future. A 2002 Time Magazine poll revealed that 30 percent of its respondents believed that the world would end within their lifetimes. The work in this exhibition corresponds to the other 70 percent of the population that is optimistic despite the massive challenges faced by civilization [6]. These artists seize technologies that provide unprecedented platforms for collaboration, and new ways of visualizing and representing reality. Theirs is a moment of fluid exchanges between artistic and scientific disciplines, and cooperation among private and public institutions, toward the realization of a possible future.

– Andrea Grover, Curator

In the Reading Room: The Buckminster Fuller Institute, Lowry Burgess, International Space University, The Seasteading Institute

Andrea Grover is an independent curator, artist and writer. In 1998, she founded Aurora Picture Show, a now recognized center for filmic art that began in her living room as “the world’s most public home theater.” She curated the first exhibition exploring the phenomenon of crowdsourcing in art (Phantom Captain, apexart, New York, 2006), and, with artist Jon Rubin, organized an exhibit in which worldwide participants created a photo-sharing album of their imaginings on Tehran (Never Been to Tehran, Parkinggallery, Tehran, Iran, 2008) She recently curated screenings for both Dia Art Foundation, New York, and The Menil Collection, Houston. 29 Chains to the Moon continues her research into cooperation and distributed thinking across disciplines.

[1] Fuller called this ephemeralization, or doing more with less. It refers to the tendency for current technologies to be replaced by ones smaller, lighter, and more efficient.
[2] Design and the Elastic Mind was another important survey of anticipatory design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2008.
[3] The next registered “world exposition” will be Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China with the theme of “Better City, Better Life.”
[4] According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Fuller and Clarke were lifelong friends, who “shared a common fascination with the concept of a "space elevator" (the subject of Clarke's book The Fountains of Paradise) and Clarke wrote in his introduction to Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for a New Millennium, "when the space elevator is built, sometime in the twenty-first century, it will be his greatest memorial."
[5] Private corporations like Virgin Galactica and SpaceX are entering what was once exclusively the domain of government science agencies. Prizes like X Prize (which promotes “revolution through competition”), with initiatives in space travel, automotive design, and genomics, requires registered teams to be 90 percent privately funded.
[6] In September 2000, world leaders came together at United Nations Headquarters in New York to adopt the United Nations Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to end poverty and hunger, provide universal education, gender equality, child and maternal healthcare, combat HIV/AIDS, and create environmental sustainability, via global partnership. With a deadline of 2015, these have become known as the Millennium Development Goals.

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
AUG. 28 - DEC. 6, 2009

Sept. 11, Fri.
1-4pm: Open_Sailing Workshop
"In the time of Buckminster Fuller, the emergence of communication technologies forecasted singular global strategies for survival. Singular strategies fail to satisfy individual irrational needs in a complex society and fragile ecosystem. Today’s technology offers the potential to shift the paradigm of survival from one grand strategy to multiple individual or group strategies.

Open_Sailing is the community and infrastructure that is producing the International_Ocean_Station_1, a universal cultural symbol not made by a small closed group of rocket scientists, but by an emerging group of motivated individuals.

During the Open_Sailing Workshop, we will explore concepts of Object Oriented Politics and Adhocracy (an adaptable organization that does not have a fixed bureaucratic structure). We will use Glocal (Global + Local) thinking to design an Open Architecture. The workshop will be a physical experience – we will dance, draw, design and brainstorm about the future of our energy infrastructure, web 3.0 (virtual + physical), and novel collaborative social models. See you there!" - Open_Sailing

5-6pm: Gallery Tour with Curator

6-8pm: 2009: A Taste Odyssey Reception
The first 100 people will receive a miracle berry tablet for a taste-tripping adventure.

Oct. 3, Sat.
Visionary Ideas for this World or Another organized by Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski (The Waffle Shop)
@ East Liberty Presbyterian Church, main chapel, S. Highland at Baum

Eight people from all walks of life will be presenting their mind-blowing visionary ideas for the future in a live contest. The winning concept will be broadcast to the cosmos and will receive a year’s worth of free waffles, along with a $250 cash prize.

Each visionary will have five minutes to present their idea orally, and two minutes to answer questions from our panel of judges. The top two visionaries will then defend their proposal against questions from the entire audience, before a winner is selected.

The Judges: Janera Solomon, Executive Director of the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater. Pittsburgh City Councilman Bill Peduto. Visonary educator and artist Lowry Burgess. And You the studio audience: You know who you are.
Visionaries include: Gregg Pangle, Catalina Ocampo, John Farley, Alison Alvarez, and more.

Waffle Shop is an experimental platform for media production and public dialogue that combines a restaurant with the production of an online TV show directly on the premises. At Waffle Shop, our customers are our funders, audience and participants as we film each night, inviting interested patrons to express their unique opinions and personalities. Our recordings are streamed live on our website during our open hours, and then produced into episodes which are broadcast publicly 24 hours a day in the windows of the storefront, and made available through our online archive. For more information, please visit: http://www.waffleshop.org

Oct. 8, Thurs.
3pm: Workshop with Stephanie Smith @ Miller Gallery
5pm: School of Art Lecture Series: Stephanie Smith
@ Kresge Theatre, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University

"It's All Free Because It's Yours" (The Diggers, 1969)

This workshop will explore the idea of “free”. Our current economic system was designed hundreds of years ago and may no longer meet our needs today. Can we develop new ways to exchange value? What if goods and services were free? What physical, cultural and societal infrastructures would we need to accomplish this?

We will use as inspiration the work of the sixties counterculture activist group ‘The Diggers’, and also the original ‘Diggers’ (active in the UK in the 1600s) who inspired them. We’ll also reference the seminal book by E.F. Schumacher ‘Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered’.

The Commons(Commune) kiosk constructed in the gallery will offer a starting point for a discussion on “free” infrastructure in public spaces. We’ll also brainstorm other ideas to create zones of “free”-dom in culture, society, and in our daily lives.

Workshop will be followed by a 5pm lecture at Kresge Theatre in the College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon. This workshop is part of the 29 Chains to the Moon exhibition currently on view at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, and the School of Art Lecture Series.

Oct. 22, Thurs.
7:30-9pm: Dorkbot: Lenka Clayton (A Piece of the Moon), Eric Singer (from LEMUR)
@ Brillobox Upstairs, 4104 Penn Ave. at Main

Nov. 17, Tues.
5-6:30pm: School of Art Lecture Series: Claire Bishop
@ McConomy Auditorium, Carnegie Mellon University Center, 5000 Forbes Ave. at Morewood

“A Word From Our C.E.O.”

The deceptively simple poetic interventions of Jennifer Gooch, wryly activate a delicate and awkward territory between the private and the public. Joey Hays proposes a playful approach to environmental and social concerns through genial kinetic experimentation and friendly, participatory sculptures. With her fabricated aerial views of fictional locations, Samina Mansuri substitutes media generated images of war zones with a haunting psychological terrain. Michael Nixon uses photography to poignantly represent the post-industrial malaise, manifest in the blighted urban fabric of Pittsburgh. Greg Witt invents digitally and mechanically ingenuous machines which intrigue, entertain and delight with their winsome, intricate clunkiness.

I wholeheartedly support their artistic ambitions and would recommend them to you highly. Managing to complete the graduate program at Carnegie Mellon, has them well suited for success.

John Carson,
Regina Gouger Miller and Marlin Miller Jr. Professor of Art
and Head of the School of Art

In Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now, hundreds of posters, photographs, moving images, audio clips, and ephemera bring to life over forty years of activism, political protest, and campaigns for social justice.

Curated by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee, this important and timely exhibition surveys the creative work of dozens of international social movements. Signs of Change presents the creative outpourings of social movements, such as those for civil rights and black power in the United States; democracy in China; anti-apartheid in Africa; squatting in Europe; environmental activism and women's rights internationally; and the global AIDS crisis, as well as uprisings and protests, such as those for indigenous control of lands; against airport construction in Japan; and for radical social transformation in France.

The exhibition also explores the development of powerful counter-cultures that evolve beyond traditional politics and create distinct aesthetics, life-styles, and social organizations. Although histories of political groups and counter-cultures have been written, and political and activist shows have been held, this exhibition is a groundbreaking attempt to chronicle the artistic and cultural production of these movements. Signs of Change offers a chance to see relatively unknown or rarely seen works, and is intended to not only provide a historical framework for contemporary activism, but also to serve as an inspiration for the present and the future.

COUNTRIES REPRESENTED

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bosnia, Brazil, Burma, Cameroon, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Congo, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Curated by Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee as part of Exit Art’s Curatorial Incubator. Curatorial Incubator Director: Mary Anne Staniszewski.

Dara Greenwald is a media artist and PhD Candidate in the Electronic Art Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her collaborative work often takes the form of video, writing, and cultural organizing. She worked at the Video Data Bank from 1998-2005 and taught DIY exhibition at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2003-2005. www.daragreenwald.com

Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator and activist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. His work often revolves around themes of radical politics, privatization and public space. His most recent book is Reproduce & Revolt/Reproduce Y Rebélate (Soft Skull Press, 2008, co-edited with Favianna Rodriguez). He also organizes the Celebrate People's History Poster Series and is part of the political art cooperative Justseeds.org.

“Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now” is an exhibition produced by Exit Art, NY, and was the inaugural project of the Curatorial Incubator Program. The program expands Exit Art's commitment to young and emerging curators and scholars in contemporary art, by giving material, financial, and human resources to developing curatorial talent. Working with Exit Art directors and staff, fellows curate large-scale exhibition projects, learn fundraising, develop outreach and educational programs, and co-publish a catalogue.

FUNDING: Signs of Change at the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University is underwritten in part by the Jill Watson Family Foundation. The exhibitions and programs at the Miller Gallery are supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as well as the School of Art and the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University.

Signs of Change is supported by a major grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional support provided by the Museum program at the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency, and the Starry Night Fund at The Tides Foundation.

Public programs at Exit Art were supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. General exhibition support provided by Bloomberg LP; Carnegie Corporation; Jerome Foundation; Pollock-Krasner Foundation; Exit Art’s Board of Directors and its members. Exit Art gratefully acknowledges public funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn and New York State Senator Thomas K. Duane. Sponsoring partners of Signs of Change are The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) in Los Angeles and the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam.

Curated by Astria Suparak

Reaching countless people through websites, newspapers, and television broadcasts, the sometimes anonymous Yes Men are among the most visible and effective artist-activists of our time. Over the past dozen years they have fearlessly taken on the world’s biggest corporations and bureaucracies through a process they call “Identity Correction.” Masquerading as official representatives at business conferences and on the news, they have helped keep critical issues in the international spotlight. “Unlike Identity Theft, which criminals practice with dishonest intent,” The Yes Men clarify, “Identity Correction is the art of impersonating a powerful criminal to publicly humiliate them for conspiring against the public good.”

Infiltrating the elite realm of the influential and the moneyed, cloaked in the sheerest layer of authority—thrift-store suits, quick-print business cards, forged press releases—these social activators urge us to question where ethics belong in our capitalist-driven society. In their elaborate hoaxes and improvised pranks, The Yes Men provide fleeting glimpses of a more humane world: Dow Chemical assumes full responsibility for the worst industrial accident in history at Bhopal, The New York Times reports on the end of the Iraq war and legislation capping C.E.O. salaries, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reopens public housing in New Orleans and forces Exxon and Shell to restore the region’s wetlands, and the World Trade Organization disbands in order to improve the lot of the poor. Alternately, The Yes Men extrapolate extreme conclusions to the free market’s greed and disdain: McDonald’s recycles its hamburgers for Third World consumption, Exxon converts climate-change victims into fuel, Dow calculates the acceptable ratio of death to profit, and the W.T.O. unsheathes its Management Leisure Suit to remotely control sweatshop workers.

This survey represents the first-ever solo exhibition of The Yes Men. Here you can walk into a re-creation of their past exploits in the Conference area, witness a comically apocalyptic future, and pay respects to a janitor who generously donated his body to satisfy our insatiable energy needs. In the Executive Board Room, you may browse through The Yes Men’s personal office items and orate along to their absurd PowerPoint presentations.

In all of their exploits, The Yes Men hold a mirror up to faceless, corporate power. They do this not only to mock its acute disconnect with the real needs of people, but also to rouse to action the individuals who uphold this structure—that is, all of us. They push the limits of taste, forcing us to define our ethical boundaries and reaffirm our agency, a vitally important task in an era of eroding civil rights and marketing campaigns that obfuscate what democracy means.

In the tradition of the Situationists, through lurid satire reminiscent of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, strategies of tactical media like those of the Critical Art Ensemble, institutional critique à la the Guerilla Girls, Hans Haacke, and Ant Farm, or public performances akin to those of Abbie Hoffman, Adrian Piper, and the Reverend Billy, The Yes Men seek to incite change. 

Above all, they urge us to do something better.

- Astria Suparak, Curator

Curated by Astria Suparak

Big box buildings have increasingly dominated the American landscape since the 1960s. Author, artist, and researcher Julia Christensen spent the last six years studying these monolithic, free-standing structures and their resulting effects on our culture. In Your Town, Inc., photographs and new installation work examine how communities are changing in the shadow of corporate real estate.

Seventy-seven photographs from Christensen’s critically acclaimed book, Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, 2008), illustrate the ways in which communities throughout the United States creatively re-employ the structures constructed and abandoned by multinational corporations, such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. Resulting endeavors include: justice center, megachurch, senior resource center, elementary school, and flea market.

For Your Town, Inc., Christensen fabricated a sculptural construction that is a reaction and response to the big box concept. Her UnBox (2008) demonstrates values and conventions opposed to the superstore sort: it is modular, transportable, easily reusable, and made of regional and recycled materials.  Furthermore, UnBox will be activated for creative and social uses, rather than retail purposes, by various local groups who can propose events to take place within this new facility.  The installation can enable discussion about urgent issues such as sustainability, user-friendliness, and reusability.

Across the floor of the gallery an actual-sized parking lot will be painted to local city code. The lot raises questions about the infrastructural aspect of our lifestyles–particularly, the auto-centricity of our culture.

Your Town, Inc. is an exhibition that explores the state of our built environment. Among Christensen’s photographs of reworked big box buildings, the UnBox structure, and the parking lot setting, the audience will be asked to think critically about how their own town has changed in light of corporate real estate. And ultimately, the question will be posed: how can you reclaim power over the design of your town’s future?

Your Town, Inc. is organized by the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, in connection with the release of the artist’s book with MIT Press. The Carnegie Mellon Office of the Vice-Provost and the School of Art Lecture Series have provided assistance for the Big Box Reuse presentation.

PAST EVENTS

Sept. 19, Fri.
6-8pm: Hometown BBQ Reception

Nov. 13, Thurs.
4:30-6pm: Carnegie Mellon University Lecture Series: Big Box Reuse Presentation
+ Book Signing

Oct. 2, Thurs.
Unbox Event: CRAFT LUNCHTIME with CFAfun

Oct. 28, Tues.
Unbox Event: "From Cellar to Attic", video installation by Ian Warren

RELATED

· Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes: Carnegie Museum of Art,
  Oct. 2008–Jan. 2009

· Society for Photographic Education: Mid-Atlantic Conference, Nov. 7-9, 2008

AREAS OF INTEREST

· Architecture: Urban Planning, Landscape Architecture
· Art: Photo, Sculpture
· Design
· Environmental Studies
· Humanities: American Studies, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture

TOUR SCHEDULE

Aug. 29 – Nov. 23, 2008
Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Feb. 25 – Mar. 19, 2010
Richmond Center for Visual Arts, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI