Swamplands

Tuesday March 5, 2024

 

Swamplands, a yearlong research and exhibition series at Storefront for Art and Architecture focused on the ethical and technical entanglements of water. This program takes the murky soil and unstable grounds of swamps as a conceptual framework to highlight the ecological and socioeconomic intricacies that lie at the threshold between bodies of water and land.

 

Presenting newly commissioned works and exhibitions that are anchored alongside the coast of the Gulf of Mexico by artists Imani Jacqueline Brown, Gala Porras-Kim, and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Swamplands explores unique social, political, and economic conditions in the tidelands of Louisiana, Yucatan, and Texas respectively. In addition to the three exhibitions, this multi-sited project will also unfold through public programs, radio broadcasts, a research fellowship, an open call, and a thematic reader that will aid in connecting with other geographies dealing with the increasing complexities of wetlands. Individually and collectively, these artistic expressions challenge perceptions of swamps as unstable environments, portraying them instead as sites of inherent duality and hybridity, both of emergence and transformation, of care and kinship, as well as of violence and neglect. 

 

The different projects and dialogues hosted throughout the year aim to uncover the emergence of diverse life forms amidst the dynamic interplay of weather, water, land, and the coexistence of human and non-human elements. The intrinsic ambiguity of mud becomes a poignant locus of resistance, defying conventional capitalist interpretations of climate dynamics and environmental health. Swamplands thus becomes a platform for reimagining our relationship with these ecologically rich yet often misunderstood landscapes, inviting a reevaluation towards notions of environmental stewardship and cultural engagement.

 

 

Swamp Summit

Serving as a prelude to Swamplands, the Swamp Summit was a field trip and learning summit which took place in February 2024, and brought together a multidisciplinary group of artists, curators, anthropologists, biologists, environmental activists, and poets to collectively think on the social, political, and material presence of water in the Yucatán peninsula. It was organized in collaboration with Fundación Transformación, Arte y Educación, and Jorge Pardo.

 

Exhibitions

Fred Schmidt-Arenales: March 2023

 

Imani Jacqueline Brown: June 2024

 

Gala Porras-Kim: September 2024

 

Open Call

The Swamplands: Open Call in collaboration with frieze magazine will be launched this Spring and invites proposal submissions for a month long exhibition to be presented at Storefront’s gallery in January 2025. The selected application will receive institutional support, a budget, and a fee to develop and realize the project.

 

Broadcasts

Throughout the year, Storefront will be collaborating with the independent online radio Montez Press Radio to release Swamplands: Broadcasts, a series of radio programs that further explore the subject through staged conversations, interviews, readings, etc. These broadcasts provide another platform to disseminate our ongoing generative research. These four radio broadcasts will collage case studies, conversations, and field recordings to weave our findings together. 

 

Open Sessions

During the last week of each month Storefront will open the gallery for Swamplands: Open Sessions, inviting a different guest to curate and host the evening. These informal gatherings will open a space for collective learning where critical issues surrounding ecological and socioeconomic intricacies that lie at the threshold between bodies of water and land are shared and discussed.

 

Researcher in Residence

The Swamplands: Researcher in Residence will spend the year thinking through ideas of borders and ambiguous land and water terrains as it pertains to Florida and Cuba, with an emphasis on investigating marginalized histories and ecological narratives.  

 

Reader

A publication with excerpts from the cumulative research, new commissions, and archival materials will be published at the end of this year-long program.

 

Additional public programs will take place in conjunction with the exhibitions. For more information, follow us on Instagram, or sign up for our newsletter

 

Credits

Swamplands is conceived and organized by the Storefront Team

Graphic design by Estudio Herrera 

Photography by Yvonne Venegas

 

Support
Storefront’s Swamplands  program is made possible through the support of the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; with invaluable support from Storefront’s Board of Directors, the Storefront Circle, Storefront members, and individual donors. Storefront is a proud member of CANNY (Collaborative Arts Network New York), currently supported by the Mellon Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Arison Arts Foundation, Imperfect Family Foundation, and Jay DeFeo Foundation. Storefront extends to a special thanks to our Swamp Summit partners, Fundación TAE and Jorge Pardo.

On the Ground: Open Call

Saturday January 20, 2024 – Saturday February 17, 2024

 

Building on their exploration of intimate bodywork spaces as hubs of collective activism for migrant massage workers, sex workers, and allies of the Asian diaspora, Red Canary Song utilizes Storefront’s gallery to engage both the Flushing, Queens community and the migrant body care workers in Chinatown, Manhattan. For RCS, the massage parlor represents a multifaceted space – a home, a stage, a confinement, and a battleground for decriminalization and migrant justice.

 

The works on view delve into these entangled practices of placemaking, navigating issues of commercialism, fetishization, domesticity, exotification, policing, violence, self-care, and survival. In this context, Storefront itself evolves into a site of advocacy and collective struggle while addressing the nuanced risks and liberatory power associated with the interior and exterior aspects of labour and their respective communities. 

 

The exhibition will open at Storefront for Art and Architecture on January 20, 2024. Throughout the show, Red Canary Song will offer community-based programs, including body care workshops, karaoke evenings, fundraisers, and a Lunar New Year celebration for Chinatown spa workers.

 

About Red Canary Song

Red Canary Song’s (RCS) work centers on mutual aid, community care, and decriminalization of labor. 

 

In November 2017, RCS formed in response to the death of Yang Song, a migrant Chinese massage worker who fell to her death from a fourth-floor window during a police raid. RCS rallied to protest the police, provide mutual aid to the family of Yang Song and other Asian massage and sex workers, and to advocate for decriminalization of unlicensed massage work and sex work. 

 

Through the pandemic, RCS provided workers with mutual aid including groceries, legal assistance, funds, and translation services. In March 2021, a gunman targeting Asian massage workers killed eight people in Atlanta. RCS responded to the tragedy by gathering communities together to mourn and protest. RCS vigils have brought together thousands of workers and allies across a range of ethnic, gender, economic, and political orientations to participate in art activations and rituals of healing.

 

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture, in partnership with frieze magazine, are thrilled to launch an open call for proposals that reflect on the spatial dynamics of New York City’s ground floor. 

 

Building upon On the Ground, our yearlong program focused on the critical role storefronts play in shaping public life, this open call is an opportunity for artists, architects, and researchers to develop a new body of work that will be presented at Storefront’s exhibition space during January 2024. 

 

Amongst other things, storefronts act as thresholds between public and private space, as social anchors or carescapes within communities, as voids of real estate speculation or markers of changing consumption patterns. This new initiative invites critical responses to the forces that shape the city’s street life through the production and presentation of new work by individuals or collectives.

 

Ever since it was founded in 1982, Storefront has chronicled the changing urban landscape of New York City and beyond. We’re interested in supporting work committed to presenting diverse notions of place and public life, which is at the core of Storefront’s mission. 

 

We are open to diverse forms of practice, including video, photography projects, performance-based work, installation pieces, architectural ideas, and other media. Proposals should take the form of a new body of work aligned with On the Ground that can be presented as a month-long exhibition at Storefront. Collaborations across different professional fields and practices are welcome.

 

The selected proposal will receive a $10,000 production budget in addition to a $1,500 artist fee and curatorial assistance from Storefront to present the work at the gallery. Through the support of our partner frieze magazine, and their unparalleled platform for the discovery, inspiration, and discourse of contemporary art and culture, the selected project will gain additional attention from an arts and culture audience worldwide.

 

Storefront is committed to determining the successful project through a blind review process composed of a New York-based jury of curators, scholars, and leading cultural practitioners. Projects will be considered by the strength of the ideas, the applicant’s engagement with the subject matter, the feasibility of the project with regard to budget and timeline, and the responsiveness to Storefront’s mission at large.

 

To find out more about On the Ground series please click here.

 

– Naomi Beckwith, Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

– Tom Finkelpearl, Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence, The City University of New York 

– Danielle A. Jackson, Curator, Artists Space

– Sohrab Mohebbi, Director, SculptureCenter

– Manuela Moscoso, Executive Director and Chief Curator, CARA

– Felicity D. Scott, Professor of Architecture, Director of the PhD program in Architecture (History and Theory), and Co-Director of the CCCP program, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University

 

–  The successful project will be announced through Storefront and frieze digital platforms by the end of July.

–  The selected candidate will be announced with an advertisement in the printed edition of frieze magazine.

–  As part of Storefront’s public program, a conversation between the selected participant with frieze’s senior editor Terence Trouillot will be held at the gallery space during the run of the show. 

–  The work must be realized within August and December 2023 and be ready to be installed at the gallery during the first two weeks of January. (Please note the facade panels will be closed during the winter. Interventions on the exterior facade will not be possible due to our ongoing Groundworks commission.). 

– The production budget is $10,000, which should include all costs involved in the development and installation of the project, including materials, fabrication, printing, transportation and shipping, installation, and the realization of any other related events and activities. There is an artist fee of $1,500 for the selected applicant in addition to the production budget.

– The work will be presented at Storefront from January through February 2024. 

– This opportunity is open to New York City-based applicants at any stage of their careers, regardless of experience level or background. 

– No curriculum vitae or letters of recommendation are required.

– There are no application fees at any stage of the process. 

– Only one proposal per applicant will be reviewed.

 

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

 

On the Ground: Broadcasts

Sunday March 26, 2023

Storefront for Art and Architecture x Montez Press Radio, 2023. Courtesy of Montez Press
Radio.

 

Throughout the year, Storefront will be collaborating with the independent online radio Montez Press Radio to release On the Ground: Broadcasts, a series of radio programs that further explore the subject through staged conversations, interviews, readings, etc. Set in their recording studio and performance space in Chinatown, these broadcasts provide another platform to disseminate our ongoing generative research. These four radio broadcasts will collage case studies, conversations, and field recordings to weave our findings together. 

 

See below to learn more about each broadcast.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

On the Ground: Broadcasts | Threshold

 

Sunday March 27, 2023

 

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio presents the first episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Threshold. This episode explores the tensions between public and private space through a close look at New York City’s ground floor.

 

Architect Sol Camacho, former Cultural Director of the Instituto Bardi, reads from Lina Bo Bardi’s seminal text, Vitrinas. Artist Alvaro Barrington discusses the storefront as a threshold between life and work. Canal Street Research Association further explores their inquiry into billboards and the “facadification” of Manhattan in a four way chat with artists Nick Poe and Gabriela D’Addario, and Levi Eichenstein, CEO of Red Rock Outdoor. Journalist Nathan Kensinger and UPENN Media Studies professor Shannon Mattern engage in conversation around their respective works on the transformation of the city’s streets and sidewalks. Architect Germane Barnes expands on his long-standing research on Porch Politics.

 

 

 

Sound and Video Credits:

Brown, Barry Alexander (Director). (2010). Sidewalk [Film, excerpt] 20:20-21:18

Cohen, Jem (Director). (1996). Lost Book Found [Film, excerpt] 03:29-04:20

Fitzgerald, Kit and Sanborn, John with Van Tieghem, David (Directors). (1982). Ear to the Ground [Film, excerpt] 00:00-1:04

Houston Jr., Otis. (2020). I Like Where I Stay. On AMERICA [Audio file]

Wilson-Tanner. (2022). Sun Room. On 69 [Audio file]

 

About the Contributors:

Germane Barnes is the Director of Studio Barnes, a research and design practice that investigates the connection between architecture and identity. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences Black domesticity. 

 

Alvaro Barrington is a multidisciplinary artist based in London. Raised in the Caribbean and later Brooklyn, New York, Barrington harnesses abstract painting, embroidery, and site-specific installation to explore communal and personal histories and disrupt art historical narratives.

 

Canal Street Research Association is the fictional office entity of poetic research and roving archival unit, Shanzhai Lyric. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. 

 

Sol Camacho is an architect and urban designer and the former Cultural Director of the Instituto Bardi/Casa de Vidro Institution founded by Lina Bo and Pietro Bardi. 

 

Nathan Kensinger is a New York based journalist, photographer, filmmaker and curator, whose work explores hidden urban landscapes, including forgotten waterways, post-industrial ruins, environmental cleanups, and coastal communities endangered by sea level rise and climate change.

 

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and Art History at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2004 to 2022, she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies.

 

 

On the Ground: Broadcasts | Void

 

Sunday July 30, 2023

 

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the second episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Void. This episode focuses on the various registers of emptiness across the built environment. The void is unpacked as spatial absences, erasure, unmet potential, permissive emptiness, liberating silences, and capital-driven failure. We explore the many languages of vacancy in New York City in dialogue with other socio-political contexts with shared challenges.

 

Participants in this episode include the following: Dominique Petit-Frère from Limbo Accra who talks about Into the Void, a digital project aimed at archiving West Africa’s unfinished property developments and revitalizing their existence through collectivity and embracing liminal space. Dragonfly aka Robin LaVerne Wilson, member of The Stop Shopping Choir, brings us into The Earth Chrxch. Writer Jeremiah Moss, reads an excerpt from Feral City, a book they published in 2022 about life in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic. Artists Tom Burr and Carlos Motta think about void in its multiple possibilities and what it means in the context of queer life. Artist Igancio Gatica has a conversation with Martha Snow from the Urban Design Forum and Gina Lee from the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development about their studies on the hidden stories of vacancy in the city and their potential. Dia Art Foundation curator, Jordan Carter, reads an excerpt from a text by Glenn Ligon published in Artforum in September 2004, titled Black Light: David Hammons and The Poetics of Emptiness. Collaged within the episode are clips from archival videos and audio from artists Amanda Williams, Gordon Matta-Clark, June Jordan, Zoe Leonard, and Francisca Benítez.

 

 

Sound and Video Credits:

Spirit of Space (Director). (2017). Amanda Williams, Color Shift [Film, excerpt] 0:00-01:00

Silver, Howard (Director). (2007). Gordon Matta-Clark Exhibit at Whitney walkthrough with Jane Crawford [Film]

Holman, Bob (Director). (1989) REC0047_2_158_2142: WNYC-TV Poetry Spots June Jordan [Film, excerpt] 01:17-02:52

Documenta 12 (Director). (2007). Zoe Leonard, Analogue (1998-2007) [Film]

 

About the Contributors:

Amanda Williams is a Chicago-based artist who uses ideas around color and architecture to explore the intersection of race and the built environment

 

Carlos Motta is a Columbian multi-disciplinary artist whose practice documents the social conditions and political struggles of sexual, gender, and ethnic minority communities in order to challenge normative discourses through acts of self-representation.

 

Dominique Petit-Frère is the founder of Limbo Accra, a spatial design practice founded in 2018 in Accra, Ghana, that imagines a more community-minded and revitalizing future for the incomplete concrete buildings left throughout African cities undergoing rapid urbanization. 

 

Dragonfly (aka Robin LaVerne Wilson) is an artist that interweaves a lifetime of professional experiences in radio, filmmaking, stage and street theater, photography, design, journalism, spoken word, music, activism, facilitation, and guerilla marketing.

 

The Earth Chxrch is a former East Village bank space at 36 Loisaida Avenue, and home to weekly services by the radical performance community, Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir. The philosophy of The Earth Chxrch surrounds the imminent “Shopocalypse”, which assumes the end of humanity will come about through manic consumerism.

 

Francisca Benítez is an artist born in Chile in 1974, living and working in New York since 1998. Her art practice explores relations between space, politics, and language, being closely linked to the places where she lives and the communities she interacts with. 

 

Gina Lee is the Program Coordinator of the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development which is a member organization of community groups across New York CIty using research, advocacy, and grassroots organizing to build equity and justice in their neighborhoods and city-wide. In 2022, the ANHD published a report titled The State of Storefronts: Alarming Vacancy Rates and Rising Rents during the Pandemic which used the latest annual release of storefront registry data to assess the state of storefronts as of 2020.

 

Glenn Ligon is an American artist who has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. 

 

Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist who pioneered a radical approach to art making that directly engaged the urban environment and the communities within it, through large-scale architectural interventions in which he physically cut through buildings.

 

Ignacio Gatica Rojas is a Chilean artist whose practice identifies and questions systems of knowledge and structures that configures the urban, historical, and personal experience. He works between installation, sculpture, video, and text, to map out and make connections between distinct forms of signs and signifiers.

 

Jeremiah Moss, pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury, is an American poet, writer, psychoanalyst, social worker, and social critic. He is the author of the blog Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York and in 2022 published Feral City, a book about life in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Jordan Carter is a curator at Dia Art Foundation and a former associate curator in the Art Institute of Chicago’s department of Modern and Contemporary Art.

 

June Jordan was one of the most widely-published and highly-acclaimed Jamaican American writers, poets, playwrights, and essayists of her generation. She was known for her fierce commitment to human rights and political activism.

 

Martha Snow is the Director of Community Design at the Urban Design Forum which is an independent membership organization that convenes civic leaders to confront the defining issues in New York City’s built environment. In 2022, the Urban Design Forum released a year-long initiative called Streets Ahead, aimed at advancing ideas and proposals to envision a more vibrant, equitable streetscape. 

 

Tom Burr is an American conceptual artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. From his first exhibitions in New York City in the late 1980s, Burr has placed a consistent emphasis on spatial issues both sociopolitical and formal. 

 

Zoe Leonard is an American artist who over the past three decades, has produced work in photography and sculpture that has been celebrated for its lyrical observations of daily life coupled with a rigorous, questioning attention to the politics and conditions of image making and display.

 

 

On the Ground: Broadcasts | Care

 

Thursday December 7, 2023

 

 

Storefront for Art and Architecture and Montez Press Radio present the third episode of On the Ground: Broadcasts, titled Care. This episode focuses on different projects that are rooted in care and mutual aid through the lens of the city’s ground floor, and how practices that strengthen bonds of affection can transform and reshape our immediate environment.

 

Participants in this episode include the following: An experimental choral performance read by Natalia Boumatar and Zara Zulfiqar, created for a class at Cooper Union titled “Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure.” This project is by Anders Kristensen, Natalia Boumatar, Ralph Karam and Zara Zulfiqar. It engages fragments of texts about settler colonialism through collective oral readings. Red Canary Song introduces us to their advocacy around Asian and migrant massage parlor workers through their short film, “Fly in Power”. Curator Diya Vij, writer and organizer Ted Kerr, and artist Zacarías González have a conversation about the 90s Chicago-based art collective titled Haha, and their project Flood, which was a hydroponic garden in a storefront that grew vegetables and herbs for people with HIV. Curator Eric Booker reads some archival texts from Smokehouse Associates, the artist collective that transformed Harlem with vibrant, community-oriented abstract murals and sculptures during the late 1960s. Writer Lam Thuy Vo reads from an article she wrote on Pearl River Mart for Documented NY. Artist Cudelice Brazelton talks to Senior frieze editor Terence Trouillot about his recent exhibition at Wschod Gallery in the Lower East Side and how his work relates to intimate micro practices of care. We learn from OlaRonke Akinmowo how the Free Black Women’s Library is fueled by tenants of Black Feminism, and the transformative power of both reading and creating. Huda Tayob discusses her research on Architectures of Care. Scholar Adam Anabosi performs a poem by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Zayyad written to the Palestinian people in their different places of refuge. Interspersed throughout the episode are clips and archival sounds from professors and writers Premilla Nadasen, Carlos Sanabria, Sharon Zukin and artist Jenna Bliss’s documentary “The People’s Detox.”

 

 

Sound and Video Credits:

The Peoples’ Forum (Director). (2023). BOOK TALK: Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism with Premilla Nadasen and Ujju Aggarwal [Film, excerpt] 4:00-14:31

Red Canary Song (Director). (2022). Fly In Power [Film]

Bliss, Jenna (Director). (2018). The People’s’ Detox [Film, excerpt] 0:00-02:10

Global Cities Local Streets (Director). (2015). Orchard Street, New York [Film, excerpt] 0:14–09:00

Center for Puerto Rican Studies – Centro (Director). (2017). The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios [Film, excerpt] 10:13-25:06

Tayob, Huda. (2015). Architectures of Care [Audio file]

 

-Artist(s)/Organization Bios + Pronouns:

Adam Anabosi is a Ph.D student at Princeton. He possesses a keen interest in the modern middle east studies and the cultural, political and historical approach associated with it. Adam is deeply fascinated by Arabic culture and its rich oral heritage. On occasion, he indulges in writing poetry in the spoken Shami dialect and in colloquial Arabic. And every now and then, he contributed to online cultural magazines articles related to the political, cultural and social history of Palestine and Bilad al-Sham.

Carlos Sanabria is author of the book The Bodega: A Cornerstone of Puerto Rican Barrios: (The Justo Marti Collection). He is former associate professor in Caribbean studies at The City University of New York.

 

Cudelice Brazelton IV is an artist who lives and works in Frankfurt. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and currently studies at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste. Selected solo and duo exhibitions include Friend of a Friend Warsaw, Wschód and Emanuel Layr, Warsaw (2021); Bronzed from Silver, Sans titre (2016), Paris (2021); Recoil (with Dozie Kanu), International Waters, New York (2020); Violent Groom, Wschód (2020); Prune (with Nicholas Grafia), Shoot the Lobster, New York (2019); and Bounty, Jeffrey Stark, New York (2017). 

 

Diya Vij is the Curator at Creative Time and is committed to critically investigating the evolving role of public art in politics and civic life. Over the past decade, she has held programming, curatorial, and communications positions at major New York City Institutions. She currently serves on the Board of the Laundromat Project and as the Co-Chair of the Board of A Blade of Grass. She recently was part of the Curatorial Ensemble for the Counterpublic 2023 public art triennial in St. Louis.

 

Eric Booker is a curator and writer. His work makes space for artists and narratives that challenge dominant histories. Booker is former Assistant Curator and Exhibitions Coordinator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where he worked on a range of exhibitions, performances, public art, and site-specific installations. Booker is currently Associate Curator at Storm King Art Center.

 

Haha was an art collective—originally including Richard House, Wendy Jacob, Laurie Palmer, and John Ploof—that formed in Chicago in 1988 and continued to work together until 2008.

 

Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and architectural theorist. She is currently a lecturer in Architectural Studies at the University of Manchester, and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centered on the African continent and global south.. She was a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along east African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.

 

Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is currently a reporter with The Markup and an associate professor of data journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she was a journalist at BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR’s Planet Money.

 

OlaRonke Akinmowo is an interdisciplinary artist that scecializes in collage, papermaking, printmaking, stop motion animation and interactive installation. She also works as a set decorator, yoga teacher, cultural worker, and mom. In 2015 she started The Free Black Women’s Library, a social art project that features a collection of over 4000 books written by Black women. This particular work is fueled by the tenants of Black Feminism, Community Care, and the transformative power of both reading and creating.

Premilla Nadasen is professor of history at Barnard College and president of the National Women’s Studies Association. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing and is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class women of color have fought for social justice.

 

Red Canary Song’s (RCS) work centers on mutual aid, community care, and decriminalization of labor. 

In November 2017, RCS formed in response to the death of Yang Song, a migrant Chinese massage worker who fell to her death from a fourth-floor window during a police raid. RCS rallied to protest the police, provide mutual aid to the family of Yang Song and other Asian massage and sex workers, and to advocate for decriminalization of unlicensed massage work and sex work. 

 

Sharon Zukin is professor emerita of sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center but is still working with PhD students and will occasionally teach courses. Her new book, The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy, examines the shaping of the tech ecosystem in New York.  Zukin has been a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College; a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Western Sydney, and Tongji University; and a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center.

 

Smokehouse Associates was an artist collective formed in 1968 by William T. Williams, Melvin Edwards, Guy Ciarcia, and Billy Rose. Through developing community-oriented public art projects in Harlem, the collective sought to transform space through vibrant, geometric abstract murals and sculptures. Initially spanning three generations of artists, the Smokehouse collective eventually grew to encompass a diverse range of creative practitioners, all of whom united around the transformative potential of public art. 

 

Terence Trouillot is senior editor of frieze. He lives in New York, USA.

 

Theodore Kerr is a Brooklyn based writer, organizer and artist whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS, community, and culture. Kerr’s writing has appeared in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The New Inquiry, BOMB, CBC (Canada), Lambda Literary, POZ Magazine, The Advocate, Cineaste, The St. Louis American, IndieWire, HyperAllergic, and other publications. In 2016, he won the Best Journalism award from POZ Magazine for his HyperAllergic article on race, HIV, and art. In 2015, Kerr was the editor for an AIDS-focused issue of the We Who Feel Differently journal.

 

Zacarías González is a queer artist with a background as a commercial art director turned chef and sommelier. They founded ediciones projects in 2020, a creative studio focused on collaborative projects that intersect and explore food, wine, hospitality, media, consulting, and design specifically through a queer-centric lens as a Cuban-American.

___________________________________________________________________________

 

On the Ground
On the Ground is a year-long research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the heterogeneous threshold between public and private space throughout 2023. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader.

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

On the Ground

Wednesday February 8, 2023

 

On the Ground is a yearlong research project and exhibition series about New York City’s ground floor. Through a close look at the urban typology of the storefront, this expansive endeavor presents newly commissioned artistic explorations and dialogues about the critical role storefronts play in shaping public life. The project will unfold through three exhibitions, a radio show, an open call, a public program, and a thematic reader. 

 

Informed by Storefront for Art and Architecture’s peculiar relationship with the sidewalk, On the Ground reflects on the critical role storefronts play in shaping public life. While empty storefronts have been ubiquitous in the city long before the pandemic, the impact of the last two years has seen an even greater proliferation of ground floor vacancies which has altered the urban fabric, and in doing so, the experience of moving through the city.

 

This themed series looks at how ground floor retail spaces are markers of social, political, and economic transformation. Both inside and on the sidewalk, social infrastructures are set in motion (and sustained) on the ground floor of cities. Retail establishments sit at the intersection of a cultural ecosystem underpinned by local merchants, developers, supply chains, local governments, and ultimately, an amalgam of individual interests and collective identities. On the Ground invites artists, architects, designers, writers, scholars, and the public at large to engage with the unique stories of the storefronts that give identity to New York City’s changing built environment.
 
The threat to these evanescent urban spaces is not easily untangled. Small business storefronts, especially in a “post-pandemic” condition, are signs of economic dissonance. The voids visible by their vacancies across the city are evidence of a real and symbolic rise in eviction. Booming real estate markets and speculative rent increases are effectively decimating this mode of social resilience. Furthermore, commercial displacement is experienced differently across neighborhoods, having disproportionate effects on various socioeconomic and racial demographics. A focused study on storefronts is also a way to explore the spatial challenges of the rise in online consumption that has reshaped the street, threatening brick-and-mortar retail while inundating neighborhoods with delivery vehicles.  
 
On the Ground probes how this fragile urban form can enable carescapes within diverse communities, providing refuge and belonging by maintaining an intimacy of local life.
 

 

On the Ground: Exhibitions
Storefront will present three newly commissioned solo exhibitions from New York-based artists under the framework of On the Ground. Each project will be in dialogue with an off-site ground floor space somewhere in New York City that acts as a launch pad to study these polemics. 
 
From March 1st through May 27th, we will open with an exhibition by Canal Street Research Association, a fictional office of the poetic research collective Shanzhai Lyric. Titled New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original, the exhibition will explore shanzhai methodologies such as mimicking, redistribution of resources, and parody to create a portrait of New Land Plaza, a former marble storage facility turned mini-mall on Canal Street that was the site of the infamous Bloomberg “Counterfeit Triangle” bust of 2008. 
Read more
 
From June 17th through September 9th, we will present an exhibition by artist Francisca Benítez and her explorations of the city through her work on performance and the politics of space. The exhibition will explore Benítez’s practice in relation to her participation in the defense of public space, including her engagement with groups such as Art Against Displacement, Chinatown Working Group, East River Park Action, and the Stop Shopping Choir. The latter currently occupies the storefront of a former bank at 36 Avenue C in the East Village, which has been transformed into the Earth Church, performing services on Sundays. This exhibition acts as an interlocutor between this site and Storefront’s gallery. 
Read more
 
From October 7th to December 16th, we will present the work of artist Ilana Harris-Babou, an exhibition that reflects on storefronts that engage alternative ways of teaching and learning in the neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn where she grew up. From a cooperatively-run alternative preschool to an Afrocentric martial arts space, Harris-Babou unpacks how the pedagogical use of storefronts has become an essential artery to share knowledge within the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Wingate, Flatbush, and their shifting demographics. 
Read more
 
On the Ground: Open Call
Alongside our exhibitions, we are also launching an open call—a strategy used by Storefront since its early years—to engage a wider public with this theme and serve as a platform for new ideas. The open call will be launched this Spring and invites artists, architects, writers, curators, and creative individuals to submit proposals for a month long exhibition to be presented at Storefront’s gallery in January 2024. The selected application will receive institutional support, a budget, and a fee to develop and realize the project.  
 
On the Ground: Broadcasts
Throughout the year, Storefront will be collaborating with the independent online radio Montez Press Radio to release On the Ground: Broadcasts, a series of radio programs that further explore the subject through staged conversations, interviews, readings, etc. Set in their recording studio and performance space in Chinatown, these broadcasts provide another platform to disseminate our ongoing generative research. These four radio broadcasts will collage case studies, conversations, and field recordings to weave our findings together.
 
On the Ground: Open Sessions
During the last week of each month Storefront will open the gallery for On the Ground: Open Sessions, inviting a different guest to curate and host the evening. These informal gatherings will open a space for collective learning where critical issues surrounding the transformation of New York’s ground floor are shared and discussed. 
 
On the Ground: Reader
A publication with excerpts from the cumulative research, new commissions, and archival materials will be published at the end of this yearlong program. 

 

2023 – 2024 Calendar

Canal Street Research Association March 1 – May 27
        Broadcast 1: Threshold March 26
        Open Session 1 March 29
        Open Session 2  April 25
        Open Session 3  May 30
Francisca Benítez June 17 – September 9
        Open Session 4 June 27
      Broadcast 2: Void July 2
        Open Session 5 July 25
        Open Session 6 August 29
Ilana Harris-Babou October 7th – December 16th
        Open Session 7 September 26
        Open Session 8 October 25
        Broadcast 3: Public October 22
        Open Session 9 November 29
        Broadcast 4: Analogue December 3
Open Call Exhibition

January 20, 2024 – February 17, 2024

 

Credits
On the Ground is conceived and organized by the Storefront Team

Graphic design by Estudio Herrera 

Photography by PJ Rountree 

 

Support
Storefront’s On the Ground program is made possible through the support of the Graham Foundation, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the Storefront Circle and Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

StorefrontTV Season 3: On Maintenance

Wednesday June 24, 2020 – Wednesday September 30, 2020

 

[Tune In]

[Sign up for Reminders

[About Season 3]

 

JUMP TO EPISODES

Episode 1: Noches vacías by Mariela Scafati

Episode 2: Before Wearout: by Jessica Kairé

Episode 3: Collective Wakes by Sumayya Vally

Episode 4: Se va a caer by Julieta Gil

Episode 5: Recapture by Leslie Hewitt

Episode 6: Why Not Stand? by Yolande Daniels

Episode 7: Tomorrow Is So Far by Alvaro Urbano

Episode 8: Ziyarat (زیارت) by Samaneh Moafi

Episode 9: 2Maintain by Devin Kenny

Episode 10: Documenting Practice by BRANDT : HAFERD

Episode 11: She Finally Caught A Breath by Papi Juice

Episode 12: Unmet Needs by Melanie Gilligan

Episode 13: Re-model by Rafael Domenech

Episode 14: Cistern by Vivien Sansour

 

 

TUNE IN:

 

Episodes of StorefrontTV Season 3 will air weekly on Wednesdays at 6 pm ET here on Storefront’s website, as well as on YouTube and Instagram Live. Each episode is brief, usually between 5-10 minutes.

 

Tune in below on Wednesday, September 23rd from 6:00-6:05 pm ET for Episode 14: Cistern by Vivien Sansour, the final episode of the season. To watch episodes from past weeks, see episode description sections below, or check out our YouTube playlist.

 

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

ABOUT SEASON 3:

 

Print

 

StorefrontTV is an online broadcast channel created in 2014 that presents experimental programming about the built environment. In 2020, Storefront launches the third season of StorefrontTV with the theme On Maintenance.

 

Presenting newly commissioned videos by artists and architects, this season aims to explore and redefine the notion of maintenance. Participants interpret “maintenance” in various ways, some shared and others divergent, and many reflecting upon particularities of our current moment. Episodes address topics such as the radical reinterpretation of societal values, efforts to avoid wear on the body and mind, networks of people that sustain a neighborhood, nostalgia for unrealized change with the passing of time, and the spatial expertise of domestic laborers, among others.

 

Each episode provides artists and architects with a space to playfully and critically address a key aspect of social life and culture through the lens of maintenance. Learn more about forthcoming episodes below, and stay tuned for the full schedule.

 

StorefrontTV Season 3: On Maintenance is broadcast weekly on Wednesdays at 6 pm Eastern. Episodes are brief, between 5-10 minutes each, so we encourage you to subscribe to our YouTube channel, sign up for reminders, and follow us on Instagram at @storefrontnyc.

 

Learn more about the previous season of StorefrontTV here.

 

Image: StorefrontTV Season 3: On Maintenance. Design

by Pentagram/Natasha Jen, Jonathan Katav, Ran Zheng

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 1:

 

Noches vacías (Empty Nights

Mariela Scafati (with music by Daiana Rose)

 

Wednesday, June 24th, 2020 from 6:00-6:05 pm ET

 

 

I can’t remove the cat hair from my clothes

nor do I want to

I’m in phase 1

if anything at all

naming at least one place

and there’s no way to cover up that everything is ignored 

I am comforted by the memory of some gesture, of your voice or your gaze

sometimes I dream

other times I sleep,

those times give me

some notion of life

the cat looks at the glass of water

it keeps walking

neither thirst nor the damn habit of throwing the glass

nor looking from the table at the glasses and the puddle of water

a calm that is impossible to sustain

not even the damn habit.

 

I’m sharing this “table theatre” that I made one night, accompanied by the song Noches vacías” (“Empty Nights”), a melancholic version by Daiana Rose interpreted from the well-known track by Gilda. I chose to use my hands in an attempt at closeness, and to be able to think about what, from this time, we wish to endure and what we are no longer willing to hold onto. 

 

— Mariela Scafati

 

About Episode 1

In the first episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Buenos Aires-based artist Mariela Scafati questions the notion of maintenance by exploring the absurdity of the concept of “normalcy” in our current times, and contemplating the values that shape our societies. Although Scafati’s exhibition Bodybuildings would have been on view at Storefront’s gallery space this summer, she is ready to embrace the challenge of meaningful change brought on by the current moment. 

 

About the Artists

Mariela Scafati (b. 1973) is a Buenos Aires-based artist using mediums of painting, installation, screen printing, and performance to address issues of gender rights and identity. Scafati completed her studies in Visual Arts at the E.S.A.V. in Bahía Blanca, Argentina. She has been exhibiting works inside and outside of Argentina since 1988. She is a co-founder of Taller Popular de Serigrafía (Popular Silkscreen Workshop), created collectively with the Popular Assembly of San Telmo that emerged during the December 2001 insurrection. She has also been a part of the non-group Serigrafistas Queer (Queer Silkscreeners) since 2007, as well as a member of Cromoactivismo (Chromoactivism). Scafati has worked at the Centro de Investigaciones Artísticas (Center of Artistic Investigations) since 2010, and has participated in many other group-based and collaborative projects that range in medium from education to printmaking, radio, and theater.

 

Daiana Rose (b. 1980) is a visual artist and a member of Cromoactivismo (Chromoactivism) and Serigrafistas Queer (Queer Silkscreeners). Her work focuses on drawing and performance. She is interested in using her art for communication and learning, and in exploring art as a method of emotional survival. Rose is a graduate of the Lola Mora National School of Fine Arts and a CIA2015 Fellow. Some of her individual exhibitions include Miss Verduritas (CC Recoleta, 2009), A Florencio (Orange Green Gallery, 2013), Bullfighting (Agatha Costure, 2014), and I am attracted by what it brings, I am attracted by what attracts (UV Gallery, 2018). In 2019, she released an album of 11 songs entitled Este peludo sentir (This Furry Feeling) with the label Otros Formas, produced by Lola Granillo. Since 2018, she has been performing this music in various locations. 

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 2:

 

Before Wearout:

Jessica Kairé

 

Wednesday, July 1st, 2020 from 6:00-6:10 pm ET

 

 

While visiting relatives in Kochi, Japan, my partner’s hometown, the international lockdown caused by coronavirus catches us off guard, and we remain abroad in semi-quarantine for three months. Before Wearout: portrays some cultural nuances of domestic life that I encounter while living in this new environment. In a small space, I perform a sequence of actions that viewers can try at home using resources they have on hand. For me, these include a futon, a pomelo, and some cleaning tools.

 

Though not without a struggle, I try to do as the locals do. I learn about the culture by conversing with my mother-in-law, eating seasonal produce, and browsing old housewives’ magazines. I reflect upon being confined to a context that never seems to change, and the sense of weariness that this can create. Now that I find myself having “more time than life,” I consider the importance of establishing self-care methods to avoid wearout, and the ways in which mundane actions gain new meaning as we see things around us suddenly shifting.

 

— Jessica Kairé
 

About Episode 2

In Before Wearout:, the second episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, artist Jessica Kairé performs the notion of maintenance by practicing small actions of self-care while quarantined far from home. Playing with the notion of “wear” as a noun and a verb, her actions acknowledge both the newness and consistency of her surroundings in a time when everything has changed.

 

About the Artist

Jessica Kairé (Guatemala, 1980) is an artist and educator based in New York, and co-founder and co-director of NuMu (Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo), an egg-shaped museum located in Guatemala City that aims to satiate the lack of other contemporary art institutions in the country. In her practice, Kairé combines artistic and domestic elements to create works that engage the public in various forms of activation such as eating, manipulating and wearing. She is particularly interested in appropriating materials, objects and contexts that are informed by personal or collective conflict, and altering the way we relate to them through an often playful and humorous approach. Her work has been shown at museums, institutions, and galleries such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; SITElines.2018 Biennial, Santa Fe; 2da Gran Bienal Tropical, Loíza, Puerto Rico; and more.  

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 3:

 

Collective Wakes

(and Other Spatial Acts of Resistance)

Sumayya Vally

 

Wednesday, July 8th, 2020 from 6:00-6:10 pm ET

 

 
An exercise in place-making:
 

     1. Chase former evil dwellers.

     2. Remove dirt.

     3. Dig a hole, place salt in it.

     4. Cover the hole with soil.

     5. Draw a circle of hot ashes within the limit of the cleared space.

     6. Have three priests gather around it with a bucket of water in the middle.

     7. Mix coarse salt in the water.

     8. Pray over the water, simultaneously sprinkling it around.

 
— Sumayya Vally
 

About Episode 3

In Collective Wakes (and Other Spatial Acts of Resistance), the third episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Sumayya Vally presents a choreography of “wakes,” both difficult and celebratory. Drawing upon literary and scholarly works as well as historical and contemporary imagery from public gatherings and advocacy movements, Collective Wakes explores what it means to maintain community over time.

 

About the Artist

Sumayya Vally is the founder and principal of Counterspace. Her design, research and pedagogical practice is committed to finding expression for hybrid identity and contested territory. She is obsessed with Johannesburg as a laboratory for finding speculative histories, future archaeologies, and design languages; often with the intent to reveal the invisible. Her work is often forensic, and draws on performance, the supernatural, the wayward and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. She is presently based between Johannesburg and London as the lead designer for the Serpentine Pavilion 2020/20 Plus 1.

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 4:

 

Se va a caer (It’s Gonna Fall)

Julieta Gil (with Concepción Huerta)

 

Wednesday, July 15th, 2020 from 6:00-6:05 pm ET

 

 

On March 8th, Women’s Day, millions of us marched in the public sphere, demonstrating and resisting together. That day, we took a collective vow to dedicate our lives to putting an end to this violence.

 

The day before the protests, I panicked. My cries merged with the cries that emanate from the bodies of the countless women, non-binary, and trans people who have undergone systemic violence that goes unrecognized, unseen, and nonexistent.

 

Now, under lockdown, many are confined to the very spaces where the violence originates. Still, we took a vow. Today, I feel like I am part of something bigger than myself – something so big that it can make another thing fall.

 

I really think it’s gonna fall.

The patriarchy is gonna fall.

 

— Julieta Gil

 

About Episode 4

In Se va a caer (It’s Gonna Fall), the fourth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Julieta Gil builds upon a series of works entitled Nuestra Victoria (Our Victory) about a prominent Mexico City monument, the Ángel de la Independencia (Angel of Independence). Last summer, hours after serving as the site of protests focused on violence against women, the Ángel was boarded up. The government soon began working on its restoration, erasing the voices of protest that it carried. Se va a caer (It’s Gonna Fall), created in collaboration with Concepción Huerta, allows the words and actions of civil resistance to be maintained in our collective memory.

 

About the Artists

Julieta Gil (b. 1987) is a visual artist based in Mexico City. Her creative research incorporates installation, sculpture, 3D animation, and print in order to explore topics of simulation, as well as the overlaps that occur in the interaction between physical and digital realities. Through her work, she creates narratives that reflect upon institutional pasts, presents, and futures. Julieta holds an MFA from UCLA Media Arts, and a BArch from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. In 2015-16, she was a grant recipient of Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and Arts in the field of art and technology research and production. Her work has been presented in spaces such as: the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda (Mexico City), the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), Future Gallery (Mexico City), Human Resources (Los Angeles, CA), and Zuecca Projects (Venice, Italy). 

 

Concepción Huerta (b. 1986) explores sound through recordings of everyday objects and instruments which, when reproduced and manipulated with tape recorders and processed tapes, create atmospheres based on ambient and noise elements. She creates sound narratives that construct previously invisible stories, eschewing the boundaries of musical genre. She has played in VOLTA, Meditatio Sonus, Overflows, Translation II, Articulations of Silence, THRESHOLD, Aural, Remains, NSMBL, Anxrmal, No Idea Festival, and C4NM, among others. She has also collaborated with many artists, some of whom include: Enrique Arriaga, Turning Torso, Fernando Vigueras, Rodrigo Ambriz, Martín Escalante, Arcangelo Constantini, CNDSD, Viian, Nika Milano, Mabe Fratti, Gibrana Cervantes, Camille Mandoki, Alejandro Morse, among others.

  

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 5:

 

Recapture

Leslie Hewitt

 

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2020 from 6:00-6:25 pm ET

 

Screen Shot 2020-07-17 at 12.05.39 PM

 

Though I never actually visited the National Memorial African Bookstore myself, images of the bookstore have flooded my imagination to this very day. In this mental space of post-memory, literature, the chaos of embodied knowledge, and the misremembering of things past, I play with computer code, concrete poetry, and the freeing feeling of chance and happenstance as a place to begin anew. The typefaces of PL/I and IBM Plex Mono serve as foils to potentially instinctual sensory responses that may be stimulated by the temporal poetry present in this in situ documentation of the work “Forty-two.”

 

— Leslie Hewitt

 

About Episode 5

In Recapture, the fifth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Leslie Hewitt presents documentation of a work entitled Forty-two (2019), a text-based html programmed video that explores the intersection of concrete poetry, memory, and the “technoscape.” The words generated in the work are collected from archival images of books that circulated through the National Memorial African Bookstore, an iconic space that maintained a subversive presence in Harlem, New York City for forty-two years (from 1932 to 1974). Through the work, Hewitt strives to create a sensory experience of a forgone space where art, politics, and activism converged, placing ideas of resilience and fortitude front of mind.

 

About the Artist

Leslie Hewitt’s approach to photography and sculpture reimagines the art historical still-life genre from a post-minimalist perspective. Her geometric compositions, which she frames and crystallizes through the disciplines of photography and film theory, are spare assemblages of ordinary effects and materials, suggesting the porosity between intimate and sociopolitical histories. Interested in the mechanisms behind the construction of meaning and memory, she decisively challenges both by unfolding manifestly formal, rather than didactic, connections. Her distinct play on syncopation and juxtaposition make her work discursive and beautifully layered. Hewitt further works with site-specific installation, autonomous sculptures, drawings, and the moving image as modalities to contend equally with shifting notions of space and time. Hewitt has held residencies at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Konstepidemin in Göteborg, Sweden and the American Academy in Berlin, Germany amongst others. She is an associate professor of art at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 6:

 

Why Not Stand?

Yolande Daniels

Edited by Julieta Gil

 

Wednesday, July 29th, 2020 from 6:00-6:05 pm ET

 

 

Instructions for a standing piss using OURStandard FEMME™pissoire:

      (To be repeated multiple times on a daily basis, with variations as needed)

 

1. Place your bag on the service shelf in front of the mirror.

2. Stand facing the FEMME™pissoire. Walk up to the urinal and position your feet on the silhouettes on either side of the floor mat. Do not squat, sit, or turn backwards.

3. Face the urinal and look into the mirror. If you have the time, say an affirmation that feels true to you.

4. Position your thighs at the rubber wings on either side of the urinal. This should be the only point of contact. Once you learn this posture, you will no longer need the wings.

5. Stand and remain clothed. With its second zipper at the crotch, the FEMME™p-system pants eliminate the need to lift, drop, or pull down. Use the p-system ring (which doubles as jewelry) to open the crotch zipper.

6. Tilt your pelvis up. Touch yourself to direct the flow of urine. Or, just because. Focus on fostering awareness and controlling the flow. Over time, you will master aiming.

7. Use the spigot to clean, as you would with a bidet.

8. Use the air dryer attachment to dry yourself.

9. Zip your pants closed using the tab-less crotch zipper.

10. Check yourself in the mirror. As you make any final adjustments, focus on fostering awareness of your actions while challenging “proper” toilet protocols.

11. Confront your discomforts. Do they uphold gender binaries? While the FEMME™pissoire was designed to give women parity, the object and components are gender neutral. 

12. Don’t forget your bag as you exit.

 

— Yolande Daniels

 

About Episode 6

In Why Not Stand?, the sixth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Yolande Daniels showcases the OURStandard FEMME™pissoire, a prototype urinal that she originally designed in 1992. The urinal creates a system of objects and accessories that together propose a reimagining of the gendered protocols that inform toilet use. Through the FEMMEpissoire, Why Not Stand? challenges misconceptions of female anatomy, fears of touching and female agency, and the maintenance of societal structures that attempt to raise modest girls to be chaste women.

 

About the Artist

Yolande Daniels is a co-founding design principal of studioSUMO whose works have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, and have been the recipient of various project and firm awards and grants including the AIA Design Awards for Museums and Education Buildings, Emerging Voices Award, Design Vanguard Award, Young Architects Forum, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Daniels is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has taught architecture at the University of Southern California, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University (M.Arch ‘90), the University of Michigan, Washington University, and City College, CUNY (BS.Arch ’87), and held positions as the Saarinen chair at Yale University, Silcott chair at Howard University, and interim-director of the Master of Architecture Program at Parsons School of Design.

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 7:

 

Tomorrow Is So Far

Alvaro Urbano

 

Wednesday, August 5th, 2020 from 6:00-6:05 pm ET

 

 

                                    Today

 

“I miss you.”   6:00 PM ✓✓

 

                                       “When are we seeing each other?”   6:03 PM ✓✓

 

“Tomorrow.”   6:03 PM ✓✓

 

                                        “Tomorrow is so far.”   6:05 PM ✓

— Alvaro Urbano

 

About Episode 7

In Tomorrow Is So Far, the seventh episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Alvaro Urbano presents a trailer to an unknown future. A man is alone, outside, busy. His actions fade in and out of his surroundings; he at once becomes part of the landscape and stands starkly apart from it. Tomorrow Is So Far, filmed on a sculptural set created by the artist and acted out by his partner, Petrit Halilaj, is a cinematic teaser that blurs the lines between fiction and reality and between the natural and the artificial, provoking us to contemplate how we maintain human and environmental connections over time.

 

About the Artist

Alvaro Urbano lives and works in Berlin and is currently a professor at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France. He studied at the Institut für Raumexperimente at the Universität der Künste. He has received the Villa Romana Fellowship and has attended The Artists and Architects in Residence at MAK, Los Angeles. His works have been exhibited at Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Boghossian Foundation, Brussels; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; CAB, Brussels; Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, Moscow; PAC, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; S.A.L.T.S., Basel; and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, among others. His solo show The Awakening—co-organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture and La Casa Encendida in Madrid— is currently on view at La Casa Encendida and will be presented next year at Storefront as part of its ongoing Building Cycles program.

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 

 

EPISODE 8:

 

Ziyarat (زیارت)

Samaneh Moafi

 

Wednesday, August 12th, 2020 from 6:00-6:10 pm ET

 


In
Ziyarat (The Pilgrimage), Jalal al-e Ahmad tells the story of his visit to a dam on the waters of Khuzestan:

 

“The space was like that of a temple. That generator was the altar, the area in between was the sanctuary, the blue shade of light was the holy scent, and the sounds of the turbine – which you couldn’t see – were the humming voices of worship. It wasn’t just the temple; the act of ziyarat had also changed. Instead of the Ayat prayer, the one that you would perform to the floods, or the Istisqa prayer, which you would perform to the skies for rain, now, upon entering the temple, you were to perform in silence one rakat of quandary. This temple entrapped the forces of rains and floods with the curves of a generator’s copper coils, and enslaved them all to the click of a switch that could be turned on, or off.” 

 

I share with you a ziyarat to these same waters: the Dez and Karkheh rivers. The floods and the rains wash the villages of Khuzestan, and the dams and the canals maintain its plantations of sugarcane. A curse echoes in these loose waters; I report on it as it appears from a distance, between differing satellite images, archive photographs, documentation from my travels, written reports, and social media footage. 

 

— Samaneh Moafi

 

About Episode 8

In Ziyarat (زیارت), the eighth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Samaneh Moafi conducts a “pilgrimage” to the Dez and Karkheh rivers in the Khuzestan Province of southwest Iran. This performative retelling of a story by writer and anthropologist Jalal al-e Ahmad weaves together personal, media, and archival documentation. Ziyarat (زیارت) uses installation, objects, imagery, and movement to shed light upon the maintenance of the sugarcane industry and its relationship to water and the ecology of place.

 

About the Artist

Samaneh Moafi is a researcher and practitioner in architecture. She is a member of Forensic Architecture in the UK, where she develops investigative techniques for environmental violence and oversees the Center for Contemporary Nature. She has a PhD from the Architectural Association (AA), where she completed her thesis on Iran’s contemporary history of state-initiated mass housing, emancipatory practices of female residents, and the intersection of domesticity with gender and class. Samaneh’s practice is a cross between the scales of territory and the domestic, and it involves engagement with historical and contemporary archives through mixed-media installations, video animations and essay writing. Her work and contributions have been exhibited globally in forums such as the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019), Tate Britain (2018), MACBA (2017), Venice Architecture Biennale (2016), and Gwangju Biennale (2013).

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 


EPISODE 9:

 

2Maintain

Devin Kenny

 

Wednesday, August 19th, 2020 from 6:00-6:10 pm ET

 


 

I grew up listening to younger elders talkin’ stylishly, solemnly, greasy about what they did to

maintain self. I later learned that they were usually talking about illegal substances –

ancient processes, ones people close to me enjoyed, ones that shouldn’t be illegal at all…

“I give you the seed-bearing plants and herbs to use,” ones that were only made illegal to

prevent the Hearsts and other tycoons from losing money –

different forms of the decorative noose, and trying to make the moon look like a warning.

 

— Devin Kenny

 

About Episode 9

In 2Maintain, the ninth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Devin Kenny considers various forms of Black self-care and sociality, exploring why some are considered harmless and others are criminalized. He tends to houseplants using a nail clipper, a tool normally associated with human hygiene, and presents a new song, “if you get arrested (demo),” as well as an original poem. 2Maintain interrogates the notion of maintenance in our time, presenting a juxtaposition between two current realities: police are to maintain the status quo, while self-care is to maintain the spirit.

 

About the Artist

Devin Kenny is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. Raised on the south side of Chicago, Illinois, he relocated to New York City to study at The Cooper Union as a teen. He continued his practice through the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (Brooklyn), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Madison, Maine), SOMA Summer (Mexico City), and the Whitney Independent Study Program (New York). He has done collaborations with Justin Allen, Lucas Pinheiro, the Center for Experimental Lectures, Triple Canopy, Rhizome, Andrea Solstad, and various art and music venues in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and elsewhere including: The Kitchen, Goethe Institut, Recess, Julia Stoschek Collection Düsseldorf, CAMH, OCCII, SculptureCenter, REDCAT, MoMA PS1, Freak City, and Performance Space. He received an MFA in 2013 from UCLA. 

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 


EPISODE 10:

 

Documenting Practice

BRANDT : HAFERD

 

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020 from 6:00-6:20 pm ET

 


 

We produce space, and our spaces produce us…

 

Documentation is both a self-conscious performance and a process of unveiling.

 

We document to reveal the connections between our spaces, actors, and labor.

 

We document the elements that form a practice of recurring events.

 

We document to acknowledge the thinness of the line between cultural production, collective maintenance, and self sustenance

 

We document to demystify and make transparent work that is situated in the world, and that is critically part of the now.  

 

We document to investigate:

 

The Everyday and the Mundane

Territory

Embeddedness

The Ethics of Care

Aesthetics, and the links between

Media or Mediums

Sounds / Footage / Images / GIFs…or Animations / Quotes / References

Processes…from the digital realm of email to the recording screen or Zoom call

 

In the constant act of maintaining this diffuse and sublimated landscape, we document to reclaim the body as primary actor and instrument. 

 

BRANDT : HAFERD

 

About Episode 10

In Documenting Practice, the tenth episode of  StorefrontTV Season 3, BRANDT : HAFERD documents the sustenance of a practice, exploring collaboration as a series of daily, monthly, and seasonal “rituals.” Documenting Practice breaks down barriers between domestic, public, and professional realms, proposing that, in order to maintain culture, we must learn to radically conflate and intersect spaces that may have previously seemed distinctly separate by design.

 

About the Artist

BRANDT : HAFERD is a Harlem-based architecture and design studio led by Jerome W Haferd & K Brandt Knapp since 2012. They work with private clients, institutions, and city governments. Their body of work includes academic research and a range of built projects – from the domestic to the workplace to the urban – that challenge the limits of practice. Some of the interests they explore include: Performance and Play, Abstract vs. Built Form, Nature and Territory, and the Individual vs. the Collective. Through experimental projects, the studio imagines ways in which public space can drive innovation at multiple scales. Haferd and Knapp were winners of the inaugural 2012 Folly competition held by the Architectural League of New York and Socrates Sculpture Park. In 2015, they presented the installation caesura at Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park in collaboration with artist Jessica Feldman. The studio recently won the 2019 Zero Threshold competition for barrier-free housing with their project Side by Side. They are also recipients of the 2020 AIA New Practices New York.

 

___________________________________________________________________________

 


EPISODE 11:

 

She Finally Caught A Breath

Papi Juice

 

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020 from 6:00-6:05 pm ET

 

 

What does care look like when we’re breaking down? How do we retain our sanity in a place that’s always pushing us to the edge? What’s the cost of a city that rushes us all the time? What do we do when a decade of growth screeches to a halt? And now, what time is wine time?

 

Let the mourning process begin as it will blossom into acceptance. 

 

— Papi Juice

 

About Episode 11

In She Finally Caught A Breath, the eleventh episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Papi Juice ruminates on the meaning of adaptation, growth, and change. In a narrative composed of fragments – a bike ride through empty streets, a beach hang, a virtual event, a rooftop sunset, a recording session –  Papi Juice asserts that in order to overcome discomfort, we must acknowledge it. She Finally Caught A Breath is a snapshot of our time, giving us permission to slow down, to pivot, and to seek the ultimate comfort in taking a deep breath.

 

About the Artist

Papi Juice is an art collective that aims to affirm and celebrate the lives of queer and trans people of color. With co-founders and resident DJs Oscar Nñ, Adam R, and illustrator Mohammed Fayaz, Papi Juice lives at the intersection of art, music, and nightlife. Since Papi Juice’s inception in 2013, the collective has been changing the face of nightlife in New York City and beyond with intentional platforms for artists of color, including panels, workshops, artist residencies, performances, and, of course, fabled DJ sets and all night parties. Papi Juice has featured artists such as Princess Nokia, MikeQ, Indya Moore, Juliana Huxtable, Helado Negro, and Yaeji. Papi Juice has also partnered with institutions such as The Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, El Museo del Barrio, Creative Time, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Toronto Pride, Red Bull Music Academy, and many more.

  

___________________________________________________________________________

 


EPISODE 12:

 

Unmet Needs

Melanie Gilligan

 

Wednesday, September 9th, 2020 from 6:00-6:10 pm ET

 

 

Care is labour and dignity, formal and informal, skilled and intimate, systemic and individual, unequally distributed and accessed, racialized and feminized, essential and undervalued, the maintenance of our relationships.

 

Meeting with a person who researches health equity and social determinants of health, I learn that in Ontario, Canada, aging immigrants do not receive adequate support for their health and well-being. Meeting with a person who works in retirement living and long-term care, I hear what it is like to give support to older people. It becomes clear that care work is often given by people who should be paid much more, and some who are not paid at all. Despite this context, through the work of caring for older people, important relationships are built and sustained.

 

— Melanie Gilligan

 

About Episode 12

In Unmet Needs, the twelfth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Melanie Gilligan addresses the context of commodified and informal care for aging people in Ontario, Canada. Through conversations with a researcher and a care worker, she considers multiple types of caregiving relationships, investigating manifestations of intimacy, value of labor, agency, and access. Unmet Needs is a timely portrayal of the crucial relationships that maintain the physical and emotional health of one of society’s most vulnerable demographic groups.

 

About the Artist

Melanie Gilligan (b. 1979) works in a way that reconceives television drama and its links to various forms of non-fictional moving images in order to discuss contemporary political conditions. She studied fine art at Central Saint Martins, London, and was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York. She is a PhD candidate at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Solo exhibitions include those at Kunsthaus Glarus (2017); The Wattis, San Francisco (2016); Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz (2016); and de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2015). She has contributed to group exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Kiasma, Helsinki (2017); Les Ateliers de Rennes – Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Rennes (2016); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2016); British Art Show 8, Leeds (2015); Fridericianum, Kassel (2015); and MoMA PS1, New York (2014).

  

___________________________________________________________________________

 


EPISODE 13:

 

Re-model: la ciudad más allá de la ciudad

Rafael Domenech

 

Wednesday, September 16th, 2020 from 6:00-6:20 pm ET

 

 

— por donde hacia la luz huye el sonido —* 

 

Through the cracks, the building breathes, producing consecutive echo chambers. Paint chips fall from the walls, creating curtains of dust visible only when the sun peeks inside.

 

                                               go up the stairs.

                          I walk inside,

           morning, 

Every

 

I inhabit a decommissioned building.

 

I saunter through the city as I wander through books. It all unfolds, creating an architecture of fragments that scaffolds images of consumption, of dwelling.

 

The book,

                  the architecture

                                             of the endless space

                                                                                where language and image collide.

 

– Rafael Domenech


*Severo Sarduy, Big Bang (Barcelona: Tusquests Editores, 1974), 25. 

 

About Episode 13

In Re-model: la ciudad más allá de la ciudad, the thirteenth episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Rafael Domenech examines the relationship between city and building, exploring how we dwell in different spaces and inhabit multiple realities. In a decommissioned high school building in Yonkers that he has occupied for the last few years, Domenech conducts a daily routine of 5 minute repairs, replacing vandalized windows, installing lighting systems, and repurposing unused faucets and toilets. Re-model juxtaposes footage from these tasks with concrete poetry by the artist, proposing maintenance as a form of irreverence in a society of replacement.

 

About the Artist

Rafael Domenech was born in Havana, Cuba. Domenech is interested in globalized socio-economical infrastructures, contemporary material productions and their relationships to the continual evolution of the urban landscape, the production of architecture, and the manufacturing of language. Through a multidisciplinary artistic practice, he employs notions of radical architecture and public programing as tactics for an exploration of different typologies of objects, experimental publications — artist books, and architectural models. His work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter and Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; The Bass Museum, Miami Beach; Phillip and Patricia Frost Art Museum, Miami; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Artium Museum, Vitoria, Spain; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and The Rockefeller Foundation, New York. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and the Cintas Fellowship. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.

   

___________________________________________________________________________

 


EPISODE 14:

 

Cistern

Vivien Sansour

In collaboration with Samar Hazboun

Music by Emel Mathlouthi

 

WATCH LIVE on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020 from 6:00-6:05 pm ET

 

[Tune In]

[Subscribe]

[Follow on Instagram]

[Sign up for Reminders]

 

1_Website + Instagram Post

 

In this very small terrain I call home, imagining a different reality is imperative for survival. As Palentinians, we are constantly trying to figure out ways to maintain ourselves in a system that abhors us and that considers our presence an obstacle to the fulfilment of its vision as a “land without a people.”

 

Along with the challenges of climate change, Palestinians are facing real thirst; we are granted water only in small allowances. We often find ourselves having to figure out how to save water for cut-off days, as well as how to preempt dry days.

 

In August of 2020, we completed the building of a rain harvesting cistern, a project I embarked upon in order to ensure that my plants don’t die of thirst and that I am able to produce food on this terrain, especially in times of crisis. In the process of digging, we came across a few crystallized rocks; a reminder that 100 million years ago – before humans existed – this place was submerged in water and belonged only to the natural world. 

 

– Vivien Sansour

 

About Episode 14

In Cistern, the fourteenth (and final) episode of StorefrontTV Season 3, Vivien Sansour presents a new community project, a water harvesting cistern in Bethlehem. Sansour, along with artist Samar Hazboun, documents the site, emphasizing the importance of water for the survival of all living beings. Cistern is a performative ode to the maintenance of a people, based in both a brutal reality and a fantastical world.

 

About the Artist

Vivien Sansour is an artist and conservationist. She is the founder of The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and the Traveling Kitchen project, initiatives that aim to bring seed heritage back to the dinner table so we can “eat our history rather than store it away as a relic of the past.” Her work has been exhibited in various arts and culture institutions, including the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her performance “Autonomia” was selected for the closing of the Venice Art Biennale in 2019. Vivien works with farmers worldwide on issues relating to food and seed sovereignty. She uses images, sketch, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations, and to advocate for the protection of biodiversity as a cultural and political act. Vivien was field producer for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in 2013. She has also worked with Dan Saladino from the BBC Food Program, among others. She is an enthusiastic cook and often refers to herself as “a proud PhD dropout.”

 

Image: Still from Vivien Sansour’s CisternSeptember 2020.

Photo by Samar Hazboun, courtesy of the artist

Letters to the Mayor: Berlin

Thursday November 15, 2018 – Friday February 2, 2018

Letters to the Mayor: Berlin

November 15th, 2019 – February 2nd, 2020 

Deutsches Architektur Zentrum – DAZ

Wilhelmine-Gemberg-Weg 6, 10179 Berlin, Germany

 

Opening Reception: Friday, November 15th at 7 pm

 

#letterstothemayor     #letterstothemayorberlin     @storefrontnyc

 

Storefront presents Letters to the Mayor: Berlin as part of the global project Letters to the Mayor in collaboration with the Deutsches Architektur Zentrum (DAZ). Each iteration presents a collection of letters by more than 100 architects, addressing the most pressing issues facing their city.

 

Letters to the Mayor: Berlin invites architects to write to the Mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller. On the evening of Friday, November 15th, there will be an opening reception with Mayor Müller and select participants of the exhibition discussing the state of architecture and the built environment in Berlin. All members of the public are invited to attend.

 

Participants

Esra Akcan, Aristide Antonas, Berk Asal, Yıldız Aslandoğan, Thomas Baecker, Matthias Ballestrem, Christophe Barlieb, Caro Baumann, Eike Becker, Uwe Becker, Verena von Beckerath, Sally Below, Helga Blocksdorf, Christine Bock, Friedrich von Borries, Chris Bosse, Malte von Braun, Benita Braun- Feldweg, Winfried Brenne, Jessica Bridger, Roger Bundschuh, Marius Busch, Nils Buschmann, Vanessa Miriam Carlow, Sam Carvalho, Hans-Jürgen Commerell, Jason Danziger, Christopher Dell, Dan Dorocic, Jan Edler, Tim Edler, Christine Edmaier, Franziska Eidner, Mascha Fehse, Kristin Feireiss, Lukas Feireiss, Jesko Fezer, Laura Fogarasi-Ludloff, Tom Friedrich, Jörg H. Gleiter, Bettina Götz, Nicholas Green, Heike Hanada, Saskia Hebert, Rainer Hehl, Mathias Heinz, Susanne Hofmann, Gerd Jäger, Helmut Jahn, Thomas Kaup, Theresa Keilhacker, Gabriele Kiefer, Erhard An-He Kinzelbach, Jan Kleihues, Julia Klink, Bettina Kraus, Thomas Kröger, Lars Krückeberg, Anupama Kundoo, Michael LaFond, Hilde Léon, Jens Ludloff, Michael Maginness, Ton Matton, Jeannette Merker, Tanaz Modabber, Stephen K. Molloy, Ingrid Moye, Ulrich Müller, Walter Nägeli, Anika Neubauer, Johannes Novy, Philipp Oswalt, Erica Overmeer, Klaus Overmeyer, Lukas Pappert, Markus Penell, Sofia Petersson, Joanne Pouzenc, Wolfram Putz, Alexander Rieck, Jacob van Rijs, Alexander Römer, Gunnar Rönsch, Eike Roswag-Klinge, Ines-Ulrike Rudolph, Ingrid Sabatier, Gudrun Sack, Johannes Schele, Gabi Schillig, Moritz Schloten, Julian Schubert, Elena Schütz, Joachim Schultz-Granberg, Stephan Schwarz, Alex Schweder, Max Schwitalla, Annelie Seemann, Rafi Segal, Johanna Sonnenburg, Maayan Strauss, Leonard Streich, Tilmann Teske, Lisa Tiedje, Katrin Voermanek, Petra Vondenhof- Anderhalten, Martin Voss, Tobias Wallisser, Thomas Willemeit, Peter Wilson, Lena Wimmer, Imke Woelk, Lennart Wolff, Ana Zatezalo Schenk, Christoph Zeller

 

PROJECT TEAM

 

Local Curators

DAZ

 

Wallpaper, Mayoral Desk, and Architect’s Table Design

something fantastic

 

ABOUT LETTERS TO THE MAYOR

 

Letters to the Mayor is an itinerant exhibition that displays real letters written by architects to their city mayors. Initiated by Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2014, the project has traveled to more than 18 cities across the globe, including Bogota, Mexico City, Athens, Panama City, Taipei, Mariupol, Madrid, Lisbon, and Buenos Aires, among others. 

 

Letters to the Mayor invites 100 architects in each city to write a letter to their mayor as a means of bringing innovative ideas and visions of the city closer to the decision-makers, and vice versa.

 

Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political, and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. 

 

Letters to the Mayor questions this dynamic, and invites local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of elected officials, and simultaneously into the public consciousness.

 

Letters to the Mayor: Barcelona

Thursday March 28, 2019 – Sunday May 5, 2019

Letters to the Mayor: Barcelona

March 28th, 2019 – May 5th, 2019

In collaboration with the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC) and urbanNext

 

#letterstothemayor #letterstothemayorbarcelona @storefrontnyc

 

Storefront presents Letters to the Mayor: Barcelona in collaboration with the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC) and urbanNext as part of the global project, Letters to the Mayor. Each iteration of Letters to the Mayor presents a collection of letters by more than 100 architects, addressing the most pressing issues facing their city.

 

Letters to the Mayor: Barcelona invites architects to write to the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau.

 

Participants

Archikubik/Marc Chalamanch/Miquel Lacasta/Carmen Santana, Irma Arribas, Carolina B. García Estévez, Anna Bach, Teresa Batlle Pagès, Sandra Bestraten i Castells, Ibon Bilbao, Josep Bohigas Arnau, Marta Bugés i Aragonés, Denise Castro, Marina Cervera/Students Màster Paisatge UPC, Chiara Cesareo, Curro Claret, Jaume Clèries, Ana Cocho Bermejo, CollLeclerc/Jaime Coll/Judith Leclerc, Comando Señoras, Marc Conangla, Carles Crosas, Ignasi Cubiñá, Nu Diaz, Tomas Diez, Dobooku, Julia Doz/Cristina Garriga/My Bookcase, Expósito Expósito, Ramon Faura, Fulleda Arquitectes, Toni García, Mariona Genís Vinyals, Kathrin Golda-Pongratz, Daniela Hartmann, Sonia Hernández-Montaño, Alex Ivancic, Imma Jansana, Montsa Jovani/Caves Berdié/Jovani Vins, LaCol Arquitectura Cooperativa, Xarxa La Pera/Toni Sonalas/Cristina Casali, Josep Maria de Llobet, Marta Llorente, Areti Markopoulou, Rafael Martínez/Esther Ribas, Mayorga + Fontana arquitectos/Pia Fontana/Miguel Mayorga, MIAS Architects/ Josep Miàs/Marc Subirana, Nerea Mota, Zaida Muxí, NUA arquitectures/Maria, Simone Orso, Roger Paez, Jaume Prat Ortells, Eva Prats, Teresa del Pozo, Moisés Puente, Carmen Rodríguez Pedret, Marina Romero, Maria Rubert, Àfrica Sabé Dausà, Tomoko Sakamoto, Eduard Sancho Pou, Helena Sanz Palau, Glòria Serra Coch, Erica Sogbe, Son Canciones/ Mabel Alonso/Lieven Scheerlinck, Soon in Tokyo/ Angelo Palma, Olga Subirós, Judit Taberna Torres, Daniel Torres, Sara Torres/Víctor Betriu, Jon Tugores, Teresa Urroz/Chus Gómez, José Luis de Vicente, Vora/Pere Buil Castells/Toni Riba Galí

 

PROJECT TEAM

 

Local Curators

Ricardo Devesa, Xavier González, Núria Moliner (members of the urbanNext platform)

 

Mayoral Desk and Architect’s Table Design

L’estoc

 

Graphic Design and Wallpaper Design

Marga Gibert

 

Exhibition Design

Ricardo Devesa, Xavier González, Núria Moliner

 

Exhibition Organizers and Coordinators

Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), Josep Ferrando (member of the Governing Board at COAC), and Gemma Molas (Cultural Events Assistant at COAC)

 

ABOUT LETTERS TO THE MAYOR

 

Letters to the Mayor is an itinerant exhibition that displays letters written by architects to their city mayors. Initiated by Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2014, the project has traveled to more than 20 cities across the globe, including Bogotá, Mexico City, Athens, Panama City, Taipei, Mariupol, Madrid, Lisbon, and Buenos Aires, among others. See here for a list of iterations.

 

Letters to the Mayor invites 100 architects in each city to write a letter to their mayor as a means of bringing innovative ideas and visions of the city closer to the decision-makers, and vice versa.

 

Throughout history, architects have addressed this responsibility by navigating the structures of economic, political, and cultural power in different ways, and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the political role of the architect has often been relegated to providing answers to questions that others have asked.

 

Letters to the Mayor questions this dynamic by inviting local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of elected officials and, simultaneously, into the public consciousness.

Letters to the Mayor: Lima

Friday October 12, 2018 – Monday November 5, 2018

Letters to the Mayor: Lima

October 12th, 2018 – November 5th, 2018 

In collaboration with the Patronato Cultural del Peru

Museo de la Nación, Sala Nasca

 

#letterstothemayor     #letterstothemayorlima     @storefrontnyc

 

Storefront presents Letters to the Mayor: Lima in collaboration with the Patronato Cultural del Peru and curators Ernesto Apolaya Canales, Claudio Cuneo Raffo and Jorge Sánchez Herrera as part of the global project, Letters to the Mayor. Each iteration of Letters to the Mayor presents a collection of letters by more than 100 architects, addressing the most pressing issues facing their city.

 

Letters to the Mayor: Lima invites architects to write to the future mayor of Lima. Mayoral elections will happen on October 7th, 2018.

 

Participants

51-1, Asociación Homogéneos, Michele Albanelli and Carmen Omonte, Claudia Amico and Javiera Infante, Javier Artadi, José Luis Beingolea, Gonzalo Benavides, Rodolfo Bocanegra, Boom Arquitectos, CCC – Cordinadora de Ia Ciudad, Luis Calvet, José Canziani, Cheng + Franco Arquitectos, Jean Pierre Crousse and Sandra Barclay, Santiago A. Dammert, Belen Desmaison, Diacritica, Juan Carlos Doblado, Francis Espino, Esteoeste, Cynthia Estremadoyro, Aldo Facho Dede, Carlos Alberto Fernandez Dávila, Solangel Fernandez, Eduardo Figari, Manuel Flores, Jose Garcia Calderon, Mauricio Gilbonio, Ricardo Huanqui, Vincent Juillerat, K+M Arquitectura y Urbanismo, Hannah Klug, Gary Leggett, Lima Como Vamos, Llona Zamora, Llosa & Cortegana Arquitectos, Luis Longhi, Ángeles Maqueira, Ricardo Martin de Rossi, Rodrigo Martínez, Elio Martuccelli, Metha Arquitectos, Jitka Molnarova, Octavio Montestruque, Mutuo, Jose Orrego, Paulo Osorio, Poggione + Biondi Arquitectos, Karina Puente, Alfredo Queirolo, Luis Rodriguez Rivero, Sofia Rodriguez Larrain, Roman Bauer Arquitectos, Eduardo Ruiz-Huidobro, Elia Saez Giraldez, Sandra Salles, Marc Samaniego, Cynthia Seinfeld and Juan Manuel Parra, Luis Solari, José Carlos Soldevilla, Matteo Stiglich, Karen Takano, Territorial RLC, Jose Antonio Vallarino, Pablo Vega Centeno, Vicca Verde, Humberto Viccina, V.oid, Luisa Yupa

 

Live stream a discussion between the newly-elected mayor of Lima and various local urbanists, architects, and others here from 5 pm–8 pm EST. 

 

PROJECT TEAM

 

Local Curators

Ernesto Apolaya Canales, Claudio Cuneo Raffo and Jorge Sánchez Herrera

 

Mayoral Desk and Wallpaper Design

Sandra Nakamura

 

Graphic Design

Arturo Higa

 

Production Assistant

Diana Gobitz Guanilo

 

ABOUT LETTERS TO THE MAYOR

 

Letters to the Mayor is an itinerant exhibition that displays letters written by architects to their city mayors. Initiated by Storefront for Art and Architecture in 2014, the project has traveled to more than 18 cities across the globe, including Bogotá, Mexico City, Athens, Panama City, Taipei, Mariupol, Madrid, Lisbon, and Buenos Aires, among others. See here for a list of iterations.  

 

Letters to the Mayor invites 100 architects in each city to write a letter to their mayor as a means of bringing innovative ideas and visions of the city closer to the decision-makers, and vice versa.

 

Throughout history, architects have addressed this responsibility by navigating the structures of economic, political, and cultural power in different ways, and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the political role of the architect has often been relegated to providing answers to questions that others have asked.

 

Letters to the Mayor questions this dynamic by inviting local and global architects to deliver their thoughts directly to the desks of elected officials and, simultaneously, into the public consciousness.

Salons: Personal Collections – Bernard Tschumi

Thursday February 15, 2018

NYABF Salon_Bernard Tschumi

 

Salons: Personal Collections

Bernard Tschumi 

February 15th, 2018 

As a series of ongoing salons in the homes of prominent New York City based architects, each event explores a selection of books from the host’s personal library, open to audiences for the first time. The salons are structured as informal conversations between the host and attendees. 

Salons: Personal Collection is a program of StorefrontTV.  Events are recorded and made available in the form of podcasts and a series of essays in collaboration with E-Flux Architecture and GSAPP on the StorefrontTV channel. 

_____________________________________________________________________ 

 
Project Support
Programming partners during and in advance of the fair include The Cooper Union, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, e-flux Architecture, the New York Public Library, and Printed Matter.
 
       
 
The New York Architecture Book Fair is part of the Crossovers Program, a collaboration between Storefront and the Het Nieuwe Instituut. This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

  

General Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

 

         nyc cultural affairs logo _small

Salons: Personal Collections – Anthony Vidler

Thursday March 15, 2018

 

NYABF Salon_Anthony Vidler

Salons: Personal Collections

Anthony Vidler

March 15th, 2018 

As a series of ongoing salons in the homes of prominent New York City based architects, each event explores a selection of books from the host’s personal library, open to audiences for the first time. The salons are structured as informal conversations between the host and attendees. 

Salons: Personal Collection is a program of StorefrontTV.  Events are recorded and made available in the form of podcasts and a series of essays in collaboration with E-Flux Architecture and GSAPP on the StorefrontTV channel. 

_____________________________________________________________________

 

Project Support
Programming partners during and in advance of the fair include The Cooper Union, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, e-flux Architecture, the New York Public Library, and Printed Matter.
 
       
 
The New York Architecture Book Fair is part of the Crossovers Program, a collaboration between Storefront and the Het Nieuwe Instituut. This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

  

General Support

Storefront’s programming is made possible through general support from Arup; DS+R; F.J. Sciame Construction Co., Inc.; Knippers Helbig; KPF; MADWORKSHOP; ODA; Rockwell Group; Roger Ferris + Partners; Tishman Speyer; the Foundation for Contemporary Arts; The Greenwich Collection Ltd.; the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; The Peter T. Joseph Foundation; and by Storefront’s Board of Directors, members, and individual donors.

 

         nyc cultural affairs logo _small