Adriana Barcenas | GSAPP M.Arch Portfolio 2014-2017 by Adriana Barcenas

adriana barcenas rojas

atmospheric

environments

environmental

atmospheres

Master of Architecture, Printed May 2017. Produced for Columbia University : GSAPP Fonts Used: Futura, Univers, Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk, Caslon

The summer before grad school was set to begin, I’d stepped out for a walk as I was accustomed to doing while working at my former office. The banal task of moving my car from one spot to another necessitated this on a daily basis. On this particular day, by some combination of the wind against my neck, pale blue stucco at my side, and sunlight streaming through the trees overhead, I recalled suddenly a memory of some time long past that came with it a feeling of vivid joy. The feeling came on so suddenly and I knew distinctly that it was a memory associated with some place that I’d long forgotten. I’ve attempted since then many times to reconstruct just what the exact features of this place were, though I’ve never succeeded in doing so. But the experience of that day left upon me an impression of what exactly I was seeking from architecture. We speak of living systems in architecture and think often it involves the greening of a space. But a living architecture, as I conceive it, is always the careful interplay between that which is permanent to a certain degree, the ephemeral nature of the experiential, and the overarching system of nature into which all architectures are introduced, be they detrimental or benign. As such, the works within this book have all taken as their central question: what is an architectural process that accommodates the remembering of form just as rigorously as the making of form?

atmospheric

environmental

environments

atmospheres

F. 014

12/23 LIVING POOL Critic: Mark Rakatansky 24/31 WATER CLOSET Critic: Mark Rakatansky

S.015

34/45 KIDS MAKE THE FUTURE Critic: Jeremy Barbour 46/49 DISRUPTED DRAWING Critic: Dan Taeyoung

Project Index F.015

52/53 CHAWL TYPOLOGY Critic: Ada Tolla & Guiseppe Lignano

S.016

84/94 AN ESSAY ON KANO Instructor: Mpho Matsipa

54/63 IN MUMBAI Medium: 35mm Film

102-109 NATURAL OBJECTS Medium: 35mm film

64/80 HEAT WAVE Critic: Ada Tolla & Guiseppe Lignano

110/149 AERIS INSTITUTE Critic: Tei Carpenter 151/165 PORTRAITURE IN REVIEW Critic: Yoonjai Choi

F.016

169/178 AN ESSAY ON PRODUCED FLOWS Critic: Andres Jaques 180/207 INHERITED TOXICITY Critic: Andres Jaques

S.017

210/243 (A)VENUE FOR ART Critic: Galia Solomonoff 246/257 CHILDRENâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SCREEN Critic: Bob Heintges

f. 014

A community pool A public restroom environmental

year one

The first half of year one dealt primarily with the presence of water in architecture. My own relationship to water during this time was greatly influenced by my native state, California. Back home, the land was still suffering from severe drought and the anxiety generated by this conflict was palpable all throughout, from the suburbs in Los Angeles to the agricultural county I once called home. It is an issue that will resurface again in this book. But when I moved to New York three years ago, it was a bizarre adjustment going from a drying terrain to one nearly drowning in water everyday. Public fountains and summertime, sprinkler playgrounds for me were ominous agents, somehow complicit in a larger narrative in which water was a resource without end. Water has been an element Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve gravitated to strongly both prior to and during my time at GSAPP. For these initial exercises in the fall, I considered two ways through which water could impact the experience of space and in turn, how architecture could engage with the issue of water conservation.

atmospheres

water studio

Living Pool Critic: Mark Rakatansky Public Facility Columbia University + NYCHA Community Manhattanville New York cyclical

year one

water

The undulating concrete floor on the highest level is the source of water that is filtered throughout the remainder of the building. Here, a variety of swimmers can find a water depth suitable to their experience level. These visitors include Columbia students and faculty, as well as the primary user group of nearby NYCHA housing resident children that both utilize the pool level in addition to the other educative programming hosted elsewhere in the facility.

The curvature of the structure circulates water downward from the living pool above and filters it through the living laboratory spaces that host green walls as the backdrop to botany classes for nearby children in the community.

water studio

Closet For Water Critic: Mark Rakatansky Program: Public Facility Location: Straus Park New York conservation

year one

water

This public restroom is comprised of a series of water chambers that hold a measurable and limited amount of water which is drained from as the day progresses. The intent is to create a direct visual connection between civic use and the resultant use of water as a resource.

S. 015

A home for children A drawing by air

atmospheric

year one

I will state honestly that I did not have much interest in designing a bank, the prompt for the second-half of year one. Instead, I was immensely interested in the way banks operate as financial institutions that situate themselves as the site for many critical milestone’s in the average civilian’s life: the opening of one’s first savings account, signing a mortgage for a starter home, developing credit, etc. In focusing upon youths in New York’s foster care/adoption circuit, there seemed to be a large constituency group that was being excluded from this cycle, as many age out of the system with little guidance over fiscal responsibility. I proposed my building within a scenario in which a bank institution took interest in developing a new type of residency program for such youths as a corporate philanthropic endeavor in conjunction with the city. The other project in this section follows a similar tangent. While the drawings produced were the result of a drawing machine, physical and digital, the main concern was not necessarily with the design of the device itself, but in what was being transcribed. The device existed only to transcribe disruptions in the environment of a room, otherwise invisible and in the background.

environments

bank studio

alternative value

year one

Kids Make The Future Critic: Jeremy Barbour Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Residential Center Long Island City New York social ecology

Spatial density Precedent Study: The Detention Center

The Academic Residency Program

The University Dorm Hall

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Early Unit Organization Within Building

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adr II

Disrupted Drawing Critic: Dan Taeyoung

movement

year one

air

The initial drawing machine was an adapted mobile that would transcribe disruptions in the air around it onto a sheet of paper below. Each modification to the machine and test was an event recorded by the device. This operation was then reconstructed in digital from through a grasshopper script that generated drawings based on the input of live audio feedback. In both, a constrained path and rhythmic circuit are inflected by these permutations in the unseen environment.

F. 015

A housing type A visit abroad A housing project environmental

year two

The beginning of year two was largely defined by my studio travel to Mumbai. Everything from the climate to the impact of city infrastructure on daily life would eventually coalesce into a project concerned with the relationship of the private dwelling to thermal climate. At this point, the scope and scale of the projects henceforth will expand far beyond the extents of the physical building and work in dialogue with larger conversations concerning energy, infrastructure, and environmental engagement. Alongside my partner, we envisioned a hybridized energy-producing housing system that generated for itself a thermal climate always in contrast to its external environment. We considered it a prototype for future high-density urban housing, wherein the architecture could not only generate its own energy for electricity and heating, but simultaneously deal with a large portion of its waste. The thermal radiant quality of this housing type was a means of directly providing an atmospheric aspect to the embedded energy infrastructure housed with a superstructure that also contained a multitude of unit types.

atmospheres

housing studio

Existing building pipes for waste water

Existing spatial rituals of water

Addition of water tank supply

New spatial patterns of water use

Complete cycle of water and drainage

Juxtaposition of before and after

ritual

year two

Chawl Typology A Study of Water Naigon Chawl, Mumbai Project in Collaboration w. Brigitte Lucey 53

water

housing studio

In Mumbai A Study of Housing Photography: 35mm Film density

year two

climate

housing studio

energy

year two

Heat Wave Critic: Ada Tolla & Guiseppe Ligano Housing Proposal Bronx, New York Project in Collaboration w. Brigitte Lucey

thermal

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COMPOSTING ORB INFRASTRUCTURE

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UNITS HOUSED WITHIN THERMAL BANDS

SOLID

WATER

TRANSPARENT

SEMI OPAQUE

MODULE COMBINATIONS OF PANEL TYPES

S. 016

An essay on kano A research institute A typographic exercise environmental

year two

The projects belonging to the second half of year two were in response to long-established historical narratives. Such narratives can be seen as hindrances at times if not questioned or re-examined through a contemporary lens. In one, an important cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historical trajectory in West Africa is typically dominated by the rhetoric surrounding its colonial past, as opposed to a lengthy study of its spatial practices prior to the Europeansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; arrival. In the second, the basis of the studio project in this section, the legacy of natural history as a scientific field of study leaves its imprint on our engagement with the so-called natural environment. Spatial typologies such as the natural history museum construct for a viewer the diorama, a bounded space in which the focus of the observer is upon those objects contained within rather than a more holistic illustration of the relationship between human presence and the natural world. In engaging with the given program of a research institute, the project simultaneously proposes a counterpoint to the natural history museum by setting forth a series of immersive, environmental chambers devoted to a number of issues presently challenging our worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s atmosphere. The last narrative is explored through typography. Two sets of interviews with artists are interwoven together concerning their work on representations of power through the medium of portraiture.

atmospheres

Islamic Kano: Spatial Domains of Women’s Power

Prior to the radical impact on Kano of Jihad reform in the late 19th century, Islam had proven to be a long-standing influence on the city since the eleventh century. Since this time, Islamic influence has continually altered the spatial mobility of women and, by extension, the means through which women assert power and influence. However, this paper will further explore the diffusion of influence between the city’s ethnic majority, the Hausa, and the migrant presence of the Yoruba in Kano. This relationship between the two groups figures greatly in contextualizing the historical trajectory of Islam and its subsequent impact on the spatial rituals of women. The first section of this paper analyses the relationship between power and fertility by examining the spatial typology of the royal palace in Kano and the female figure as herself a site through which fertility was channeled, and thus, marking women’s access to power. The latter half of this paper examines the expanded practice of seclusion after the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate in the early 19th century as a shift away from the formal recognition of women’s power and as a generator of subversive rituals of power within the spatial realm of the woman’s household domain.

Kano emerged as a Nigerian city of great importance being that it was connected to many other cities of trade through an extensive network of trans-Saharan caravan routes, and as a result, encountered Islam repeatedly since the eleventh century. However, it was not until the rule of Muhammad Rumfa in the fifteenth century that Islam was aligned with political power and began to impact both the architecture of the city, as well, as the spatial practices of the royal palace. It was at this time that the formal practice of seclusion, or kulle, began amongst the city’s ruling class and, as such, was initially associated as a custom reserved only for those of high social standing. (Imam 1994) This is in contrast to the present-day adherence to kulle, whereby over ninety-five percent of married women live in seclusion. This is in large part due to its perception as a display of propriety for those women practicing Islam. (Calloway 1984, 431) This expansion of seclusion is of great interest in two ways. Firstly, although living under seclusion is a constraint on spatial mobility, it’s initial association with women of high rank imbued their domains with great power, as will be explored further within the royal compound. Secondly, the pervasive degree to which seclusion is practiced in the present-day is complicated by the observation that a great many woman who profess to live under strict seclusion have also been found to have incomegenerating practices.(Callaway 1984, 441) This fact suggests that the present-day household

in Kano is in some way spatially conducive to women for practicing subversive means of asserting power, wherein they are secluded but not isolated from external networks. In regards to the Yoruba presence in Kano, it is important to acknowledge their interaction with the city since the 15th century as one also facilitated by trade, but also complicated by the period following the establishment of the Sokoto Caliphate around the year 1807. Similar to the initial association of seclusion with high ranking women, the association to Muslim identity after this period was one of power and economic viability. (Imam 1994, 125) The desirability of this association both served as a catalyst for the conversion to Islam throughout Hausaland and prompted a period of openness on the part of the Caliphate as a means of expanding the Muslim identity. Ultimately, the Sokoto Jihad utilized Islam as a means of unifying Hausaland, and subsequently, initiated a process of integration amongst the various ethnic groups in their newly established territory, including the Yoruba. (Olaniyi 2004, 92) Whereas initial Yoruba migrants settled in Kano as the outcome of extensive trade between Kano and Yorubaland, later settlement in the 19th century further integrated the Yoruba migratory presence into local Hausa society and blurred the distinction between the two groupâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s individual customs. This integrated settlement, Ayagi, can still be found within the old city walls of Kano and, though the

Yoruba have assimilated into Hausa society, they retain their designation as Yoruba. (Olaniyi 2004, 89) While Olaniyi remarks on this absorption of the Yoruba into the Hausa culture of Kano as a divorce from their original customs and religious practices, there can be found traces of Yoruba influence in regards to gendered power in both the era preceding and following the rise of the Caliphate, or in other words, before and after the expansion in the practice of seclusion amongst women. Power in the Domain of Fertility Notions of fertility figured greatly in the initial practice of seclusion, specifically amongst the royal wives of the king, in Kano. Though women would continue to play pivotal roles in the palace after the reformist jihad in the nineteenth century, their previous roles held greater formal recognition and responsibility for their domain was one in which the ritual fertility of the citystate was administered. (Dunbar 2011, 407. Hence, this may explain the initial relationship Imam points out between seclusion and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;high status, wealth and respectability, as well as pietyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. These qualities derived not only from the act of being secluded, but were in acknowledgment of the fertility over which royal wives presided in their domain. This distinction is critical, largely, because this domain of fertility served also as the site of indigo dyeing for the royal wives, a process later commercialized and renowned as an industry dominated by men in the nineteenth

century. The economic exclusion of women from indigo dyeing at this time indicates that whatever association existed between indigodyed cloth and their domain of fertility was greatly diminished, and by extension, intimates a diminishing of fertility’s importance itself within the city. (Nast 2008, 233) Though women would come to have this form of formally-sanctioned power diminished along with the importance of fertility to the city, it is worth examining the relationship of fertility and indigo-dyeing within the context of seclusion and as it pertains to the relationship between Hausa royalty and the Yoruba prior to the reformist jihad and expansion of Islam over local, traditional religions. There are a great deal of indications regarding the extensive nature of indigo-dyeing within the woman’s domain in the royal palace of Kano, though it is a spatial practice long abandoned and under-studied as an archeological site. For this reason, many of the details surrounding the relationship of fertility to indigo-dyeing within the royal palace emerge from ethnographic field work undertaken by Heidi Nast. Built by Rumfa as a new marker of the city’s political alignment with Islam, the royal palace supported the division between male and female, where court chambers hosted an all-male council and the remaining territory was devoted to the secluded domain of women. (Nast, 2008, 235) In terms of scale, the royal household size was immense, as it included not only the royal wives, but the many concubines and offspring, who were all considered equally royal as the king’s children. Royal children, whether from royal wife or concubine, held great importance and were signifiers of Kano’s political fertility, which was as critical to Kano’s stability as was earthly fertility in the city’s agricultural economy. (Nast 2008, 244) Prior to the reformist jihad, Nast

points out that these two aspects of fertility were inextricably linked within the secluded domain of the royal household in that the pots used in the palace dyeing yard were similar to those used in birthing rituals and in the central kitchen, referred to as the Hall of Porridge. The symbolic unification of lineage and agriculture as important aspects of fertility within the royal domain of women granted them a form of power in terms of Kano’s stability; however, it is the relationship of indigo-dyeing to fertility that indicates the possible influence of the Yoruba’s constructions regarding gender and power, as well. The female figure in the mythology of the Yoruba is actively engaged within narratives in which the male and female negotiate their roles in order to assert power; and furthermore, the representation of goddesses amongst the Yoruba play an important role in the construction of women’s identities outside of the cosmological setting. (Olajubu 2003, 66) Examining the important roles of female goddesses in Yoruba origin myths allows an understanding of how Yoruba women identify power as a fluid force that can be exerted by both men and women within their respective domains. This aspect of Yoruba spiritual culture is particularly relevant to the secluded domain of royal women in Kano considering the presence of Yoruba women within the royal palace. The presence of Yoruba women in the royal palace arose both through the prevalence of female dyers from Nupeland who, in turn, were enslaved Yoruba women and the likelihood of freeborn Yoruba women serving as concubines, as the result of established trade with Yorubaland as far back as the 9th century. (Nast 2008, 242). Given the presence of Yoruba women within the secluded royal domain, we can examine the overlapping symbolism of indigo-dyeing and fertility through the Yoruba

goddess, Osun. In her mythology, she is explicitly recognized as a powerful female by the higher god, Olodumare, who admonished those failing to regard Osun’s advice in settling new land. For this reason, she is aligned as an influence on the source of power that makes new life possible. (Olajuba 2003, 75) Many aspects of her mythology parallel the power relegated to royal woman as agents of fertility in Kano, in that Osun is considered a provider of children, leader of the Iya mi (society of powerful women), and most interestingly, is referred to as alaro, one who dyes. (Olajubu 2003, 80) These instances of shared associations to fertility in combination with the presence of Yoruba women in the royal household give credence to the idea that the Yoruba were an influence on royal women’s construction of their roles as agents of power, as they presided over the secluded domain of both their own and the city’s fertility. This assertion of power in relation to fertility prompts me to address how the female figure herself may be considered a site through which fertility flows, a sacred relationship that underscored the practice of seclusion, in addition to the Islamic values that prescribed it prior to the 19th century. Not only were women secluded from men and public view, but the stages of a woman’s life were defined by her marriage and reproductive status, as opposed to the life stages of men set by their biological age. Such terms for women include budurwa (virgin), mata (wife),

bazarawa (divorced/widowed), and tsohuwa (old woman).(Callaway 1984, 235) Marriage, in particular, was considered the significant stage during which a woman could serve as a vessel of fertility. Nast explains this perception of women’s power as one in which her body may serve as a site of expressed fertility, and not fertility as an inherent aspect of women’s bodies. The wedding ceremonies of royal women in the palace were thus rituals where associations to fertility were reinforced as a means of ensuring a women’s ability to assert her power as a site of fertility. This was done, for example, through the preparation and consumption of a special porridge to which special herbs, normally secreted away by a special concubine, were added as a symbolic link to earthly fertility. The association of indigo-dyed cloth to fertility was also reinforced as brides were ceremoniously wrapped in cloth to ensure her power as a fertile site. (Nast 2008, 253) The power women held in their ability to serve as sites of fertility designated the secluded domain of the royal palace as a sacred space of power inflected by Yoruba spiritualism, and not just an adherence to Islamic custom. Though royal women were secluded, this did not preclude them entirely from spatial mobility within the city nor from holding formal titles and administrative duties of great importance; and more so, royal women managed to expand the means through which they could exert their

influence beyond their secluded domain in the palace. One figure of prominence was the concubine Mai-Kudandan, translated to mean owner of the granaries, whose responsibilities lay within both the distribution of palace grains and the collection of grain-based state taxes. (Nast 2008, 238) The community of concubines amongst which the Mai-Kudandan lived were other powerful figures capable of exerting economic influence beyond the palace by utilizing eunuchs and slave women to act on their behalf in the central market. (Nast 2008, 245) The fact that this relationship to Kurmi market was easily facilitated by a direct pathway built and designated solely for womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use indicates that these practices were formally acknowledge by the king and his male subjects. The practice of seclusion was not synonymous with economic exclusion and instead created a gendered domain in which women held positions of power in relation to fertility, as represented by their various formal duties concerning grain. What is little known within the context of this paper and requires further investigation is the economic relationship of Yoruba women living in the Ayagi quarters adjacent to Kurmi market. Nast touches briefly on the presence of smallscale practices of indigo-dyed cloth production for commercial purposes prior to impact of jihad reform on indigo-dyeing as an industry; however, it is unclear the degree to which Yoruba women were involved in the production of indigo cloth beyond the secluded domain of the royal palace.

Demise of Fertility as Power The reformist jihad led by the Fulani in 1807 restructured not only the majority of Hausaland into one political system consisting of many integrated territories, or emirates, but also radically transformed womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s access to power via beliefs regarding fertility. Political unity through the practice of Islam lessened the degree to which it was necessary to establish political and economic stability through royal marriages; and thereafter, the signification of royal children as political fertility was greatly reduced. (Nast 2008) This shift infringed on the sacred power of fertility and women within the secluded domain and, consequently, the very practice of seclusion lost its initial association with the high-ranking status of royalty once extended as a requirement for all practicing Muslim women to adhere to. Fertility no longer served as a primary motivation for practicing seclusion after the Fulani. Instead, the practice of seclusion embodied the politically-charged motivations of the Sokoto Caliphate as a reaction to the spread of Christianity, largely diffusing from the south and through the very trade-routes network that introduced Islam to Kano centuries prior. Seclusion was a highly visible spatial act that denounced any intimations of Chirstian practice, in that Christian women were seen as visible agents within the marketplace and not constrained to the home. (Nast 2008, 251) An early example of the expanded constraint on womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spatial and economic mobility is seen

in the transformation of the indigo-dyed cloth industry after the emergence of the Caliphate in the 19th century. 90

Further removing women’s associations to power through fertility, the formally-recognized duties of concubines in the care of palace grain stores and taxation were diminished after the establishment of a currency that was no longer grain-based. Adding upon this diminishing importance of fertility to the state, the immense dyeing yard within the palace’s secluded was abandoned, converted to serve as an administrative space for males first, and finally designated as a burial ground for the royal family (this being its current use to the present day, though its given name meaning “dyeing pots” retains its original function). (Nast 2008) Beyond the palace, the expansion of seclusion to all Muslim women was a means of deterring women’s enterprises in the public space of the market, in keeping with the political motivations of Kano to support other reformists within the Caliphate. As previously mentioned, this era was also one in which it was incredibly desirable to share an association with Islamic beliefs and, consequently, had an impact on the traditional beliefs of ethnic groups interacting with the largely-Muslim Hausa in Kano. (Imam 1994) In the case of the Yoruba, Olajubu points out a possible manifestation of this influence in illustrating the minimization of goddess’ roles within the various cosmological myths regarding

their origins and the ongoing balance of power between men and women. Considering the active role these goddesses, specifically Osun, served to inform the relationship women had to power through bodily-based rituals of marriage and associated symbols, such as indigo-dyed cloth, the alteration of Yoruba myth to reflect the political dominance of a male-led state indicates the loss of women’s power through these traditional ties to fertility. However, despite the alteration of these associations to fertility and the expanded constraint of woman’s enterprises to the household domain through seclusion, women have arguably established alternative and subversive means of asserting power since the reformist interventions of the Fulani in the 1800s and have continued to do so since its fall to colonialism in the 20th century. Subversive Power in the Household Domain The era of the Sokoto Caliphate utilized religious affiliation to Islam as a means of unification throughout northern Nigeria, and in a similar fashion, Islamic association in Kano continued to act as a unifying method of solidarity in reaction to the era of colonization by the British in the 20th century. (Imam 1994, 126) Rather than focus on the colonial impact of the encounter with the British on gender and power in Kano, I choose to focus on the ever-increasing expansion of the practice of seclusion amongst Kano women as a socio-spatial condition in which

the previous ties to the domain of fertility were supplanted by household spatial practices as a means of asserting a subversive form of power. It is important to understand these practices within the Islamic context as women’s access to political rights in Nigeria since 1979 are established and recognized through Islamic law, Sharia; and thus, their spatial mobility exists within the constraints and allowances of such a framework. (Callaway 1984, 432) In analyzing this time period after the end of the Sokoto Caliphate, I rely extensively on Callaway’s analysis of Hausa women as a ‘muted group’. This concept derives from the earlier work of Shirley Ardener and suggests through the construct of the ‘muted group that women cultivate distinct identities within the private domain that distinguish them greatly from their perceived roles as suppressed entities in larger society. (Callaway 1984) The household is thus a site that simultaneously embodies a form of suppression in that women are strictly secluded to a constrained space away from public view and functions as a spatial haven in which women act as independent agents free to cultivate their own sense of priorities and enterprises away from the dominant space of men. This is not to say that the suppression of women through the practice of seclusion is an acceptable one, especially when one considers its historical trajectory as a political signifier of alliance with Islamic belief rather than a custom inherent to Islamic faith. However, the fact that seclusion is perceived as an integral custom for practicing Muslim women requires then an examination of the relationships and networks women generate amongst themselves when secluded. (Callaway 1984) This is especially important when the product of these practices can instill notions of power in the suppressed individual, albeit within a limited context. This section examines the way

this form of subversive power manifests through economic and spiritual means and further seeks to parse out any continuing diffusion of influence between the Hausa and Yoruba in Kano. While the link between the two cultures is complicated by the Yoruba’s near-complete adoption of Hausa culture within Kano since the 15th century, one may infer the likelihood that subversive practices of power also occur within the secluded households of Hausa women that claim Yoruba origin. Though such an inference requires further study, the extensive spread of Islam as a unifying force throughout northern Nigeria, as well as continued trade between Kano and Yorubaland, indicate that the economic practices of the secluded household may apply to assimilated Yoruba women and, in turn, their spiritual rituals continue to impact the Muslim space of seclusion. The status of marriage retains its importance as a critical stage in women’s reproductive life and also marks the beginning of a woman’s seclusion in Hausa society. This entry into seclusion is not simply the constraint of married women to the bounded space of the household, but it is a restructuring of a women’s mobility within the city itself.Firstly, married women navigate the public space of the city at night and exploit the presumption that they are visiting other family members when their actual intentions are to conduct business.(Callaway 1984, 440) If power can be derived from a role in which one possesses exclusive knowledge, as Olajubu states, then it is significant that these economic endeavors at night and any subsequent income generated constitute an exclusive knowledge to which only married women’s young daughters are privy to. The combined fact that Islam dictates husbands provide all basic needs for the household and that young boys are secluded from women as young as age six means that women also

learn from a young age that income from their mother’s economic enterprises belong wholly to women, and not men.(Callaway 1984) However small in scale these income-generating practices may be, they encompass a level of flexibility in that women are able to create networks of trade between various households. Because these are secluded domains, men have no access to these particular spaces and, as a result, are proscribed from engaging with these networks of trade. The designation between public and private space lessens in importance here when trying to determine the degree to which women may viewed as suppressed, for the extensive number of secluded households provide a protected realm for economic mobility not possible in the former dichotomy. Spiritualism is another means of subversion through which women assert power within the secluded domain of the household. Though Hausa women adhere to Islamic practice, they do not disavow the practice of spirit possession in the bori cults that persist until now. Just as there had been a large time-span of confluence between Islam and the Yoruba in Kano prior to the reformist Jihad in the 1800s, the bori cults played a key part in Hausa culture alongside Islam. As mentioned earlier, fertility had been of great importance to the political and economic vitality of the city up until the 19th century; and therefore, the bori shrines were another domain in which royal women held sacred power in

securing fertility for the city as priestesses to the spirits.(Callaway 1984) One view on why the relevance of bori cults persists despite the political shift away from fertility’s importance contends that the state of being possessed provides married women with special distinction and is accompanied by a time of celebration within the secluded domain. (Dunbar 2011, 198) Seemingly, the practice of spirit possession can be understood as a subversive act of asserting power in that women lay claim to spirituallylinked privileges when possessed. However, Matory’s writing on spirit possession within the context of Yoruba spiritualism counters this reading by highlighting the significance of spirit possession for both women and men. As previously mentioned, Yoruba mythology recalls the many instances in which the fluidity of power may oscillate between male and female deities; and so, spirit possession directly reflects this fluid force taking hold of the body regardless of gender. I point this aspect of Yoruba spiritualism out because the continued co-existence of Islam and spirit possession parallels the co-existence of Islam and traditional religion amongst the Yoruba. A Yoruba proverb goes as such: “Ifá (the ranking divination priesthood) is as old as life; Islam is as old as life; It was at noon day that Christianity came in.” (Matory 1994, 496) The Yoruba perceive both their own traditional beliefs and Islam as sharing the same length of time since their origin and thus, neither one is perceived as superseding the other.

The actual subversion of power in the secluded domains of Kano women, in regards to spiritualism, may then be informed by the way the Yoruba address Islam as a fellow system of belief into which they can impute their own meanings. This is a process of familiarizing and occupying the religious practices of the other. (Matory 1994) In this way, Islamic households are inflected by Yoruba constructions of gender and power, much in the way that Yoruba notions of fertility and indigo-dyed cloth influenced the royal household prior to the Fulani. Power is not derived solely from the privileges that come with being possessed, but from the roles women hold within rituals of spirit possession. The Muslim household is then the domain in which priestesses may freely occupy the Islamic space of seclusion and where they may tend to the spiritual concerns of fellow wives who, otherwise, demonstrate outwardly their devotion to Islam. The two practices are not necessarily perceived to be in conflict with one another, but they reflect women’s agency as powerful figures in relation to religion. Conclusionary Remarks That women can establish roles of prominence within the scope of Islamic practice as a means of accessing power is significant since, as Callaway points out, it is not a simple directive to dismantle the practice of seclusion in Kano that one should exalt right away. There is a desire amongst many women to reform Hausa society,

but to do so in keeping with their Islamic beliefs. Regardless of outsider opinion on the act of seclusion, women do not perceive ‘liberation’ in the same sense as western thinkers might. (Callaway 1984) It is through marriage and the secluded domain of the household that women have established means of expanding their network of influence, whether economically or spiritually, much in the way that royal women of the era prior to the Caliphate also held great prominence and influence within the market from their secluded domain. Removing the practice of seclusion as a means of ending women’s suppression from the public sphere without other radical recourse or reform involves also displacing women from the private network of spaces in which women act freely and independently. But given the rise of women as political entities, as seen in the formation of two women’s issues groups (Women in Nigeria and Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations of Nigeria) in the 1980s, it may be more fruitful to investigate in Kano the shared interests and influence between the belief systems of Islam and the Yoruba in their present condition as women further negotiate their future roles within Hausa society.

References BBC News | Africa | Yorubas Flee Kano After Fighting”. News.bbc.co.uk. N.p., 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016. Gender & Power: Yoruba, Maasai, Igbo”. Women & Religion in Africa. N.p., 2016. Web. 30 Mar. 2016. Callaway, Barbara J. 1984. “Ambiguous Consequences of Socialization and Seclusion of Hausa Women”. The Journal of Modern African Studies, Volume 22, Issue 3. Cambridge University Press, pp 429-450 Dunbar, Roberta Ann. 2011. “Muslim Women in African History”. History of Islam in Africa. Athens, OH, USA: Ohio University Press, pp 397-418 Imam, Ayesha M. 1994. “Politics, Islam, and Women in Kano, Northern Nigeria”. Identity politics and women : cultural reassertions and feminisms in international perspective. Boulder, CO : Westview Press.

Lorand Matory, J. 1994. “Rival Empires: Islam and the Religions of Spirit Possession among the Oyo-Yorùbá” American Ethnologist, Vol. 21, No. 3. Wiley, pp. 495-515 Nast, Heidi J. 2008. “Women, Royalty, and Indigo Dyeing in Northern Nigeria, circa 1500-1807”. Servants of the dynasty : palace women in world history. Berkeley : University of California Press, pp 235-259 Olajubu, Oyeronke. 2003. “Identity, Power, and Gender Relations in Yoruba Religious Traditions”. Women in the Yoruba religious sphere. Albany : State University of New York Press, pp 65-92 Olaniyi, Rasheed. 2004. “Yoruba commercial diaspora and settlement patterns in pre-colonial Kano”. Nigerian Cities. Trenton, NJ : Africa World Press, pp 79-99 Shaikh, Sa’diyya. 2011. “Morality, justice and gender: reading Muslim tradition on reproductive choices”. African Sexualities : A Reader. Pambazuka Press, Capetown, ZAF, pp 340-358 Works, Parris, Parris Works, and View profile. “Kano Is My New Home: Kano Dye Pits And Kurmi Market”. Livinglifemphnigeria.blogspot.com. N.p., 2013. Web. 30 Mar. 2016. Zakaria,Yakubu. 2001. “Entrepreneurs at Home: Secluded Muslim Women and Hidden Economic Activities in Northern Nigeria”. Nordic Journal of African Studies 10(1). University of Uppsala, Sweden, pp 107-123

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Portraiture In Review Critic: Yoonjai Choi Final Project Booklet representations of power

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PORTRAIT PORTRAIT PORTRAIT OFOF AOF A WOMAN, WOMAN, A WOMAN, PETER PETER PETER PAUL PAUL PAUL RUBENS, RUBENS, RUBENS, CA. CA. 1625–27. CA. 1625–27. 1625–27. UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED #193, #193, #193, CINDY CINDY CINDY SHERMAN, SHERMAN, SHERMAN, 1989. 1989. 1989. MARIA MARIA MARIA PORTINARI, PORTINARI, PORTINARI, HANS HANS HANS MEMLING, MEMLING, MEMLING, CA. CA. CA. 1470. 1470. 1470. UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED #183, #183, #183, CINDY CINDY CINDY SHERMAN, SHERMAN, SHERMAN, 1988. 1988. 1988. PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS ELIZABETH, ELIZABETH, ELIZABETH, ROBERT ROBERT ROBERT PEAKE PEAKE PEAKE THE THE THE ELDER, ELDER, ELDER, CA. CA. CA. 1606. 1606. 1606. UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED #216, #216, #216, CINDY CINDY CINDY SHERMAN, SHERMAN, SHERMAN, 1989. 1989. 1989. PORTRAIT PORTRAIT PORTRAIT OFOF AOF A WOMAN WOMAN A WOMAN WITH WITH WITH A AMAN A MAN MAN ATATAAT ACASEMENT, A CASEMENT, CASEMENT, FRA FRA FRA FILIPPO FILIPPO FILIPPO LIPPI, LIPPI, LIPPI, CA. CA. CA. 1440. 1440. 1440. UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED #223, #223, #223, CINDY CINDY CINDY SHERMAN, SHERMAN, SHERMAN, 1990. 1990. 1990. PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS VICTOIRE VICTOIRE VICTOIRE OFOFSAXE-COBURGOF SAXE-COBURGSAXE-COBURGGOTHA, GOTHA, GOTHA, SIR SIR EDWIN SIR EDWIN EDWIN LANDSEER, LANDSEER, LANDSEER, 1839. 1839. 1839. PRINCESS PRINCESS PRINCESS VICTOIRE VICTOIRE VICTOIRE OFOFSAXE-COBURG-GOTHA, OF SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA, SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA, KEHINDE KEHINDE KEHINDE WILEY, WILEY, WILEY, 2012. 2012. 2012. MADAME MADAME MADAME DEDEDE POMPADOUR, POMPADOUR, POMPADOUR, FRANCOIS FRANCOIS FRANCOIS BOUCHER, BOUCHER, BOUCHER, 1759. 1759. 1759. THE THE THE TWO TWO TWO SISTERS, SISTERS, SISTERS, KEHINDE KEHINDE KEHINDE WILEY, WILEY, WILEY, 2012. 2012. 2012. SELF-PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT, SELF-PORTRAIT, REMBRANDT REMBRANDT REMBRANDT VAN VAN VAN RIJN, RIJN, RIJN, 1660. 1660. 1660. UNTITLED UNTITLED UNTITLED #210, #210, #210, CINDY CINDY CINDY SHERMAN, SHERMAN, SHERMAN, 1989. 1989. 1989. DON DON DON GASPAR GASPAR GASPAR DEDEGUZMAN, DEGUZMAN, GUZMAN, COUNT-DUKE COUNT-DUKE COUNT-DUKE OFOFOLIVARES, OFOLIVARES, OLIVARES, DIEGO DIEGO DIEGO RODRÍGUEZ RODRÍGUEZ RODRÍGUEZ DEDESILVA DE SILVA SILVA Y YVELÁZQUEZ, VELÁZQUEZ, Y VELÁZQUEZ, 1635. 1635. 1635. NAPOLEAN NAPOLEAN NAPOLEAN LEADING LEADING LEADING THE THE THE ARMY ARMY ARMY OVER OVER OVER THE THE THE ALPS, ALPS, ALPS, KEHINDE KEHINDE KEHINDE WILEY, WILEY, WILEY, 2005. 2005. 2005. JAMES JAMES JAMES STUART, STUART, STUART, DUKE DUKE DUKE OFOFRICHMOND OF RICHMOND RICHMOND AND AND AND LENNOX, LENNOX, LENNOX, ANTHONY ANTHONY ANTHONY VAN VAN VAN DYCK, DYCK, DYCK, CA. CA. CA. 1633–35. 1633–35. 1633–35. WILLEM WILLEM WILLEM VAN VAN VAN HEYTHUYSEN, HEYTHUYSEN, HEYTHUYSEN, KEHIND KEHIND KEHIND WILEY, WILEY, WILEY, 2005. 2005. 2005. P POP ORO RT R TR R TI A R I ATI A TU U TRU RE R E EI N I NI NR RE R EV V EI EV I EW IW EW

a booklet on violet

Portraiture in Renaissance and Baroque Europe

paintings in their own right but rather important inclusions in pictures of Christian subjects. In medieval art, donors were frequently portrayed in t=he altarpieces or wall paintings that they commissioned, and in the fifteenth century painters began to depict such donors with distinctive features presumably studied from life. An example is Robert Campin’s Merode altarpiece (56.70) of about 1425, in which the man and woman in the left wing have the specificity characteristic of Jean Sorabella portraiture. Hans Memling’s portraits of TommaAugust 2007 so and Maria Portinari (14.40.626-27), painted around 1470, were also probably meant to flank A portrait is typically defined as a representation the image of a saint in a small triptych, yet each of a specific individual, such as the artist might likeness fills a whole panel and has the emphasis meet in life. A portrait does not merely record of a portrait in its own right. someone’s features, however, but says something One of the hallmarks of European portraiture is about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a a sense of reality, an apparent intention to depict real person’s presence. the unique appearance of a particular person. The traditions of portraiture in the West extend Each portrait is thus meant to express individual back to antiquity and particularly to ancient identity, but as Erwin Panofsky recognized, it Greece and Rome, where lifelike depictions also “seeks to bring out whatever the sitter has in of distinguished men and women appeared in common with the rest of humanity” (quoted in sculpture and on coins. After many centuries in Shearer West, Portraiture [Oxford, 2004], p. 24). which generic representation had been the norm, This second aspect of portraiture comes across in distinctive portrait likenesses began to reappear the considerable conservatism of the genre: most in Europe in the fifteenth century. This change portraits produced in Renaissance and Baroque reflected a new growth of interest in everyday Europe follow one of a very small range of life and individual identity as well as a revival of conventional formats. The profile view, which was Greco-Roman custom. The resurgence of portraifavored in ancient coins, was frequently adopted ture was thus a significant manifestation of the in the fifteenth century, for instance, in Fra Filippo Renaissance in Europe. Lippi’s picture of a woman at a window, with a The earliest Renaissance portraits were not young man peeking in (89.15.19). The three-quarter face, which allows The Exquisite Dissonance Of Kehinde Wiley for greater engagement between sitter and viewer, was also widely Heard on All Things Considered favored. Petrus Christus used this May 22,2015 format in his portrait of a Carthusian monk (49.7.19), which places the sitter in a simply characterized interior, with a horizontal element AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: The first time I saw a Kehinde like a windowsill at the bottom and Wiley painting w as out of the corner of my eye. It was in an a glow of light in the left background. Italian painters at the turn art gallery. I saw this blood-red and gold pattern. It looked of the sixteenth centu ry embraced like satin wallpaper. And then I saw a Timberland boot, and and refined this formula. Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated portrait of I had to follow that boot. I went around the corner and found Mona Lisa (ca. 1503–5; Musée du Louvre, Paris), for instance, increasmyself in front of a massive portrait of a young black man. es the sense of connection between He wore a creamy-white Velour tracksuit, but he held a sitter and viewer by placing the on the window ledge; the sword like a king from an old European oil painting. This is hands enigmatic smile departs from the what Kehinde Wiley does. He takes contemporary people - perfect composure seen elsewhere. Raphael’s widely imitated portrait oftentimes, it’s young black men, young black women - and of Baldassare Castiglione (ca. 1514; uses the half-length format puts them in a pose you’d expect to see in the Louvre or the Louvre) seen in the Mona Lisa b;ut tightens the focus on the sitter by highlightMet. And much like his paintings, Wiley captures you from ing his lively face against a softly lit first sight. He dresses in rich, bold colors. I met him earlier gray backdrop. Mannerist artists adjusted these this week in New York at the Brooklyn Museum. He was conventions to produce works wearing a navy blue suit with cornsilk-yellow paisley print. like Bronzino’s portrait of a young man (29.100.16) painted in the

KEHINDE WILEY: A little piece of Senegal. I spent a lot of

representations of power

1530s: the figure again appears half-length, but the expression is aloof rather than serene, curious pieces of furniture replace the barrier along the lower border, and the hands—the right fingering the pages of a book and the left fixed on the hip— suggest momentary action and bravado rather than quiet dignity. The hand in the book confers an air of learned nonchalance on sitters both like and unlike Bronzino’s fashionable young man: it occurs, for instance, in Titian’s sensitive portrait of the aged archbishop Filippo Archinto, painted in the 1550s (14.40.650). The hand on hip frequently appears in portraits of rulers or would-be rulers, as in van Dyck’s splendid likeness of James Stuart, painted around 1635 (89.15.16). The full-length format, always a costly and grandiose option, increases the sitter’s air of power and self-possession. Even greater magnificence is implicit in equestrian portraits, which also had Greco-Roman associations and were much favored in Renaissance and Baroque courts (52.125). The conventional aspects of portraiture ensure that each example will bear some resemblance to the next, and yet this general similarity makes the distinctive qualities of each one the more salient. Sometimes the sitter’s beauty or demeanor is emphasized, as in Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portrait of a young man (35.89.4) with luxuriant curls and a straightforward gaze. In other examples, a magnificent costume highlights the sitter’s wealth and fashionable taste (51.194.1). Other portraits suggest a sitter’s profession or interests by including possessions and attributes that characterize him as, for example, a time in Senegal. In fact, I have a studio there. humanist author (19.73.120), an accomplished sculptor (46.31), CORNISH: Wiley is 38. He grew up in LA. His mom started or an impassioned preacher him with painting lessons when he was 11. Now he’s (65.117). In addition to these public aspects of idengetting the retrospective treatment after more than a decade rather tity, portraits may also suggest the sitter’s inner psychology or of work. Fifty-eight pieces are on display. I wanted him state of mind. Hints of personto tell me about that regal-looking man in the Timberland ality are especially evident in portrayals boots, the first painting of his I ever saw, which is one of the seventeenth-century of less exalted persons, such as Rembrandt ’s portrait of the first paintings in the exhibit. craftsman Herman Doomer WILEY: The original painting, actually, is an old Dutch (29.100.1), Velázquez’s picture of his assistant Juan de Pareja painting that depicts a man. He has his hand on his hip. (1971.86), and Rubens’ seducHis fist is turned outward, and he has a sword in the other tive likeness of a woman who have been his sister-in-law hand. And it’s a very regal look. It’s very self-possessed. And may (1976.218). In addition to recording appearin this particular painting that I chose to create, all of that ances, portraits served a variety

pose is recreated, with the exception that there is a young man who I met in the streets of Brooklyn back in 2006 who chose that painting as his pose. And here he’s wearing a Velour Sean John suit, a pair of timberlands, but that same sense of regal hauteur is there. CORNISH: I notice that you leave in the brands. WILEY: Yeah.

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of social and practical functions in Renaissance and Baroque Europe. Miniatures were given as gifts of intimate remembrance, while portraits of rulers asserted their majesty in places from which they were absent. In courtly settings, portraits often had diplomatic significance. For instance, Jan van Eyck traveled to make portraits (now lost) of potential wives for his patron, Philip the Good of Burgundy, and Girolamo della Robbia made a ceramic portrait of Francis I (41.100.245) to adorn the residence of one of his comrades in arms. A portrait was often commissioned at a significant moment in someone’s life, such as betrothal, marriage, or elevation to an office. The making of a portrait typically involved a simple arrangement between artist and patron, but artists also worked on their own initiative, particularly when portraying friends and family (18.72; 1981.238; 1994.7). These portraits sometimes display a sense of affection, informality, or experimentation unusual in commissioned works. Finally, artists captured their own likenesses in self-portraits (49.7.25; 14.40.618), where they freely pursued their own ends, whether to claim elevated status, to showcase technical mastery, or to seek frank self-reflection. From the Met, Heilbrunn Timeline of History

CORNISH: I see tags on sneakers. I see Adidas and labels. Why leave that in? WILEY: Why take it out would be the real question. The brands that people wear are serious business. I remember growing up as a kid in South Central Los Angeles back in the 1980s when people were being killed for Jordan sneakers. Branding says a lot about luxury and about exclusion and about the choices that manufacturers make. But I think what the society does with it after it’s produced is something else, and the African-American community has always been expert at taking things and repurposing them towards their own ends. This code switching that exists between luxury and urban is something that was invented in the streets of America, not on 6th Avenue. CORNISH: I want to turn around to this painting behind us called the “Mugshot Study” because it doesn’t look like anything else in the exhibit, and talk about how this painting came to be. WILEY: Well, what this painting is is a portrait of a young black man, possibly between the ages of 18 and 26 - I

representations of power

Review: ‘Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic’ at the Brooklyn Museum

Roberta Smith February 19, 2015

painting by Peter Paul Rubens. In Mr. Wiley’s reprise, produced in 2009, the face of the tragic pop star, who died that year, is overwhelmed by the ostentatious royal armor and hovering cherubs. Often, Mr. Wiley’s subjects are seen against decorative patterns based on textiles from various cultures — rich brocades, British Arts & Crafts designs, Africa-inspired Dutch wax-resist fabrics. Mostly floral designs, they curl across the figures, confusing foreground and background. Anointed with carved black or gold frames that look a little too fake, these paintings keep company with other borrowings from art history: among them six imposing full-length portraits in stained glass that are too photographic, and four bronze portrait busts that muster a terrific hauteur but otherwise are generically academic. In nearly every instance, the figures are larger than life; some paintings are nearly as big as billboards. But there are also small-scale portraits of young black men, some on gold leaf, like Byzantine icons, and others ensconced in sturdy wood frames equipped with doors. Resembling portable altarpieces, and based on the austere portraits from the 1400s by Hans Memling, they bring to mind the quiet perfection of Northern Renaissance works amped up with a contemporary sense of seductiveness. When it comes to art history, Mr. Wiley has not only scores to settle but also possibilities to explore. He sees this terrain as ripe with potential, a revisionist approach that he shares with artists as

You can love or hate Kehinde Wiley’s bright, brash, history-laden, kitsch-tinged portraits of confident, even imperious young black men and women. But it is hard to ignore them, especially right now, with scores of them bristling forth from “Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic,” the artist’s mind-teasing, eye-catching survey at the Brooklyn Museum. Since 2001, Mr. Wiley has been inserting black individuals into the generally lily-white history of Western portraiture, casting them in poses — including on rearing steeds — derived from Renaissance and old master paintings of saints, kings, emperors, prophets, military leaders, dandies and burghers. Usually these works have titles identical or similar to their sources, among them “Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps,” and “Colonel Platoff on his Charger,” creating the delicious sense that Mr. Wiley’s updates are perfectly normal, which in a way they are. Still, they are conceptually can’t really say. He has these beaded necklaces around provocative and should startle just about anyone, regardless of his neck, nothing more than a wife beater. It’s a painting race, creed or color, even if his often thin, indifferently worked that’s cropped, and, in fact, the way that I found this image surfaces can leave something to was I was walking down the street in Harlem and I found be desired as paintings. In a way that few other living this crumpled piece of paper, and on it was a mug shot. artists match, Mr. Wiley’s art is overtly, legibly full of the pres- Presumably, it fell out of a police car, and it got me thinking ent. His paintings reflect some about portraiture. It got me thinking about the choices that of the problems and pleasures of being alive right now, in times one has to make in order to be in a portrait of this type. fraught with corrosive bigotry and inequality; flooded with CORNISH: It’s also the antithesis of the work people may images, goods and sounds; and recognize, right? Like, if anything, your work, for a lot of enriched by the incessant, even ecstatic interplay of cultures people, has been a rebuke of the mug shot when it comes to — whether high, low or sub — black men, right? around the globe. In the 44 paintings here, Mr. WILEY: It’s a rebuke of the mug shot. It’s an ability to say that Wiley’s subjects wear hip-hop fashion or designer gowns, and in I will be seen the way that I choose to be seen. All of the addition to posing as kings and models are going through art history books and deciding, saints, they mimic aristocratic ladies in well-known paintings out of all the great portraits in the past, which ones do they from the Louvre or masterworks of African sculpture. Very occa- feel most comfortable with? Which ones resonate with sionally, we see someone famous them? And so I go through the studios with individuals who and in costume, as in “Equestrian Portrait of King Philip II go through art history books and choose how they want to (Michael Jackson)” based on a

perform themselves.

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diverse as Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz, Carroll Dunham, John Currin and especially Mickalene Thomas, who also inserts black women into art history (and with a degree of painterly innovation that exceeds Mr. Wiley’s). Mr. Wiley also belongs to a tradition of Pop Art-infused figuration that includes Mel Ramos, Wayne Thiebaud and Barkley L. Hendricks. And he owes something to the flamboyance and painting-consciousness of artists from the 1980s, especially the slyly layered images of David Salle and the sampled patterns of Philip Taaffe. Mr. Wiley may best be described as a combination of Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell and Jeff Koons. Like Warhol, he makes striking images of his contemporaries. Like Rockwell, he elevates everyday Americans with somewhat corny portrayals that are more interesting as images than as art objects. Like Mr. Koons especially, Mr. Wiley’s is largely an accessible public art that also raises issues about the role of the artist’s hand and the use of workshop production. Like all these artists, Mr. Wiley has a carefully cultivated public persona, and is, along with his art, the subject of considerable art-world argument, which matters little. Mr. Wiley’s work is part of the larger culture, and so is he. Mr. Wiley was born in Los Angeles in 1977 and grew up looking at old master paintings and sculpture at the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. He earned his B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1999 and his M.F.A. from Yale in

2001, followed immediately by a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. One day, on a street near the museum, he picked up a piece of paper featuring the image of a young black man; it was a confidential police mug shot of a suspect. Looking at the image in the catalog, or the painting from 2006 based on it, one can see why the innocence and nobility of this young face became, as Eugenie Tsai writes, “a catalyst for his subsequent work.” Covering just 13 years of activity, this exhibition was organized by Ms. Tsai, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, and offers an early midcareer report on Mr. Wiley’s progress. It presents the scope of his ambition and his carefully constructed artistic and social project, which has improved as he has gone global, finding subjects in Africa, Brazil, Jamaica and Haiti. It shows his willingness to risk and fail. The primary flaw is his seeming indifference to the physicality of painting, as he more or less said in a recent article, but that may be changing. However, Mr. Wiley is, as all artists should be, aspirational. In the first gallery, “Conspicuous Fraud series #1 (Eminence)” portrays a young man in a business suit whose black hair swirls around him like a large, powerful serpent. It is so cursorily painted as to seem unfinished. His later paintings adhere to a formula of repeating elements: figure, pose, garments, props, background, as do most portraits. The problem is that in many of his efforts, the elements battle one another. The figures, which are painted by Mr. Wiley, convey a certain intensity, but the backgrounds, painted by CORNISH: Why use what people might consider old assistants, often seem skimpy, filled in, not quite up to the European art traditions? I think one thing, when it comes task. The imbalance can be even to African-American art forms, one of the defining features worse in canvases that replicate actual setting has been to create something wholly new, right, to, like - to the of the borrowed work, as in actually divorce yourself, in a way, from the traditions, right, “Gossiping Women” and “Santos Dumont: The Father of Aviation whether it be jazz or whatever. II,” in which marvelously solid subjects (two women and two WILEY: Right. In fact, that’s the rallying call of the avantmen respectively) are set in garde - to create something wholly new. The simple truth is landscapes that resemble sloppy stage sets or images painted by that, rhetorically, we cannot do that. numbers. CORNISH: You’ve been asked this question a lot, right? And The patterned backgrounds are especially overdone in the first it must be frustrating (laughter) to have people... paintings Mr. Wiley made of young black women, a 2011 WILEY: No. series titled “An Economy of Grace.” For this he went all CORNISH: Really? out, outfitting the women in WILEY: Not at all. Givenchy gowns, with piled-up hair and elaborate makeup. It CORNISH: OK. doesn’t help that they also seem ill-at-ease, having been removed WILEY: No, no. You’re getting to the heart of my love affair from the comfort zone of their with art. My love affair with painting is bittersweet. I love own clothing in a way that their male counterparts are not. The the history of art. You asked me about that moment when I fashion photographs that Mr. Wiley orchestrated for a recent first looked at this stuff and when I first fell in love with it. issue of New York magazine,

It was only later that I understood that a lot of destruction

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using some of the same models, are better. And so are his latest paintings of women in everyday dress: especially “The Sisters Zénaïde and Charlotte Bonaparte,” after another Jacques-Louis David, where two young women, seated, reading a letter before what may be the artist’s simplest background pattern, based on a William Morris design.

A general complaint here is that the labels cite the paintings’ high-art sources intermittently. The origins of the backgrounds are almost never mentioned. Full disclosure for each would strengthen the show. But aspiration pays off. Like the artist’s most recent paintings of women, his three small and highly detailed portraits based on Hans Memling in the show’s final galleries end the exhibition on a high note, especially the muscular, slightly androgynous Rasta-braided subject of “After Memling’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat.” This is perhaps the only work in the show that you can imagine seeing anywhere near its Flemish original. The smooth pore-less surfaces and intimacy of Mr. Wiley’s effort have a rare physical and emotional concentration. Now that he has our attention, he may find his true métier working small, in oil on wood panel, in the manner of Northern Europe’s self-effacing early portraitists. At least for a while.

and domination had to occur in order for all of this grand reality to exist. So what happens next? What happens is the artist grows up and tries to fashion a world that’s imperfect. He tries to say yes to parts that he loves and to say yes to the parts that he wants to see in the world, such as black and brown bodies like my own in the same vocabulary as that tradition that I had learned so many years before. It’s an uncomfortable fit, but I don’t think that it’s something that I’m shying away from it all. In fact, I think what we’re arriving at is the meat of my project, which is that discomfort is where the work shines best. These inconvenient bedfellows that you’re seeing all over this museum are my life’s work. CORNISH: When we talked to museum visitors yesterday, one of them actually said that they felt as though the work resonated with them in particular because of the events from the last year, the conversation about police brutality and the deaths of young black men, in many cases at the hands of police. WILEY: Right. CORNISH: And I realize maybe that, also, is something I was

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The Multiple Worlds of Cindy Sherman’s History Portraits

Beth Hinderliter

It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that a man – just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! – may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the ‘feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of hanging into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.’ Borges, The Library of Babel In his story The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges feeling in my gut, that I was seeing. elegantly describes the efforts of those who seek order in an WILEY: No, you’re not making infinite world. Despite the narrator’s searching and travthat up. You’re not seeing something that’s not there. This elling through the library of entire body of work comes out of a sense of vulnerability, the world, unfortunately he has never found the catalogue and I love that you’ve arrived at that point because what of catalogues that would give I wanted to do was to look at the powerlessness that I the key to the mystery of order. In seeking a solution to felt as - and continue to feel at times. As a black man in this ancient problem of chaos versus constancy, the narrator the American streets, I know what it feels like to walk can only answer that he has through the streets knowing what it is to be in this body and hope that order exists somewhere in this realm of chaos. how certain people respond to that body, this dissonance With this, Borges weaves an between the world that you know and then what you mean elaborate tale in which his model of the world is multias a symbol in public, that strange, uncanny feeling of ple and diffuse. He begs that, if he must live in this hell of having to adjust for... confusion and disorder, at least let heaven – the best CORNISH: What people think of you, yeah. possibly ordered world – WILEY: This kind of double consciousness. exist elsewhere. Condemned to this dark realm of the CORNISH: Well, Kehinde Wiley, thank you so much for impious, Borges names it a walking us through the show. This was really lovely. And ‘feverish library’ where all is in constant flux. best of luck with the next 14 years (laughter). This too is the image of the world created by Cindy SherWILEY: Thank you. It was my pleasure. man in her History portraits

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series. These photographs, shown initially as a group at Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City in 1990, present chaotic scenes in which images from art-history catalogues clash and mix. Through her impertinent handling of the shelves of art history, Sherman offers us the insight into the feverish library described by Borges. In rejecting the catalogue of art-history catalogues, she refuses to participate in traditional narratives of the artist as genius and the art object as a singular and invaluable masterwork. By rejecting such established hierarchical systems of order, Sherman creates a decidedly feminist model of the world that privileges disagreement over unity and difference over singularity. In the History portraits series, as in her earlier black-and-white film stills works, we see Sherman posing in multiple guises. While her early works had created elaborate tableaux reminiscent of B-grade Hollywood movies, here Sherman turns her impious attention to the history of art and diverse artists such as Raphael, Caravaggio and Ingres. Wittily combining costumes, prosthetic devices and make-up, Sherman’s portraits are in no means faithful mirrors of the original works of art, but instead bring into question the distortion that such historical works undergo through functions of time and memory. Combining elements from multiple and often incongruous sources, Sherman intentionally highlights this play of distortion. That is to say, these grotesque and It Began with Madame de Pompadour often comical assemblages do not add up to a single whole – Interviewer: Susan Sollins. Content Editor: Nicole J. Caruth. a plausibly coherent window July 2013 onto the world. Her mixture of references does not point reverently to the work of an old master or to an anxiety ART21: What was the impetus for History Portraits? of influence overcome by the SHERMAN: This piece [Untitled (#183 A)] was sort of where younger artist’s reinterpretation. Rather, these works it all began. In the late ‘80s I was invited to do something destabilise concepts of copy and original, using a space with a company that wanted artists to make objects that in-between to illuminate the were functional yet works of art. They suggested I do operation of representation itself. This artistic strategy something with Limoges and invited me to their factory of self-conscious referencing where they had casts of everything they’d ever done. and quoting of art within art questions the relationship They had a lot of things that Madame de Pompadour had of the divergent worlds that meet here within. Thus, in designed when she was involved with King Louis XV. I bringing these worlds togeth-

decided to use a tureen that was made for her and I shot all these pictures loosely based on her. ART21: Is this Madame herself or is this your idea of her? SHERMAN: Like everything I do, I wasn’t really trying to copy any picture of Madame de Pompadour, but to look like someone like Madame de Pompadour. A year after I made this I had a show in Paris that coincided with a big

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celebration of the French Revolution. And so in continuing the theme of the Madame de Pompadour, I did a whole series of characters that were inspired by my research of the Revolution and that whole period. And I started doing more poses as men. ART21: What were some of the challenges of portraying a man? SHERMAN: I hadn’t done too many characters that were supposed to be men. I had tried in some of the black and white photographs but they weren’t successful. In doing this work I realized it was not so hard visually—with makeup, wigs, and costumes—to make myself look like a man. What was easier in these pictures that was harder in earlier work was that I wasn’t trying to show any emotion. These characters are just sitting there kind of frozen in time. Whereas the new work is so much about a kind of emotion that comes out of the face, from behind the makeup I’ve put on. ART21: Tell me more about your research. SHERMAN: I usually buy a lot of books and rip pages

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out and stick them on the wall. I refer to them in more encyclopedic ways and it just sort of all gets absorbed. Then, when I’m ready to shoot, I’ll see what I have available. I think with [Untitled (#224)] I had all these grapes and leaves and thought, “That’s such an easy thing to do, to copy Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus.” When I was in Rome, I would go to the flea markets there because I didn’t bring that many costumes and props with me. I expected to buy things there. The sleeves in [Untitled (#209)] were ripped off of a dress and added to the bodice of something else. And the white part is just a shirt that I sort of tucked in. I probably saw some painting with a crisscross thing on the head somewhere and threw that in too. I wasn’t copying anything in particular. ART21: It seems to me that people think mostly about your work in terms of the creation of another personality or figure. But are you also thinking about the creation of an atmosphere? SHERMAN: Yes. In some, I set up a background behind me and try to make it seem like the environments these people historical works undergo through functions of time and memory. Combining elements from multiple and often incongruous sources, Sherman intentionally highlights this play of distortion. That is to say, these grotesque and often comical assemblages do not add up to a single whole – a plausibly coherent window onto the world. Her mixture of references does not point reverently to the work of an old master or to an anxiety of influence overcome by the younger artist’s reinterpretation. Rather, these works destabilise concepts of copy and original, using a space in-between to illuminate the operation of representation itself. This artistic strategy of self-conscious referencing and quoting of art within art questions the relationship of the divergent worlds that meet here within. Thus, in bringing these worlds together, Sherman’s portraits undo the seemingly established security of the identity of an artist and his masterpiece. Rather than allowing works of art to rest in a sacred fiction of autonomy, Sherman’s performativity emphasises not only that identity is by no means secure, but also that it is an invention subject to constant undermining. In Untitled #183-A, 1988 (fig. 1), Sherman poses in a low-cut lacy gown, reminding us in her demeanour and attire of François Boucher’s portrait Madame de Pompadour, 1759 (fig. 2). Sherman created the series History portraits during an extended stay

in Rome – a place she found perfect for finding a variety of costumes and decorative objects. The mixture of props in Untitled #183-A – a book held in her right hand, pearl jewellery, and a tapestry casually draped in the background – refer more to Sherman’s flea market scavenging than to Boucher’s Rococo elegance. Here Sherman stages the disagreement of colliding worlds on several different levels. First, by juxtaposing the supposed realism of photography – its documentary aspects – with the glaring falsity of the staged scene with its rigged props, Sherman insists that identity in portraiture is always constructed. Secondly, the clash between Madame de Pompadour’s Rococo realm and Sherman’s modern world activates the virtual potential of both, causing each to be altered in the collision and reinterpreted anew.

The assembled narrative of Untitled #183-A is at once playful and extremely serious. Sherman’s cool stare and pursed lips are countermanded by the lavishly busty pose – her décolletage being all the more flagrant for the evident falsity of her breasts. The greenish tint of the photograph adds a touch of the macabre to the atmosphere. Such citing of a vaguely recognisable, yet fractured and incoherent scene creates both belief and disbelief. The strength of the narrative attracts the viewer, who then must reconcile the work’s internal inconsistencies. Regarding the camera in a calm yet frosty manner, Sherman dares the viewer to challenge her studio fiction. However, this challenge does not end at the borders of this work, but instead reaches back to infect the Boucher portrait with conspicuous exaggerations. The tension that Sherman assembles in Untitled #183-A is not a simple distrust of representation. The viewer is not given any credible access to the identity of her buxom sitter. In contrast to Boucher’s domestic harmony and romantic garden scene, Sherman rejects the appeal to intimacy. Rather, Sherman’s feigned femininity offers nothing behind this masquerade. Gone are such small comforts as the lap dog, the billowing trees in the background and the calming surroundings. The staging, her caked make-up and plastic bustier insist on the constructed nature of identity. This double compounding of the artifice of representation both in the photograph as art object and its staged scene leaves little room for the viewer to comfortably peruse the work. Sherman’s masquerade of femininity not only questions the repre-

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S. 016

A report on produced water A revised suburban farm environmental

year two

Our dependency on the extraction of reserves such as natural gas and oil is greatly impacting the landscapes both above and below ground. Though California is no longer in an emergency state due to drought, its landscape and precious water reserves are threatened still by extraction processes that have only increasingly been engineered to more efficiently produce oil at the expense of the natural environment, and by extension the environment of humans. These last two sections that comprise the third and final year are the most extensive compared to the previous works in terms of their scale and require a shift in the fabric of reality away from the one at present. These alternative scenes are not far removed from the present moment, but they nonetheless are not possible without some course correction in the way we relate to future development. This section in particular examines a specific county in California that operates as a landscape of production for both oil and much of the food supply circulated in the States. The relationship between these two neighboring landscapes implicates seemingly innocuous objects, such as the clementine, in a much larger system of exploitation and environmental degradation. The proposal is thus situated in a future in which we have moved away from the consumption of oil, the only outcome for a resource with a finite end, and one where future settlement must engage with inheriting a toxic landscape. atmospheres

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Produced Flows Fluid Boundaries Between Oil and Clementines

Chevron’s discovery well was dug by hand to a depth of 75’ in the month of May in 1899 in Kern River Field, an area located just north of today’s Bakersfield in California’s Central Valley. Four years later, the site was populated by 800 wells with around 400 companies operating in the region. By the 1960s however, production began to taper off in the region until the introduction of steam flooding renewed interest in recovering oil from the Monterey Shale beyond the original extents Kern River Field.1 Steam-flooding, a technique utilized in Enhanced Oil Recovery, is akin to hydraulic fracturing in that large quantities of water are pumped into an injection well in order to stimulate the release of oil that may be extracted through a production well.2 Through this method, recovery of oil in the region boomed to 60% as opposed to the earlier rate of 10% before the advent of enhanced oil recovery methods like steam-flooding. Today, Kern River Field alone is the third oil largest field in California and tenth largest in the United States. Within a territory of 20 square miles, the production wells that dot the landscape here extract around 67,000 barrels of oil per day, though

this quantity is greatly surpassed by another resource. In Kern River Field, Chevron is producing about 783,000 barrels of water on a daily basis in an area where water has been in increasingly short supply following a sustained period of drought.3 At each drilling site, steam injectors require 600 barrels of water and each producing well extracts 10,000 barrels of an oil/water mixture that requires further processing in order to separate the oil. At Station 36, Chevron’s on site treatment facility, this mixture goes first through large skim tanks (the oil is skimmed from the top) and then through WEMCO separators. The byproduct of this process, water, is further cleansed through a series of walnut-shell filter tanks as a means of reusing this water for steam-injection at the drilling site. Though the amount of water reused amounts to 250 thousand barrels per stream day, another 510 thousand barrels of water per day is directed toward a very different outlet, the Cawelo Water District. In contrast to this high volume of water produced, the yield result of oil from steam-flooding amounts to 67 thousand barrels of oil per day.4

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Neighboring Chevron’s oil field and served by Cawelo Water District, agricultural landowners need little incentive in accepting produced water in addition to freshwater when the price of water has soared as high as $1,300 per acrefoot due to drought, compared to Chevron’s selling price of $30 to $60.5 At present, produced water accounts for almost half the amount of Cawelo’s water supply solely dedicated for agricultural purposes and has resulted in the construction of an infrastructural network designed specifically for the distribution of water between these two spheres of production, the oil field and the agricultural field. Water from Chevron’s Station 36 flows through an 8-mile pipeline paid for by the Water District after going through the facility’s water treatment process and is received into a polishing pond adjacent to Reservoir B. Once in the reservoir, groundwater and surface water is introduced into the reservoir to be blended with the produced water as the latter is too high in salinity to be directly used for irrigation and would prove damaging, if not already, to the soil’s fertility.6 Afterward, this blended water is directed through the Cawelo Canal and distributed through pipes to serve ninety farmers within the district. The influx of produced water from Chevron’s oil fields has been ongoing for the past twenty

years and irrigating a total of 34,000 acres of crops, the majority of which are classified as “permanent” crops.7 Permanent crops are the majority in the region as farmers have transitioned increasingly away from crops that require annual replanting after every harvest. The presence of permanent crops, which includes citrus, nut trees, and grapes, results in the ‘hardening’ of the total water requirement for the water district since farms sustain the size of their crops needing irrigation consistently from year to year instead of having a changeable demand due to replanting or plant loss.9 The implication of a consistent total water requirement signifies that every year Cawelo requires meeting a minimum threshold of water to supply the region with regardless of drought conditions. For this reason, Cawelo is in agreement with Chevron alone to accept up to 29,405 acre-feet per year in produced water. When demand for water is low in the region, it is discharged at the County’s Famoso Basins project to be stored for future use.10 The alternative discharge method for produced water that does not enter Cawelo’s distribution network is instead pumped back into the ground in area designated as exempted aquifers. The entirety of the region, including both the oil fields and agricultural farms, sit atop the Central Valley aquifer system and yet these two space of

production relate very differently to the water below ground. The agricultural landscape relies heavily on the aquifer below to supply fresh groundwater and, just past these crops, the oil fields sit atop ‘unusable’ and exempt portions of the same aquifer system due to legal mechanisms established since the beginning of the Safe Drinking Water Act.11 This contradiction is further complicated by the vast disparity in access to water experienced by the local farmhand that live in Kern County, specifically those that work for Paramount Citrus. Paramount Citrus is one of the largest citrus growers in the region, instantly recognizable for their production of Wonderful Halos clementines, and receives at their many farms the produced water from Chevron in addition to other consolidations of water control that the owners, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, have made in the area since the 90s.12 While their farms’ access to water is nearly unfettered, their field irrigators lack basic access to potable drinking water in their homes and must rely on privatized sources of water in the form of bottle water or water from vending machines every month.14 As extensive as the scale of production for oil is in Kern County, the scale of agricultural production is equally substantial with a figure provided from 2013

for exported products totalling a value of $21.24 billion.15 Now in California, with greater scrutiny being applied to the disposal of produced waste water through disposal wells into the aquifer below, more oil fields are incentivized to participate in water treatment processing and distribution like that Chevron’s operation. Likewise there is increasing attention being given to the quality of water being used for irrigation in the Cawelo Water District and not only from the perspective of consumers, but from the perspective of farmers that worry over the health of their soil in the long term. The case in Kern County is one that requires an examination of water quality, but also a necessary glimpse at the production of water that is simultaneously plentiful as a byproduct of oil and severely lacking as critical resource for local farm owners.

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LERDO CANAL

CAWELO PIPELINE

STATION B

LATERAL PIPELINE TO STATION B

CITRUS (ORANGE/TANGERINE) CROPS MISC. OWNERS

PARAMOUNT CITRUS LARGE-SCALE PRODUCER OF CLEMENTINES

D / TURN-OUT FOR WATER

TO FARMS

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ELO CANAL

RESERVOIR B PRODUCED WATER BLENDED WITH FRESHWATER

VWMC PIPELINE VALLEY WATER MANAGEMENT COMPANY (NON-CHEVRON) - TREATMENT FACILITY

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CHEVRON STATION 36 OIL/WATER TREATMENT FACILITY

KERN RIVER

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STATION 36 TREATMENT FACILITY

Works Cited

California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Central Valley Region. “Order R52012-0058: Waste Discharge Requirements for Chevron USA, Inc. and Cawelo Water District Produced Water Reclamation Project”. (Bakersfield, CA, 2016). http://www waterboards.ca.gov centralvalley/board_decisions/adopted_ orders/kern/r5-2012-0058.pdf Cawelo Water District. “Cawelo Water District Beneficial Reuse Program: Food Safety Expert Panel Meeting”. (Bakersfield, CA, 2016) http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/ centralvalleywater_issues/oil_fields/ food_safety/meetings/2016_0112_ of_fs_cawelowd_pres.pdf 180

Cawelo Water District. “Agricultural Water Management Plan”. (Bakersfield, CA, 2014). http://www.water. ca.gov/wateruseefficiency/sb7/ docs/2014/plans/Cawelo% 20Final%202012%20AWMP.pdf Fox, Miranda. “California Produce Growing Strong on Oil Water”. Earth Justice. Septemeber 28, 2015. http://earthjustice.org/blog/2015september/californiaproduce-growing-strong-on-oil-water Gibler, John. “Lost In the Valley of Excess”. Earth Island Journal. Winter (2011). http:// www.earthisland.org/ journal/index.php/eij/article/ lost_in_the_valley_of_ excess/ Harkinson, Josh. “These Popular Fruit and Veggie Brands May be Grown With Oil Wastewater”. MotherJones. July 24, 2015. http://www.motherjones. com/environment/2015/07/oilwastewater-fruits-vegetables-farms

Noël, John. Clean Water Action. “Aquifer Exemptions: A first-ever look at the regulatory program that writes off drinking water resources for oil, gas and uranium profits”. (Washington, DC, 2015). http://www.cleanwateraction. org/sites/default/files/ docs/publications/Aquifer%20 Exemptions%20-%20 Clean%20Water%20report%201.6.15.pdf Onishi, Norimitsu. ““A California Oil Field Yields Another Prized Commodity”. NY Times. July 7, 2014. Accessed September 19, 2016. Roach, Eric. “Enhanced Oil Recovery: What You Need to Know”. Drilling Info. January 15. 2015. http://info. drillinginfo.com/enhanced-oilrecovery-need-know/ Schlanger, Zoe. “In California, Farmers Rely on Oil Wastewater to Weather Drought”. Newsweek. April 4, 2015. http://www. newsweek.com/2015/04/17/californiafarmers-rely-oil-wastewater-weatherdrought-319648.html

1 Cawelo Water District. “Cawelo Water District Beneficial Reuse Program: Food Safety Expert Panel Meeting”. 2 Roach, Eric. “Enhanced Oil Recovery: What You Need to Know”. Drilling Info. January 15. 2015. 3 Cawelo Water District. Cawelo Water District Beneficial Reuse Program 4 Ibid. 5 Onishi, Norimitsu. ““A California Oil Field Yields Another Prized Commodity”. NY Times. July 7, 2014. 6 California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Central Valley Region. “Order R5-2012-0058” 7 Cawelo Water District. “Cawelo Water District Beneficial Reuse Program” 9 Cawelo Water District. “Agricultural Water Management Plan”. (Bakersfield, CA, 2014). 42 10 California Regional Water Quality Control Board, Central Valley Region. “Order R5-2012-0058”. 2 11 Noël, John. Clean Water Action. “Aquifer Exemptions: A first-ever look at the regulatory program that writes off drinking water resources for oil, gas and uranium profits”. (Washington, DC, 2015). 13 Gibler, John. “Lost In the Valley of Excess”. Earth Island Journal. Winter (2011). 14 Fox, Miranda. “California Produce Growing Strong on Oil Water”. Earth Justice. Septemeber 28, 2015.

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Inherited Toxicity Critic: Andres Jaques Rehabilitated Farms And Underground Bakersfield, CA contamination

year two

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production

In addition to the impact of oil extraction in the neighboring Kern River Oil Field, farming as an industry of production has transformed the landscape.

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Adverse effect of monocrop-based production on soil quality

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Conversion from agricultural to solar farming due to drought

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Suburban Development

Kern River Oil Fields

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In Between

Farming Landscape

The proposed alternative fabric is a hybrid composition of dwelling, permaculturebased farming, and rehabilitative new wells that cycle water continuously from the reservoir below through biopool filters to cleanse water of contaminant remnants.

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Time Collapse Drawing of 10 Year Period Growth of New Farming Cells

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The first stage is the installation of a treatment nursery in select areas throughout the contaminated farmland. These are tended to by one or two individuals from an organized collective belonging to each well.

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The soil is prepped for future growth. The rotational irrigation system is retrofitted to provide additional functions within the new farming territory.

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A seeding platform is worked by a group of collective members in order to plant a variety of seeds along each successive ring of growth.

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The first set of inhabitants arrive in the form of caretakers once the soil has been tilled, seeded, and aerating through livestock grazing. Water supplied from the treatment nursery is now safe for distribution.

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Cultivation of the soil begins with the first ring of crops

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Short term and long term interns arrive to help caretakers on the farm. Short term interns have amenities, such as showers, nearby along the rotational system tracks.

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Long term interns occupy the greenhouse units. The growing space of the green house insulates the units and waterproofs the living space from the overhead spray of the rotational system that glides along twice a day.

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The transformation of this terrain is seen both above and below ground as the soil is rehabilitated and the newly-filtered water reservoir is now fit to support the community of various housing types above which is the final stage of the farm.

Each successive ring will grow more dense over time as permanent homes are built into the new farm cell. The outer rings of each cells, when they have reached their maximum growth is occupied by market zones and public amenities such as an outdoor screening field.

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Finally, the initial treatment nursery is re-purposed into a public venue with the filtering pools that formally cycled water from the underground now used by the inhabitants of the new settlement.

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S. 017

A street for art A curtainwall facade atmospheric

year three

The final work featured within this book is not driven by an ecological imperative, but returns to the initial point introduced at the very beginning. How does one leave an impression of a place on a person long after they have left? In what ways do these spaces create, through a ripple effect, a series of positive changes on the fabric around them, even in situations that seem unrelentingly hopeless. In the last half of the final year, my studio companions and I went to such a place in Spain. The Bilbao effect is a phenomenon referred to on many occasions in conversations surrounding the revitalization of cities using art as its vehicle. But a closer examination of the Guggenheim Bilbao reveals a larger infrastructural project undertaken by the city as a whole, and not the myth of one building acting as sole catalyst for urban revitalization. It is this observation that served as a guiding principle in this final proposal for the post-industrial city of Newburgh in upstate New York. A new urban corridor was re-established along the historic street of Broadway, connecting a long-neglected avenue with its waterfront and using a series of small scale art pavilions to establish the city as a new arrival point along a regional circuit of art including Dia Beacon across the river and Storm King Art Center, fifteen minutes south of Newburgh. As a means of exploring the potential impact that such a project could have on the city, the proposal sets forth a number of scenes set within this new landscape of art. environments

art & gentrification studio

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(A)Venue For Art Critic: Galia Solomonoff Waterfront Revitalization Newburgh New York landscape

year three

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procession

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A(Venue) For Art is a proposal for a new pedestrian corridor in Newburgh, NY. The project extends the historic street of Broadway to the waterfront, creating an urban landscape of public art, as a twofold strategy for revitalizing the post-industrial city. The two site oblique collages shown in succession highlight one important aspect of the project. While the architecture of the new grand urban stair, ferry terminal, and pavilions remains static, the landscape is inflected by the presence of art. Local artists will have a venue for their works and as the years progress, future artists and residents will be drawn to the city, necessitating the urban infill of currently vacant lots.

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SHUTTERED STOREFRONTS

Shuttered Storefronts

A walk along Broadway reveals the current afflictions that the city is facing. Unactivated storefronts create a feeling of abandonment as one walks east toward the waterfront. Broadway, due to its generous width and proximity to significant historical sites such as Washingtonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Headquarter Monument. Broadway, is historically significant in its own right, as it was one of the earliest streets to be lit by electricity in New York, with a dedicated-trolley lane; from the 1880s-1920s, it used to be a regional destination for weekend revelry.

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VACANT/NEGLECTED LOTS

Vacant/Neglected Lots

The initial premise of the project was to employ art as cultural activator, by co-opting the many vacated storefronts along Broadway, in response to the neglect & abandonment that has hampered Newburgh over the past several decades. However, the project necessitated a large-scale intervention in the form of an urban pedestrian connection that could bypass the heavily-used freight railway and Water Street. Building upon the presence of nearby art institutions Dia:Beacon and Storm King, (A)Venue for Art seeks to establish the city of Newburgh as an important destination along a regional circuit of art.

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REVITALIZING BROADWAY

Revitalizing Broadway

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PEDESTRAIN GALLERY CORRIDOR POTENTIAL TRAM/BUS ROUTE TO STORMKING ART CENTER

RELOCATED FERRY ARRIVAL DOCK + TERMINAL

RENOVATED PATH FROM TRAIN STATION TO FERRY DOCK

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Along the new monumental stairway connecting the waterfront to Broadway, visitors encounter a series of pavilions programmed with local art. The ramping path hosts a number of kiosks that provide small-scale cultural and commercial amenities. These kiosks operate as floating â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;storefrontsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for existing and future businesses along Broadway. Together, the pavilions and kiosks aim to balance the needs of future tourism and the local community.

Visitors to Newburgh arrive by ferry to a newlyrelocated terminal building, a mere ten-minute ride from the Beacon train station across the Hudson River.

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The following pages present a narrative for the typical experience visitors may expect when going to (A)Venue for Art. Scenarios were written for a series of spaces along the urban stair.

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FERRY SCHEDULE Ferry operates between Beacon and Newburgh Mon-Sat, 8am-7pm every hour / Free Mon-Sat, 5am-8am every half hour / $1.75 roundtrip

PAVILION HOURS Steps are accessible to the public 24/7 Galleries open at 10am and close at 5pm. All galleries are free and open to the public.

BROADWAY AVENUE

STARTER GALLERY

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TICKETS / INFO MAP

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Site 1: Ava Ackerson has worked predominantly through textile art. For her proposal, she created a series of tapestries that both line the pedestrian ramp adjacent to her site and wraps onto the volume of the nearest gallery, rendering it unusable.

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Site 2: Louise Carmichaelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s large-format drawings are markers of time. All together, they tell one narrative of a week spent in solitude. With no other details to describe the ongoings of events during this time, the observer is left to contemplate and piece together the story these paintings tell.

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Site 3: Parker Ellison is a performance-based artist. For her piece, she occupied the kiosk belonging to Joanneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ice Cream Parlour. For three hours a day, Parker sells her own variety of ice cream flavors, each of which stems from particular memories of the past, both bittersweet and overwhelmingly sweet. Instead of accepting cash for these flavors, Parker requests as payment that visitors write upon a slip a memory of theirs as inspiration for a future flavor. By the end of her stay in the spring, there will be a rotating schedule of flavor memories, of which only a few will be original to the artist and indistinguishable from the rest.

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Site 4: Roberta Espinosa works through ceramic and painting. Her two-part show is split between the dedicated gallery and the ceramics workshop in the adjacent Wellness Art Centre. In the workshop, a number of clay vases are displayed. Each is a reproduction from memory of vases her grandmother collected on many of her travels as a young woman. Years ago, Roberta came across these vases stored away in her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attic, all shattered in the cardboard box. From the remnants of these vases, she mixed them into hues of paint to create painted impressions of her own memories of her grandmother.

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curtainwall

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year three

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Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Screen Critic: Bob Heintges Harlem, New York light

These last pages are not intended as a conclusive project to this book, but it is a return from the everexpanding scales of the work prior to this page. As the final piece, we return to the most intimates of spaces which we design: the detail.

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Using Jack Tworkovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s painting as the origin of this project, the given task was to distill the attributes of the painting into the design of a curtainwall facade. The layered depth and dappled effect were selected as the facadeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s primary qualities and, working through a variety of approaches, I asked of myself what were the simplest moves one could make to achieve the most optimal effect. A ceramic frit pattern was designed for the outer plane of glass, into which relief cuts augmented the phenomenon of filtered, playful light.

RECESSED CUTS RECESSED IN CUTS IN LAMINATED GLASS LAMINATED GLASS

C.F. PATTERN, C.F. PATTERN, SEMI OPAQUE WHITE SEMI OPAQUE WHITE

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2” = 1’-0”

5'-0"

5'-0

12'-0"

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5'-0"

ADRIANA BARCENAS / ADVAN

THREE-CIRCUIT LED PANEL C.F. PATTERN, TONE FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES RECESSED CUT IN LAMINATED GLASS CL

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1 - PLAN @ MULLION

3” = 1’-0”

1 - Plan at Mullion

The ceramic frit was used as a means of unifying the facade across its face, regardless of spandrel and vision glass areas. To extend the life of the building’s facade, three-circuit LED panels are housed within the spandrel portions of glass to provide exterior lighting for an approximate life span of 20 years per circuit.

1 - PLAN @ MULLION

3” = 1’-0”

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2 - PLAN @ ANCHOR

3” = 1’-0”

THREE-CIRCUIT LED PANEL C.F. PATTERN, TONE FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES

2 - Plan at anchor CL

2 - PLAN @ ANCHOR

3” = 1’-0”

THREE-CIRCUIT LED PANEL C.F. PATTERN, TONE FOR ILLUSTRATIVE PURPOSES

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RECESSED CUT IN LAMINATED GLASS

UPLIGHT COVE

3 - SECTION @ TRANSITION TO SPANDREL

4 - SEC

3” = 1’-0”

RECESSED CUTS IN LAMINATED GLASS

3 - Section at Transition to Spandrel

C.F. PATTERN, SEMI OPAQUE WHITE

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CTION @ TRANSITION TO VISION

3” = 1’-0”

4 - Section at Transition to Vision Glass

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A final note... I owe a great deal of thanks to the amazing professors that I had the opportunity to both learn and receive encouragement from in the last three years. It has been an exhausting effort reaching this point, but all worth the last push in attaining this Master of Architecture.