67 Highlights West
May 2021
West
Gun Violence Memorial Project
Architectural Bestia
National Building Museum 401 F Street NW Washington, D.C.
SCI-Arc Online event archbestia.com
Until September 25, 2022
Through August 31
COURTESY SCI-ARC COURTESY NATIONAL BUILDING MUSEUM/ELMAN STUDIO
MASS Design Group, artist Hank Willis Thomas, and gun violence prevention organizations Purpose Over Pain and the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund have partnered to bring the Gun Violence Memorial Project to Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum. The group created the memorial in honor of those who have lost their lives to gun violence in America, and this is its second showing after its debut at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial. The work consists of four houses,
each built with 700 glass bricks containing remembrance objects. The number of bricks corresponds to the number of deaths per week from gun violence in the U.S. Accompanying the structural pieces are video excerpts from the documentary Comes the Light, produced by Caryn Capotosto and directed by Haroula Rose, which tells about the objects in the bricks. A selection of exhibition materials is also available for viewing online. Keren Dillard
East
This spring SCI-Arc is hosting Architectural Bestia, an online exhibition curated by Hernán Díaz Alonso and designed by M. Casey Rehm that features works from 20 practices, including Atelier Manferdini, Current Interests, Florencia Pita & Co., and BairBalliet. The exhibition aims to document design paradigm shifts in response to developments in technology and culture that have disrupted established orders. The show frames mutations in traditional practices as evolution, the result of cross-disciplinary
methods of design. Each body of work in the show uses this theme to reflect a form of authorship that, as described in the exhibition overview, “carve[s] a path through a jungle of aesthetic and conceptual similarities to provoke contamination.” Operating between architecture, art, fashion, film, and music, the exhibition offers a critical examination of how shared technologies have tainted the purity of multiple disciplines and ultimately created a new beast. KD
Midwest
Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life
Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test
MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue Queens, New York
Red Bull Arts Detroit 1551 Winder Street Detroit
Until September 6
Through July 30
PETER GR ANSER /COURTESY MOMA PS1
MoMA PS1, the Museum of Modern Art’s satellite institution in Queens, New York, opened a wide-ranging exhibition focusing on French-American feminist artist Niki de Saint Phalle on March 11. Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life is the first retrospective of the creator’s drawings, prints, jewelry, sculptures, and architectural projects at a New York museum. Born just west of Paris in 1930 and raised on the Upper East Side of New York City, Saint Phalle received no formal artistic training
before developing an oeuvre defined by exuberant forms and vibrant colors. Beginning in the 1950s, her decades-long career saw her producing work on a variety of political and social themes, including the HIV/ AIDS epidemic and climate change. The PS1 exhibit will foreground her large-scale sculptural and architectural pieces, including photographs and models of her Tarot Garden outside Rome, for which Saint Phalle often collaborated with Swiss architect Mario Botta. Aaron Smithson
DARIO L ASAGNI/COURTESY AKEEM SMITH AND RED BULL ARTS
Akeem Smith: No Gyal Can Test is on view this spring at Red Bull Arts Detroit following its celebrated debut in New York last fall. The newly expanded exhibition will feature sculptures and site-specific audio and video installations relating to Smith’s Jamaican American cultural roots and cross-regional personal history. As a way to reconstruct the past, the installation features remnants of demolished architectural forms salvaged from Smith’s childhood neighborhood, the
Waterhouse district in Kingston, Jamaica. The show also highlights influential women in Smith’s upbringing: those who raised him and those of dancehall. New York–based sculptor Jessi Reaves and British fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner collaborated on the exhibition, and original audio works for the show were created by musicians Total Freedom, Physical Therapy, and Alex Somers. KD
