42 Highlights East
The Architect’s Newspaper
Southwest
The GREEN at Lincoln Center
What Black Is This, You Say?
Lincoln Center Plaza New York, NY 10023
Storefront for Art and Architecture 97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY 10012
Open through September 2021
June 1 to May 2022
POLYMODE/COURTESY STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE
SACHYN MITAL /COURTESY LINCOLN CENTER
Set designer Mimi Lien’s expansive summer overhaul of Lincoln Center’s Josie Robertson Plaza touched down in May. The installation blanketed the 14,000-square-foot public space in fake grass and forms reminiscent of half-pipes. Open through September, the GREEN entices New Yorkers to congregate (at an appropriate distance) on what was previously a hard and empty landscape anchored at the center by Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s otherworldly Revson Fountain. Inclusivity was a
key factor for Lien, who received a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2015, and her landscape allows mobility-impaired visitors to navigate and interact with all of the installation’s features unimpeded. That includes chairs sculpted from biosynthetic SYNLawn (soybased fake grass with U.S. sourcing), tables, a reading room (shaded under a semicircular “bridge”), and upturned round slabs for sitting or sunning on. Jonathan Hilburg
Southwest
A yearlong public art initiative has arrived at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture in the form of What Black Is This, You Say? The multifaceted exploration of color, race, and identity, which graces Storefront’s dynamic, Steven Holl–designed Kenmare Street facade, was first launched by Chicago-based visual artist Amanda Williams in June 2020, following the #BlackoutTuesday social media protest campaign. That campaign, a global act of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, found upwards of 28 million
Instagram users posting black squares on the social media platform. Over a five-month span following #BlackoutTuesday, Williams herself posted more than 120 shades and textures of black on Instagram, each with a corresponding caption. In the course of a year, 12 of those hues will be painted onto the 12 moving panels of the gallery’s facade. The work is not an ephemeral one but, according to the institution, “constitutes a permanent transformation of Storefront's facade, which all subsequent exhibitions will navigate and build upon in various ways.” Matt Hickman
West
Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s Menil Drawing Institute 1412 West Main Street, Houston, TX 77006
Open through September 19
One Object at a Time A+D Museum Virtual
Opens June 18
ARTURO SANCHEZ/COURTESY OF HENRIQUE FARIA , NEW YORK; MARTA MINUJÍN
Last month, the Menil Drawing Institute unveiled Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s, which challenges the idea that monuments must be permanent, largerthan-life objects in space. Instead, the show advocates the importance of paper monuments, which, despite their comparatively small stature, can be monumental in their own right. Organized into thematic sections that trace the ways in which artists develop works conceived for the page alone, the display focuses on the power of drawings to evoke the unimaginable (and indeed the unbuildable). The collection is inspired by an unrealized
exhibit of the same name thought up by the Menil’s founders Dominique and John de Menil in the 1960s. Plans for that exhibition included juxtaposing drawings and models by contemporary artists, such as Claes Oldenburg and Christo, with those from the 19th and early 20th centuries. The current iteration preserves this format but expands upon the original selection of works in an effort to “constitute a new foundation for interpreting this era of art history,” as stated by assistant curator Kelly Montana, who assembled the show with guest curator Erica DiBenedetto. Alex Klimoski
COURTESY A+D MUSEUM
The latest virtual exhibition from Los Angeles’s A+D Museum is set to launch exactly one year after the institution announced that it was forsaking its Arts District home—and would not be seeking a physical replacement. Since then, the museum has gone to great pains in developing its digital footprint. Every one of its online-only productions incorporates multimedia works, as easily viewable on Instagram as on a browser. One Object at a Time promises to be no different. Curated by artist-architect Ebrahim Poustin-
chi, the exhibition will feature objects from Greg Lynn FORM, BairBalliet, Ivan Bernal, and other form-oriented practitioners. Poustinchi, who is also director of the Robotically Augmented Design Lab at Kent State University and has recruited several colleagues for the project, has developed an online VR portal with which to stage the multitudinous works. But, in a dialectical fashion, the exhibition space and the exhibited fold into one another. Samuel Medina
