Q&A: Jacob Proctor on the Neubauer Collegium's New Building and Exhibitions Program

University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society is a new research institute designed to expand the boundaries of humanistic inquiry and focus resources on questions that transcend any single individual, discipline, or method. Launched by the Division of the Humanities and the Division of the Social Sciences, it supports collaborative research projects of University of Chicago faculty and brings visiting fellows from around the world.

Jacob Proctor, Neubauer Collegium Curator, looks ahead to the initiative’s new building and gallery, expanded programming, and the role of the arts.

How do you imagine the new Neubauer Collegium building, at the corner of 57th Street and Woodlawn Avenue, will help you engage the public?

The Neubauer Collegium is unique in that it provides a platform for audiences to engage with the arts in the context of an active and collaborative research institution. The hybrid, interdisciplinary character of the institution will, in turn, be reflected in the kinds of artistic activities that the Collegium makes possible.

Jacob Proctor

The building includes a gallery, the first exhibition being No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute. What are your ambitions for the exhibition’s program?

Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions are at the heart of our mission. The arts have already featured prominently in Neubauer Collegium research projects,

from studies of Cinemetics and Global Literary Networks to investigations of materials in modern and contemporary art centered around Wolf Vostell’s Concrete Traffic (1970). The Salvage Art Institute exhibition, for example, is presented in close collaboration with the latter. The show consists entirely of salvaged artworks, objects that have been removed from circulation by the insurance industry due to various forms of accidental damage.

Future Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions will include shows in collaboration with our faculty research initiatives as well as others that will stand on their own. The exhibition’s program will speak to a range of audiences, from students and faculty on campus, to citizens of the City of Chicago, to national and international audiences.

No Longer Art

Are there any upcoming arts-related projects that you’re particularly excited about?

Our Fall 2015 season will open with a solo exhibition of Katarina Burin. On view during the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, the exhibition presents a body of work attributed to the Czech architect Petra Andrejova- Molnár, an overlooked (in fact, fictional) figure active in Eastern and Central Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. The show comprises a diverse range of materials: including architectural models, drawings, furniture and design objects, staged photographs, biographical texts, and critical writing.

In generating Andrejova-Molnár’s work, and the scholarly apparatus around it, Burin simultaneously inserts her into and subtly destabilizes the established canon of architectural history—lending voice to female designers, while also questioning notions of authorship and authenticity, the relationship between gender and the archive, and the historical tension between national identity and internationalist aspiration. The project demonstrates how historical movements and utopian ideologies are complicated and contradictory formations in a constant state of flux, while also creating a space of play around the mythos of “the architect.”

Concrete Traffic