Assaf Evron
& Claudia Weber
February 16 - April 14, 2019 ELMHURST A R T MUSEUM
MIES VAN DER ROHE M CCORMICK HOUSE
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Resor House project, Jackson Hole, Wyoming (Interior perspective of living room [view through north glass wall]), 1937-1938, unbuilt. Pencil, photograph on illustration board, 30 x 40 in. The Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Assaf Evron
Collages for the McCormick House In Collages for the McCormick House, Assaf Evron applies Mies van der Rohe's techniques of paper collages and his treatment of landscape to a photographic architectural intervention in the McCormick House. In this exhibition he also presents a series of paper collages of Pyrite crystals following the history of the McCormick house as an experiment in modular prefabricated architecture. On this occasion, Evron conducted an interview with the art historian Christine Mehring. The conversation ranged from the house’s structure, modern architecture, other artists, and their own heritage. Assaf Evron: The McCormick House was an experiment in prefabricated modular architecture. This is the unique thing about this house. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was trying to figure out how the structure of I-beams and glass that he had already developed for the high-rises can be applied to a suburban home. It is based on separate rectangular units that can be reconfigured in many ways. It reminded me of how pyrite crystals form in nature, in sequences of perfect squares connected together. Front cover images: (top) Assaf Evron, Untitled (Dead Sea Circa 2017 for the McCormick House), 2019 (bottom) Drawn curtain at the McCormick House / Photo by Claudia Weber, 2018
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Christine Mehring: That is why the artist Robert Smithson was so interested in these crystals as well. It is a very simple, serial structure that expands in such a way that one can no longer perceive its simplicity. AE: For this work, I photographed pyrite crystals in different positions. And each time, a new structure, or new potential structure, is created. CM: I find it interesting to think about the translation from three-dimensional objects to collages. Often, when you move something from three dimensions to a two-dimensional work, there’s a way in which it becomes simpler. But this is actually becoming more complicated. I think it has a lot to do with the loss and condensation of information, and with the shifting scale and surface texture. You can’t figure out at all what this would be like in three dimensions. AE: This is what photography does so well. It is descaling, alienating. CM: That’s why I never understood all these arguments about photography as a “realistic” medium. I find nothing more alienating, estranging, and defamiliarizing than shifting something from three dimensions into two. It’s a profound change. AE: I feel similarly. That’s why I think photography can be so reflexive. It can propose the visual possibility that then becomes an invitation for critical thinking about the things that are familiar to us. CM: How does abstraction, which is also so important in your work, fit into this? AE: There’s a tension between abstraction and representation. It’s an interplay, or negotiation, or dialectic that always plays out in my work, but also in Mies’s collages. CM: So, are those pyrite images photographs or a digital print? AE: It is a photograph printed on paper that I cut out and pasted on a blank paper so that I could have a figure-ground relationship. When Mies worked on his collages in the US, they were a very unique visual language. They were not necessarily representational, but also not completely abstract. They’re a conceptual exercise. They do not represent architecture as much as they represent a thought process. In the pyrite collages, I followed this idea where the paper serves as a speculative space to reflect on an object that is not necessarily grounded in a direct, physical reality. CM: Is this perceptual process something you see in Mies’s architecture or is it a kind of rebellion against the image of Mies? An attempt to take what has so often been understood as a concern with clean lines and simple minimalist architecture and spin it out of control. AE: I think that’s the way that people like to look at Mies, but it’s much more complicated than that and rooted in a complex history. Neil Levine in his essay about Mies’s collages brings up the term “a will of an era,” the idea that every historical period has its own modes of representation and production. It’s an interesting perspective on the collages, which are associated with Dada, but also on Mies’s architecture. Especially in his U.S. buildings this hyper-rationality for the top down creator, but you can also think that he was actually working with what was available, with the opportunities the time and place provided. It’s very pragmatic. But it can also be understood 3
as vernacular architecture. What do we have here? I-beams and glass. Let’s make a building out of that. CM: Both you and Mies and I came to Chicago and experienced the city as foreigners, immigrants, whatever you want to call us. When you live in a place that’s totally foreign to you, and you start trying to make a life there, inhabit it and make it your own, there’s a way in which all of the small details that are strange and slightly different manifest. The way the baseboards are made differently, the way the concrete looks different, how different the asphalt looks. It’s possible that Mies’s use of materials is motivated by a similar experience. AE: Yes, you can actually see things when you’re foreign, you see the evidence. But the fact that something is evident to everyone also makes it transparent. As a local/foreigner you have a strange view of the place and you see all those things. For me, Home Depot is an amazing experience. Looking at all those stairs stringers, for example, inspires my work Athens and Oraibi. Those stringers are a super vernacular, they are so specific to here. An object I never saw before. Everything is unique and different from other places. Everything is standardized to code. It was almost as if they figured it out and there is only one way to build. This is what Home Depot is all about: you walk into a store and you can buy materials to build a house from scratch with all the appliances they sell. CM: Was there something about Mies, when you first came to Chicago, that was quintessential American or Chicago to you, or did it feel like a mix? Was he this mixed figure that transcended the continents for you? AE: I think Mies’s collages are an interesting case study, especially the one of the Resor House in Wyoming from 1937–38, and reflect this complexity. Those are the first collages he made in the US and the first time he made the kind of collages that negotiated the relationship between an architectural interior, materials, structure, landscape, and artworks. CM: There’s a way in which the world in this photograph feels just as collaged as these pieces. I mean, they’re becoming much more alike. AE: Yes, and that was the motivation for this collage project. CM: So you were looking at the McCormick House? AE: I was looking at the collages from Mies’s American period and I was interested in the materiality of the collages and especially in the fact that Mies was using landscape photographs, cut and pasted into the window modules. And I thought; wait, what happens if I use that myself? What happens if I actually take landscape photographs and mount them on the window modules of his buildings? CM: It’s almost like you’re realizing the collages, or the collage principle, in reality. I want to talk about something, but I don’t mean for it to seem like I’m asking what it means to do this kind of work in Chicago with relationship to Mies. Rather, it’s something about the way that I experience Chicago: as very a place where nature is always somehow mediated, especially when you think about Lake Michigan. We so often experience the lake as something that is just there. I don’t pay much attention to it. But I pay a lot of attention to it when I drive down Lake Shore Drive when it’s totally mediated through the car window, or when I visit friends who live in high rises and see it out the window. 4
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Resor House project, Jackson Hole, Wyoming (Interior perspective of living room and south glass wall), 1937-1941, unbuilt. Graphite and collage of wood veneer and cut-and-pasted reproduction and photograph and graphite on illustration board, 30 x 40 in.
The Mies van der Rohe Archive, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the architect. Photo Credit: Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. © 2019 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
That’s when you really become aware of this majestic nature that we have in Chicago. But it’s very rare. Even when I walk down by the lake, I feel like it’s there but I can’t relate to it because it’s so big. AE: And for Mies, the window is of course an optical apparatus that mediates the exterior to the interior, a way of seeing nature, yet removed from nature. But I am not sure how I feel about this statement. CM: Because it is so separate? AE: Yes, I would like to go beyond the culture-nature division. I would like to think that culture is part of nature. CM: That’s what I meant I guess, that nature is grasped here in Chicago only as mediated by and intertwined with culture. And that’s what I think is so important about your McCormick project. Because from inside, viewers can still see out through the photographs. So they begin to blend in a way that is certainly more aware of this blending. The window may be a spatial separation, but because of the visual blending, things come together through the photographs. Especially when you’ve seen it from the outside. You suddenly have nature (in representation) and nature (through the window) and you begin to think of these together. AE: Yes, and the photographic installation on the exterior of the McCormick House follows that idea. The photograph of the rock formation from the Dead Sea, for example, solidifies the one-story building, almost turning it to one geological cut. 5
On the interior of the house I installed roller curtains. But instead of an abstracted geological view I printed on them a German landscape. It’s not a place that’s meant to be recognized, though I don’t hide the source. But the Alps print of the curtains inside is iconic and as an icon it replaces what it represents. It’s also about the relationship between the interior and exterior. On the exterior, the building turned into this geological object. And the image on the interior anchors the installation in a historical context. CM: There’s an interesting tension between the mountains being generic, like quintessential clichés, but there’s a reason why this image is more of a cliché than the Dead Sea. I can’t help but think of us sitting here, a German and an Israeli both living in Chicago and the source imagery we’re discussing comes from Germany and Israel. Your work has strong political and historical connotations. AE: A lot of the ideas of modernism were generated in Germany in the first half of the 20th century and the war was this unperceivable explosion. And the ideas of modernism migrated in both directions, to the Middle East and the US. CM: The relation between pre- and postwar modernist architecture is interesting in Europe also, after the war modernism gets revived and scaled up in all of these contexts. Different materials get introduced. During the war many of the large German cities, especially in the west, were heavily bombed. And then there was immediate postwar reconstruction, which many Germans hate and I particularly love. I think there are some similarities between Israeli modernism and German-European modernism in this second wave. AE: I actually grew up in those projects. It was called a “train project.” It was only three floors high, but as long as a train. I knew nothing about modernism, but I grew up in a modernist environment. CM: I suppose that was what was considered neutral, normal, across much of the world. AE: Yes. Everybody grew up in this kind of architecture. It was great, I loved it. But there was also a dystopian aspect to those projects. In Israel, they were an ad-hoc architectural solution for inhabiting underprivileged immigrants who came from North Africa and the other Middle Eastern countries, with no consideration or regard to their actual needs. CM: It’s somewhat similar to what happened to the more generic postwar architecture from the 1950s and ’60s in German cities. Because following the wave of immigration from Italy, Greece, Spain, and Turkey, many immigrants settled in those projects and the Germans were able to afford row houses, you know, small, independent two-story-tall townhomes. AE: And on this side of the world we have Pruitt-Igoe, the moment when social housing ostensibly failed. And it’s a moment that I’m very interested in because it was instrumentalized by postmodern thinkers as the death of modernism and the birth of postmodernism. Looking at that moment now it becomes clear this was actually a failure of regulation and social services, not of the architecture itself. CM: Going back to buildings and your “tinting” the window panes, I think about 6
Chicago and all those glass high-rise buildings that make you think of glass as neutral, generic, always the same. But glass is tinted, it has colors, you can see it when they replace the windows and don’t do it right. This installation, to me, reads like the borderline of reflections—you try and figure out what is reflected there. And that makes it very uncanny. So your intervention reads a bit like these glass planes that have been replaced that don’t quite fit. AE: Mies was very interested in the color of the glass. In the Barcelona Pavilion, he used several colors of glass. For the McCormick House, since it was meant to be a prototype for prefabricated modular architecture, the developers proposed that the house owners could choose the color of the glass. It is interesting how the early aesthetic ideas of Mies circulate later in the consumer economy of American suburbia. CM: You were talking earlier about how you collect these landscape photographs even though you don’t know how you might use them. How important is it to you to have it be known where these photographs are from? Does it matter? One of the things I was thinking about in relation to this is some of your earlier work, like the 54 Basel Street project in Israel, which made me think of the artist Ellsworth Kelly. In the late 1940s and early ’50s, he took a lot of photographs in Europe—he was an American in Paris. He took all these photographs and that really inspired his abstract paintings; he would take fragments and motifs from the photographs and paint them. But he never wanted to have those photographs be viewed with the paintings. They were inspirations but it didn’t supposedly matter where the motifs came from. I never bought it.
Assaf Evron, Untitled (Zugspitze Circa 1938 for the McCormick House), 2019, Solvent Print on roller curtains
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AE: Me either. But, I think he used the sources for the titles. CM: Yes, the paintings are titled this and that street, sidewalk, door, window, Awnings, Avenue Matignon (1950), Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1949). AE: I’m very interested in the relationship of abstraction as presentation, also as a form of an index. It’s like indexicality that is very much embedded in the photographic but can also be applied and activated in abstract painting. There is a source—especially with photography, there’s always something in front of the camera. And in the photograph you can alienate it but I am interested in the point in which you take this alienation as far as you can, but still keep the source resonating. Which is a delicate balance or dialectic that every work negotiates slightly differently. CM: At various moments of his life, Kelly actually made site-specific projects and paintings for architecture. Which raises the question of perception: how one experiences these, how Kelly tried to make these paintings part of the building, the paintings thus both draw attention and compete with the architecture. It also brings up the question of the meeting of design and art that seems so important in your work too. What I love about this project with the McCormick House too, is that you can look from afar and maybe not even quite realize what’s going on. It blends into the architecture. And there’s a way in which your nature blends into the surrounding nature. So it is pressing into and against the normal.
_______________ Assaf Evron’s work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he currently teaches. He has received numerous awards including The Graham Foundation (2017), Israel Lottery (2017), Artis (2016), The Gerard Levy Prize (2012), The James Weinstein Fellowship from SAIC (2013), The Israeli Ministry of Culture and Education Prize for Young Artists (2010). In the fall of 2019, he will have his first US museum solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Christine Mehring is chair and professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago, and Adjunct Curator at the Smart Museum of Art. She is the author of Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era (Yale, 2008), most recently of Ellsworth Kelly: Color Panels for a Large Wall (Matthew Marks, 2018), and the coeditor of Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951–1972 (Getty, 2010). Her writings on abstraction and postwar European art have appeared in many art journals and exhibition catalogues. Her work has been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Graham Foundation, the Reva and David Logan Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. In 2011, she received the University of Chicago’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. 8
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CHECKLIST - Assaf Evron 1
Untitled (Dead Sea Circa 2017 for the McCormick House), 2019 Solvent print on perforated vinyl 64 x 58. ½ in. & 17 x 55 in. each, total of 7
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Untitled (Studies in Modular Architecture for the McCormick House), 2019 Photographic collage 19 x 24 in. (22 ¼ x 27 ¼ in. framed)
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Untitled (Studies in Modular Architecture for the McCormick House), 2019 Photographic collage 19 x 24 in. (22 ¼ x 27 ¼ in. framed)
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Untitled (Studies in Modular Architecture for the McCormick House), 2019 Photographic collage 24 x 19 in. (27 ¼ X 22 ¼ in. framed)
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Untitled (Zugspitze Circa 1938 for the McCormick House), 2019 Solvent print on roller curtains 94 x 60 in. each, total of 3
Concept Collages for intervention with Mies van Der Rohe Buildings, 2017:
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The McCormick House, Elmhurst, 2017 Photographic collage 14 x 23 in. (24 x 30 in. framed)
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Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 2017 Photographic collage 12 x 16 in. (18 x 24 in. framed)
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Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 2017 Photographic collage 12 x 16 in. (18 x 24 in. framed)
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S.R Crown Hall, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, 2017 Photographic collage 16 x 20 in. (30 x 24 in. framed)
10 Esplanade Apartments 900/910 Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, 2017 Photographic collage 25 x 20 in . (30 x 24 in. framed)
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MIES VAN DER ROHE M CCORMICK HOUSE
Page 2 of the Bensenville Row House Brochure, circa 1955.
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Claudia Weber
150 South Cottage Hill Ave, Elmhurst, IL 60126 Inspired by the transformation of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House from a private residence (1952–1991) to a museum space (since 1997), this project experiments with the question of what happens when both of these purposes—living and exhibiting—take place simultaneously: What becomes of life (and living) when it is put on display? And how is an exhibition concept shaped when it is pulled into the daily routines of life? How will the conditions of this specific house—Mies van der Rohe’s modernist design, the more recent infrastructural changes, and the museum’s policies related to the activities that can take place there—influence this experiment? And what effects or responses will the temporary occupation of this building elicit? To find out, I am moving into the former Children’s Wing of the house from February 16th to April 14th, 2019, during which time I am living, working and exhibiting there. This prolonged engagement with Mies van der Rohe’s prototype, including my ongoing research into the contexts of the house, builds the base from which I will reflect more broadly on the relationships between architecture, art, and life. In preparation for this project, and to familiarize myself with the McCormick House’s many phases, I sifted through a large quantity of historical materials. During this research, I encountered a photograph that was taken outside the house’s former Children’s Wing around 1952 when the first residents, the poet Isabella Gardner, her two children from former marriages, and her husband, the investor Robert Hall McCormick III, were living there. The image was used in a promotional brochure for a larger Row Houses project that Mies van der Rohe and developer Herbert Greenwald were planning on a suburban lot in Bensenville, IL, circa 1955.1 A second image placed to the bottom right of the photographed steel structure shows Gardner casually reading in an arm chair in the former Parents’ Wing. The close vicinity between the two images suggests a direct relationship between the inside and outside spaces, despite the fact that each represented a different wing of the house. Apparently in an effort to reinforce this impression, the image of the interior with Gardner reading was mirrored so that the brick wall frames the opposite side of the space. Looking back and forth between these images, one begins to question the relationship between the physical and photographic spaces. In fact, the mirroring is not only present in the photographic image, but is also incorporated into the physical space itself through Mies van der Rohe’s close attention to the use of materials on the walls: the butterflied grain of the elm veneer paneling of the McCormick house shows a subtler and more economical implementation of an effect the architect first employed in the marble and onyx surfaces of the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Tugendhat. The use of mirroring and the creation of suggestive spaces in both the photographs and the building program are reminders of the complex interplays between space, time, and materials. Buildings are images, but they are also empty vessels that require us to project ourselves into them. In this 11
regard, it is intriguing to consider such techniques in relation to the similarly structured ink-blot patterns of the Rorschach test.2 In the decades following World War II, personality testing in the United States began to spread from earlier and more specialized military and psychiatric uses into broader mainstream areas of life. Within this developing normalization of character assessment, it might have seemed reasonable that even a building could be turned into a test-image for the psyche of an individual, or even an entire nation. In 1953, one year after the McCormick House was completed, Elizabeth Gordon, the editor of House Beautiful, a shelter magazine with a strong focus on interior decoration, did exactly that by using a photograph of the Villa Tugendhat. In “The Threat to the Next America,” her feature article in the magazine’s April issue, she claimed that Mies van der Rohe’s austere buildings deviated from ‘proper’ living and therefore should be deemed as un-American and detrimental to the lives and prosperity of Americans. Her warning was fueled by the fact that Mies van der Rohe had been the director of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) since 1938, where he was teaching the next generation of architects. Although she targeted Mies van der Rohe specifically, her attack was on (European) modernism more generally, and she also included the architects Le Corbusier and Hannes Meyer, the second director of the Bauhaus Dessau. Gordon considered these architects’ minimalist program totalitarian and saw their philosophy of “less is more” as a threat both to America’s claims to world leadership and to a capitalist economy based on consumerism. The McCarthy-era rhetoric of this article spiraled into a much wider and prolonged debate among architects who found themselves on the dividing line between support or rejection of Gordon’s claim. However, it was only ten years later, in 1963, that Mies van der Rohe was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor for a civilian in the United States, by president Lyndon B. Johnson, who declared him an outstanding figure for his cultural contributions to the nation. These contrasting responses to Mies van der Rohe’s architecture illustrate the extreme viewpoints from which the architect’s work was perceived. The McCormick House and other modernist structures were, like Rorschach tests, open-ended forms onto which any ideological position could be projected. The McCormick House was sold in 1991 by its last owners, the Ficks, to the Elmhurst Fine Arts and Civic Center Foundation with the goal of avoiding its possible demolition and to eventually integrate it into the future Elmhurst Art Museum. While the house’s prospective change meant that it would be uprooted from its original location and purpose for its survival, Mies van der Rohe’s reputation had, by that time, been solidly established for his historically significant contributions to architecture. “The Other House,” as some people still reference the McCormick Prototype in relation to Mies van der Rohe’s better-known Farnsworth House, went through a complex physical transformation during its change from residency to museum, a trajectory that the architect certainly didn’t anticipate, but nevertheless prepared for: “The purposes for which a building is used are constantly changing and we cannot afford to tear down the building each time. That is why we have revised Sullivan’s formula ‘form follows function’.”3 With this in mind, one could safely claim that the McCormick House has over time become a hybrid structure, a 12
Wood panel in the McCormick House Inserted photograph: Onyx wall in the Villa Tugendhat (photographer unknown)
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house with many faces. If Mies van der Rohe’s modernist home design was able to be simultaneously considered as both subversive and an embodiment of its cultural moment, the same can be said of the first inhabitant of the McCormick House, Isabella Gardner. The use of the image of her casually sitting in an arm chair and reading in the brochure was surely meant to illustrate the relaxed domestic lifestyle that this house could offer to potential clients in the 1950s. Yet Gardner, being independently wealthy, often flaunted the conventions of her time and of her Boston Brahmin heritage (her great-aunt was Isabella Stewart Gardner, the founder of the museum of the same name). She was a poet, publishing the collection Birthdays from the Ocean while she resided in the McCormick House and working for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. And she regularly interacted with the avant garde, initiating gatherings with guests such as Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Karl Shapiro, and others, and maintaining an ongoing letter exchange with the Beat poet Gregory Corso. In short, her work and attitude to life might have provoked as much controversy within the social norms of the 1950s as the McCormick house itself. By moving into the house for two months, I hope to see what potential this prototypical house might still hold as a space for life and artistic pursuits today.
_______________ 1 The Row Houses for Bensenville, IL (1954-1956) were never built, but elevation drawings of the project exist. 2 The Rorschach test was developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach as a method of psychological evaluation. In this context I would like to mention the work of German doctor Justinus Kerner, who published a popular book of poems in 1857, in which each poem was inspired by an accidental inkblot. Hermann Rorschach was familiar with the book. 3 Christian Norberg-Schultz, “A Talk with Mies van der Rohe,” published in Baukunst und Werkform No 11 (1958), pp 615–618, trans. by Mark Jarzomek and republished in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe and the Building Art (Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press, 1991), pp.338–339. Image: Installation view, 2019
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Claudia Weber is a German artist, who is based in Chicago. In her work she conceives of strategies that challenge our conditioned perception of and interaction with everyday spaces. In an attempt to break through the cycle in which the status quo is translated into the built environment, which in turn reenforces itself, Weber responds to selected sites with propositions, that should be understood as both physical and philosophical suggestions of other, possible spaces. Her mixed-media projects have been featured at White Columns, Thierry Goldberg, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, and Wave Hill, among other venues in New York. She also has shown internationally at Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Workspace, and Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, both Los Angeles; InÊs Barrenechea Gallery, Madrid; Contemporary Art Center, Bretigny; Croxhapox, Ghent; 5533 Space, Istanbul; Gallery Obinger, Kunstraum Bethanien, and Loop Gallery, Berlin. Weber was awarded a New York Studio Stipend by the Federal State of Berlin for one year, participated in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace residency program, and became a MacDowell fellow. More recently she received a Travel and Study Grant by the Jerome Foundation, a project grant by the Puffin Foundation, as well as invitations into residencies at Latitude, Chicago, and the Process Space program by the LMCC on Governors Island, NYC. The artist is currently supported by a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. Weber is also the founding editor of Plot, an online platform dedicated to images and their narrative networks. Contributions come from a wide array of disciplines. www.claudiaweber.net www.plot.online
Follow the project: www.150southcottagehillave.net Instagram @150southcottagehillave
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Weber has invited Olivia Block and Kate Park to contribute works to her exhibition. She is currently collaborating with Other Forms (Jack Henrie Fisher and Alan Smart) to create a small, experimental publication around Exquisite Corpse, a card collection that the artist specifically created for this exhibition. The publication is planned to be launched during a closing event. Olivia Block is a media artist and composer from Chicago. She creates studiobased sound art compositions for releases and concerts, site-specific sound installations, and scores for orchestra and chamber groups. Her compositions include field recordings, amplified objects, chamber and orchestral instruments, and electronic textures. She performs her pieces for microphones, radios, tapes, pieces of glass, inside piano and amplified objects and many other sound-making materials. Feature articles about Block have been published in The Wire, NPR’s Morning Edition, The New York Times, MusicWorks, The Chicago Reader, Fluid Radio, and many others. Her latest LP release, 132 Ranks for Pipe Organ, is currently published on Room 40. www.olivia-block.net Textile artist/designer Kate Park was born and raised in South Korea and is currently based in New York. She received her BFA in Textiles at Rhode Island School of Design. Park is interested in translating abstract ideas into visual reality using fiber manipulation and weaving. The major focus of her work is the coexisting relationship between dual identities. Her series of textile work represent various explorations of this idea in hand or industrially woven panels engineered to stand as poetic structures.The artist’s conceptual and three-dimensional works challenge general and traditional conception of textiles. www.thekatepark.com Other Forms (Jack Henrie Fisher and Alan Smart) is a collaborative practice working between publishing, design, historical research and critical theory. Fisher and Smart are interested in the way in which publishing and design hybridize and blur distinctions between the roles of editor and author, historical scholar and historical subject. Their own projects have worked on this dynamic by experimenting with different ways in which writing can be made open and collective by using recombinant or recursive techniques. www.otherforms.net
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Related Public Programs All public programs are free with museum admission or current membership unless otherwise indicated.
Saturday, February 16 | 1:30 PM Lecture: "Bauhaus and the USA: 1919-33" * On the occasion of The Whole World a Bauhaus and the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, scholar Margret Kentgens-Craig will expand on the legacy of the legendary school and its lasting effects in the United States with a lecture titled "Bauhaus and the USA: 1919-33."
Saturday, February 23, April 6 | 1-4 PM Family Day Workshop We invite you and your family to participate in hands-on art activities inspired by the Bauhaus and our current exhibition.
Sunday, February 24, March 10, 17, 31 | 1:30 PM McCormick House Tour: From the Bauhaus to Our House Learn about the history and unique design of the McCormick House (1952) by Mies van der Rohe. This docent-led tour will introduce concepts in the historical exhibition The Whole World a Bauhaus and end in the two contemporary site-specific exhibitions in the McCormick House.
Saturday, March 2 | 1:30 PM Artists Talk: Assaf Evron and Claudia Weber * Hear from Chicago-based artists Assaf Evron and Claudia Weber about their sitespecific installations in Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House. For this two person exhibition, each artist took over a separate wing of the single-family home. Learn more about their artistic intent and particular interests in Mies’s biography, his legacy, the Bauhaus, and unique features of the house.
Saturday, March 16 | 1:30 PM Teen Design Competition Workshop Just as Bauhaus students were encouraged to use the materials and technologies of their day, teens will be introduced to a variety of methods to fabricate their creative designs in advance of the Teen Design Competition on April 13th. Design professionals will teach skills and provide advice on how to construct their projects. Teens interested in all media are encouraged to attend. For more information please email education@elmhurstartmuseum.org Sponsored by the OPUS Foundation
Sunday, March 24, April 14 | 1:30 PM McCormick House Tour with Claudia Weber Tour the McCormick House with exhibiting artist Claudia Weber to learn about her sitespecific projects including research about the 1952 prefab prototype, various changing installations including works by other artists, interactions with visitors, and more.
Saturday, March 30 | 1:30 PM Discussion and Oral Histories of the McCormick House Mies van der Rohe’s McCormick House has been part of Elmhurst’s history since it was built in 1952. Join us as we record memories of this historically significant building, including conversations with former McCormick House residents. Co-organized with the Elmhurst History Museum
Tuesday, April 2 | 6:30-8 PM Book Discussion: The Turner House Join us to discuss The Turner House by Angela Flournoy. Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and later winning the VCU First Novelist Award, the novel tells the story of a Detroit family with 13 children as it responds to the economic woes of the city, in both the 1940s, and then in 2008. The house that sees the changes in the family, also becomes a character in the family's saga. Co-organized with the Elmhurst Public Library Please register in advance by calling (630) 834-0202.
Sunday, April 7 | 1:30 PM Lecture: “Bauhaus Translated: Transcultural Encounters with the Avant-garde school” * Dr. Regina Bittner will give a talk on the global impact of the Bauhaus. She is the Head of the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and responsible for the conception and teaching of the postgraduate programs for design, Bauhaus and architectural research. Co-organized with Northwestern University and Elmhurst College
Saturday, April 13 Teen Design Competition Drop off: 10 AM - 12 PM Reception: 3:30 PM In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, we invite area teens to submit their own architecture and design proposals. This juried competition will be on view at the museum, and will celebrate creative design of today’s young creatives. Designed objects in any 3D medium are welcome, the use of today’s industrial materials and technologies is encouraged. Sponsored by the OPUS Foundation
Sunday, April 14, 2019 - 1:30pm McCormick House Tour with Claudia Weber Tour the McCormick House with exhibiting artist Claudia Weber to learn about her sitespecific projects including research about the 1952 prefab prototype, various changing installations including works by other artists, interactions with visitors, and more.
*These programs are part of the Year of German-American Friendship initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI).
The Elmhurst Art Museum is an organization dedicated to the development of contemporary art exhibitions, the celebration and preservation of a rare home designed by Mies van der Rohe, and educational programs available at no cost to groups, schools and individuals.
This exhibition is part of the Year of German-American Friendship initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI).
ELMHURST A R T MUSEUM 150 S Cottage Hill Ave, Elmhurst, IL 60126 630.834.0202 | elmhurstartmuseum.org
Museum Hours Mondays: CLOSED Tuesdays-Sundays: 11am - 5pm
MIES VAN DER ROHE M CCORMICK HOUSE