Friday, April 10, 12–8 p.m.

As part of EXPO ART WEEK, the Graham Foundation galleries and bookshop will be open late on Friday, April 10, with extended hours until 8 p.m. to explore Latinitudes: A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture, with photographs by Leonardo Finotti and curated by Michelle Jean de Castro.

Click here to explore the EXPO ART WEEK guide and discover galleries and institutions participating across the city.

CURRENT EXHIBITION
LATINITUDES 
A Collection of Modern Architecture
Photographs by Leonardo Finotti
Curated by Michelle Jean de Castro
April 2–July 18, 2026
Opening April 2, 6–8 p.m.; gallery hours resume April 3

GALLERY AND BOOKSHOP HOURS
Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 p.m.
Free admission, no reservations required—ring the doorbell for entry.

EXPO Art Week
Art After Hours
Galleries and Bookshop open late
Friday, April 10, 12–8 p.m.



Image: Facultad de Ingeniería de Minas, Geología y Metalurgia (Faculty of Mining, Geology, and Metallurgical Engineering), Lima, Peru, designed by Walter Weberhofer, 1956–62. Photograph by Leonardo Finotti, 2016. © Leonardo Finotti

UPCOMING EVENTS

Kari Watson premieres Fuse, a new solo performance for analog modular synthesizers and programmed drum machines. The piece plays with clock function and tempo ramps, moving between analog and digital environments as Watson shapes the sound in real time.

Fuse engages a quadraphonic speaker array in tandem with a spatial audio sculpture of unhoused speaker cones distributed through the room. A custom synth garment—made in collaboration with visual artist and designer Av Grannan—houses patch cables and an XLR snake that tie Watson’s body into the setup. Modular instruments sit atop custom ceramic tables made with visual artist and ceramicist Paige Schlosser, designed so cables can be woven in and around the surfaces.

Watson takes theorist Donna Haraway’s cyborg as an origin point for the project: a figure of synthesis and hybridity, where humans and machines are enmeshed and the boundaries between body and environment are continually unsettled. Fuse makes that unsettled boundary audible, asking where the performer ends and the surrounding system begins.

Kari Watson (b.1998, Philadelphia, Pa.) is a composer, performer, and intermedia artist working across contemporary concert music, electroacoustic composition, live performance, and installation. As a performer on analog synthesizers, Watson integrates custom spatialization systems built in Max/MSP with multi-speaker arrays, foregrounding tactility and drama in spatial sound.

Watson’s work has been presented at Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Darmstadt; Donaueschinger Musiktage, Donaueschingen; MINU Festival for Expanded Music, Copenhagen; Les Écoles d’Art Américaines de Fontainebleau, Fontainebleau; the Composers Now Dialogues Series; Ravinia Festival’s Breaking Barriers Festival; and Frequency Festival, Chicago, among others. Additional presentations have taken place at KM28 and Richten25, Berlin; The Horse Hospital and IKLECTIK Art Lab, London; Werkstatt für Improvisierte Musik Zürich; Khimaira, Stockholm; the Chicago Cultural Center; and the International Museum of Surgical Science.

Collaborators include Jennifer Torrence, Maya Bennardo, Sarah Saviet, Yarn/Wire, Collective Lovemusic, Eduard Teregulov, Ensemble Dal Niente, TAK Ensemble, MIVOS Quartet, Line Upon Line, and Quatuor Diotima. Recent projects have also been presented through Roulette; Experimental Sound Studio; and International Anthem’s 11×11 Series with Katinka Kleijn.

Recordings include enclosures (Sawyer Editions, 2025) and VISTAS, with Katinka Kleijn (Elektramusic, 2025). Watson received the 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize for Composition from the Darmstädter Ferienkurse and a 2022 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Watson is currently a Ph.D. candidate in music at the University of Chicago.


Photo: Eduard Teregulov

Nile Greenberg presents Architecture of Noise, his research as the 2025–26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. Greenberg asserts that the present is a battery—that we preside over a time of noise, not signal and noise, not the noise of the past, but a gesamtkunstwerk of noise: every inch authored by someone.

Through projects and research developed at UIC, he examines how architecture can operate within overlapping crises—environmental, economic, and political—where control is often dispersed across many actors and systems. Architecture must author and reauthor its contexts and sites, remake the present, and confront its responsibilities and its risks. Greenberg positions this as a call for architecture to recalibrate itself within crisis, within noise, and within its history.

This talk follows the exhibition of Architecture of Noise at the Edith Farnsworth House (April 19–20), which brings together a series of projects: a film; a reimagined history of Chicago; a survey of sites shaped by environmental and economic forces; a visual survey of Chicago architecture; and a new masterplan for the Farnsworth House.

Related Exhibition:

Nile Greenberg is a founding partner of Abel Nile New York. Abel Nile New York guest edited the 2025 issue of Flash Art Volumes on the theme of Crisis Formalism—a dossier of architectural responses to re-integrate architectural form and crisis. Greenberg serves as architecture editor at The Brooklyn Rail, overseeing a section that focuses on the relationship between architecture and art. His published works include coauthoring The Advanced School of Collective Feeling (Park Books, 2023), a study on the relationship between physical culture and housing in the 1920 and curating the exhibition Two Sides of the Border at Yale. Greenberg is the 2025-26 Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow at University of Illinois Chicago. He has taught at University of Illinois Chicago; Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP); and Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP). His work has been presented at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; ETH Zürich, Zurich; Spazio Maiocchi, Milan; Center for Architecture, New York; Rice University, Houston; Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Cambridge;  University of Melbourne, Melbourne; and The Cooper Union, New York Greenberg was recognized as New Practices New York 2020-23 by American Institute of Architects, New York (AIANY).

About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation and an exhibition at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Image: Architecture of Noise (model), 2026. Photo: Nile Greenberg

Catherine Seavitt examines two rarely addressed moments in the career of Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994): his absence from the initial planning and execution of Brasília in 1960, and his later affiliation with Brazil's military dictatorship as a member of the Conselho Federal de Cultura in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Seavitt, any discussion of Brasília and Roberto Burle Marx must acknowledge these episodes. Burle Marx executed three significant landscapes for the military government's new ministries in Brasília, including two ministry palace gardens at the head of the monumental axis and a grand triangular plaza, Praça dos Cristais, at the army headquarters in the military sector, all in collaboration with architect Oscar Niemeyer. Commissioned in 1967 by the very Ministério do Exército that controlled the regime, the Praça dos Cristais was envisioned as a vast military parade ground, facing Niemeyer's monumental complex of the Quartel-General do Exército and inaugurated in 1973.

This talk draws on Seavitt's book Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2023), supported by a 2017 grant from the Graham Foundation, and is presented in conjunction with Latinitudes: A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture by Leonardo Finotti, on view at the Graham Foundation through July 18, 2026.

Catherine Seavitt is Meyerson Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She is the faculty codirector of the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and creative director of the department’s LA+ Journal. A registered architect and landscape architect, she is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the American Institute of Architects, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, and the American Academy in Rome. Her research explores urban landscapes, post-industrial sites, toxicity, and inventive plant knowledge, with a focus on actionable responses to the climate crisis and decarbonization. Seavitt’s books include Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2023); Structures of Coastal Resilience, with Guy Nordenson and Julia Chapman (Island Press, 2018); and Four Corridors, with Guy Nordenson and Paul Lewis (Hatje Cantz, 2019).


Image:  Roberto Burle Marx, aerial view of the Crystal Plaza garden for the Ministry of the Army with Oscar Niemeyer's Army Headquarters complex seen beyond, 1972, Brasília, Brazil. Courtesy of the Arquivo Público do Distrito Federal.

For more information on the exhibition, Latinitudes
A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture, click here.

PREVIOUS POSTS