Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org

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Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020)
Barbara Kasten with Stephanie Cristello
Apr 15, 2023 (3pm)
Book Launch

RSVP required

3:00pm | Barbara Kasten in conversation with Stephanie Cristello
4:00pm | Book Signing

Join artist Barbara Kasten alongside author and editor Stephanie Cristello for the official book launch of the monograph Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020), published by Skira. Delving into unearthed comparisons and histories, this conversation contextualizes Kasten’s ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms.

Since the 1970s, Kasten’s nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction and light has developed through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation. Well-known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, this publication reconsiders the artist through the broader context of architectural theory. Spanning five years of recent installations following the artist’s first major museum survey Barbara Kasten: Stages (2015–16) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), the Graham Foundation (Chicago), and MOCA Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles), momentous encounters including Kasten’s Crown Hall (2018) installed within architect Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass and steel structure and her solo exhibition Scenarios (2020–21) at the Aspen Art Museum serve as a primer to her revolutionary methods of abstraction.

Replete with full-color plates, the book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist following significant collaborations on the design of the stage for Obrist’s Interview Marathon (2018) and the film The New Bauhaus (2019) on artist László Moholy-Nagy; curator Humberto Moro’s interwoven comparison to the sensitivities of space, geometry, and color in the buildings of Mexican architect Luis Barragán; how Kasten’s work remains in conversation with new practitioners from architecture critic and curator Mimi Zeiger; and an elective history informed by Kasten’s early cyanotypes of sacred sites and goddess structures that provide a “stage” to disclose the spiritual basis of her approach to light by editor Cristello.

Presented in partnership with Skira

Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art critic, curator, and author based in Chicago. Her work focuses on artists who critically engage with the image and its role in visual culture. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with a liberal arts thesis in visual critical studies. Cristello was previously the Senior Editor US for ArtSlant (2012–18) and the founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art (2013–20). Her writing has been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Frieze MagazineMousse Magazine, OSMOS, and Portable Gray. She has delivered panels at the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, Independent Curators International (ICI), the Terra Foundation for American Art, Manifest Institute, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Nordic Talks. Cristello served as the artistic director of EXPO CHICAGO (2013–2020) and is currently the director / curator at Chicago Manual Style (Chicago) and Curator-at-Large at Kasmin (New York). In 2020–21, she was a curatorial advisor to the 2020 Busan Biennale (South Korea) as well as a guest curator at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), and the Driehaus Museum (Chicago). Cristello has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues nationally and internationally, including monographs on the work of Lap-See Lam (Bonniers Konsthall / Lenz Press, 2021), Mamma Andersson and Tal R (Kunsten Museum / Malmö Art Museum, 2022). She is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto / Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021), Sustainable Societies for the Future (Motto / Malmö Art Museum, 2021), and Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022). In 2020, she was awarded a publication grant by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.


Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, Chicago) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. Kasten’s practice centers around an exploration of the nature of perception and materiality. Her photographic output using both studio and natural lighting has been essential to the last decade of multi-disciplinary work in sculpture, video, installation, and public art. These works continue to examine an object’s presence within both illusionistic and real space. Forms--designated by shadow, color, and the space between objects--oscillate between representation and abstraction. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe. Most recently, Kasten was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, which traveled to Sammlung Goetz, Germany, and is open through April 2023. Other recent exhibitions include Barbara Kasten: Scenarios, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Women in Abstraction, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, and Centre Pompidou, France; The 2020 Busan Biennale: Words at an Exhibition—an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems, South Korea; Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, TATE Modern, UK; Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that traveled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is featured in the collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC among many others.


Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020) was supported by a Graham Foundation publication grant, click here to learn more.

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Birgit Ulher and Nicolas Collins
Lampo Performance Series
Apr 15, 2023 (7pm)
Performance

Reservations required; limited capacity

!Trumpet + Trumpet! That is, two trumpets and two very different approaches—one electronic, the other acoustic. While Collins works with a computer program and cobbled hardware, Ulher uses metal sheets, radios, milk frothers, and other everyday objects. The diametrically opposed sound production leads to oddly similar sonic results. At the Graham, Collins (!Trumpet) and Ulher (Trumpet!) perform together and present solo sound and video work.

Collins explains: “After 40 years, I finally figured out how to program a computer to sound like glitching circuits, and cobbled hardware and software into a brass package: a trumpet with a built-in speaker, sensors reading valve positions, a breath control, and an infrared mute. In a nod to David Tudor’s legendary composition Bandoneon! I’ve dubbed my instrument !trumpet. But where Tudor tags on the ‘!’ to indicate factorial, I lead with it as the symbol for logical negation. This is definitely not a trumpet.”

Presented in partnership with Lampo; Lampo gratefully acknowledges additional support provided by the Goethe-Institut Chicago; Travel support provided by Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media

Birgit Ulher is a Hamburg-based musician who is focused on extending the sounding possibilities of the trumpet. She has developed various techniques and preparations to produce multiphonics and a grainy, textured sound, whether holding objects in front of the horn’s bell or feeding radio noise into trumpet mutes. Ulher performs solo and in various collaborative settings in festivals and venues around the world, partnering with dancers, visual artists, composers and other free improvisers. Recent projects also include video and sound installations.

Nicolas Collins spent years in Europe, where he was artistic director of STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. He is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research fellow at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent. An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. His book, Handmade Electronic Music—The Art of Hardware Hacking (Routledge, 2020), now in its third edition, has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide.


Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

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A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing: Opening Reception
Katherine Simóne Reynolds
Mar 25, 2023 (4pm)
Opening Reception

RSVP required

Join us for a reception from 4–6 p.m. with artist Katherine Simóne Reynolds to celebrate the opening of her new exhibition A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds
practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Her work physicalizes emotions and experiences by constructing pieces that include portrait photography, video works, choreography, sculpture, and installation. Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour and beauty while interrogating the notion of “authentic care.” Her practice generally deals in Blackness from her own perspective, and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work.”

Reynolds has exhibited and performed work within many spaces and institutions including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation; The Museum of Modern Art; and SculptureCenter. She has exhibited in national and international group and solo shows, has spoken at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Black Midwest Initiative Symposium at University of Minnesota. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at The Luminary; SculptureCenter; and upcoming exhibitions for Stanley Museum of Art as well as Clyfford Still Museum.

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

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Gallery and Bookshop Hours, "A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing"
Mar 25, 2023 - Jun 10, 2023 (12pm)

Free admission, reservations required

Through June 10, 2023

Gallery and Bookshop Hours
Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 p.m.

For gallery hours and timed-entry reservations, click here to book on tock.com/grahamfoundation

Visitor Guidelines
Please note: The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please call ahead to make arrangements. The second-floor galleries and the third-floor ballroom, where events are held, are only accessible by stairs.

Group tours available by request, contact us at info@grahamfoundation.org

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

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Weston Olencki
Lampo Performance Series
Mar 11, 2023 (4pm)
Performance

Reservations required; limited capacity

In recent projects Weston Olencki has explored fusions of experimentalism and noise with American traditional music. At the Graham, they premiere new work for pump organ, Sacred Harp hymnody, and electronic synthesis, and offer a vine that grew over the city and no one noticed for electromechanical banjo, magnetic resonators, solenoid motors, AM radio transmitters, handheld radio, railroad spikes, carriage bolts, Markov-driven three-finger banjo picking, and a neural net-generated resynthesis of The Carter Family’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1935) as “performed” by the reanimated and digitized voices of Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Charley Pride, Elizabeth Cotten, Jimmie Rodgers, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Uncle Dave Macon, and Willie Nelson.

Weston Olencki (b.1992; Spartanburg, South Carolina) is a musician, composer, and sound artist based in Berlin, Germany. Their current work is centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts and constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of rural space and time.

They have presented work at the Borealis Festival, Issue Project Room, REDCAT, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Ghent Jazz Festival, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Black Mountain College, Musica Nova Helsinki, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, and Frequency Festival, among other festivals and venues. Residencies include CalArts, Columbia, Harvard, NYU, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, and the University of Huddersfield. In 2016 they were awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt. Their recording project Old Time Music (Tripticks Tapes) was named in Bandcamp’s “best of” 2022 music round-up. They have an extensive discography, with upcoming releases on Astral Spirits and Infrequent Seams. Olencki is an active member of Rage Thormbones, the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, Clone Decay (with Mary Halvorson and Kalia Vandever), the Hollows (with Nick Dunston and Etienne Nillesen), and other projects, and performs regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, organs, and various electronic media.

Image: Courtesy the artist

Presented in partnership with Lampo

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Visitor Guidelines: Masks are strongly encouraged. Visitors to the Graham Foundation understand that there is an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 in any public space where people are present. When masks are required, they must cover the nose and mouth at all times and meet CDC standards. Disposable masks are available upon request and will be provided to visitors as required.

Accessibility: Events are held in the ballroom on the third floor, which is only accessible by stairs. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

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Unless otherwise noted,
all events take place at:

Madlener House
4 West Burton Place, Chicago

Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 p.m.


CONTACT
312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org



Accessibility

Events are held in the ballroom on the third floor which is only accessible by stairs.
The first floor of the Madlener House is accessible via an outdoor lift. Please call 312.787.4071 to make arrangements.