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U.S. Pavilion from Venice Biennale announces upcoming debut in Chicago

To Chicago with Love

U.S. Pavilion from Venice Biennale announces upcoming debut in Chicago

Exhibits from the U.S. pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will be moved to Wrightwood 659 in Chicago. Pictured: Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandez in collaboration with Shani Crowe's Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line) installed at the Venice Architecture Biennale's U.S. Pavilion. (La Biennale di Venezia)

The seven installations that comprised the United States’s entry to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale will make their stateside debut on February 15 in Chicago. Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos, a series of works exploring how architecture and design respond to citizenship, will be on view for the first time outside of the Biennale at Wrightwood 659, Pritzker Prize–winner Tadao Ando’s new concrete and light-filled adaptation of a 1920s Lincoln Park apartment building. Created by transdisciplinary teams of designers, artists, and architects, the installations focus on the architectural implications of citizenship. Themes include migration, landscape, borderlands, the right to public space, the interpretation of civic monuments, and the meaning of home. The work explores these concepts through seven spatial scales: Citizen, Civitas, Region, Nation, Globe, Network, and Cosmos.

The sixteenth Venice Architecture Biennale, titled FREESPACE, included seventy-one international participants and ran in Venice from May 26 to November 25. The exhibition was commissioned by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the University of Chicago (UChicago) on behalf of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Chicago makes a strong showing among Dimensions of Citizenship’s collaborators, including curators Ann Lui, principal of Future Firm and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at SAIC, and Niall Atkinson, associate professor at UChicago, with co-curator Iker Gil, director of MAS Studio, also of SAIC. Mimi Zeiger, independent critic, editor, curator, and educator rounds out the curatorial team.

The seven individual teams are SCAPE; Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman; Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Laura Kurgan, Robert Gerard Pietrusko with Columbia Center for Spatial Research; Keller Easterling with MANY; and Design Earth. There is a Chicago presence among the teams as well, in Studio Gang, and Amanda Williams + Andres L. Hernandes in collaboration with artist Shani Crowe.

On display From February 15 through April 27, 2019, Dimensions of Citizenship is the second public exhibition at Wrightwood 659, a new space devoted to exhibitions of architecture and socially engaged art made possible by Alphawood Foundation Chicago. The exhibition follows Ando and Le Corbusier: Masters of Architecture, closing December 15.


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