Swarm
Guest-Curated by Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton
On view through 18 March 2006
Catalog available
The Fabric Workshop and Museum
1315 Cherry Street, 5th and 6th Floors
Philadelphia, PA 19107 www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org
[T] 1.215.568.1111
[F] 1.215.568.8211
[E] info [at] fabricworkshopandmuseum.org
The exhibition Swarm at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia brings together works that express swarming as a social effect generated by masses of objects, images, data, or organisms. The exhibition features new work by Fred Tomaselli, Matthew Ritchie, Yukinori Yanagi, and Peter Kogler, as well as recent work by Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze, Shahzia Sikander, Michal Rovner, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, C.E.B. Reas, Jason Salavon, Mark Bradford, Siebren Versteeg, and the design teams of the Bouroullec brothers and Campana brothers. The fascination with swarming reflects a contemporary view of nature, politics, and social lifeone that favors unplanned and decentralized modes of organization. Swarm theory animates contemporary art, science, design, digital media, and social theory. Swarm connects the social life of bees, birds, crowds, and cities to contemporary aesthetics, as seen in the fascination of artists and designers with how simple, discrete units accumulate into complex systems.
Swarm Related Public Events:
Artists Talk: Fred Tomaselli
Friday, 3 February 2006, 6 p.m.
Conversation with the Guest Curators
Friday, 3 March 2006, 6 p.m.
Moderated by Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton
Miller and Lupton will convene a discussion of swarming as it reflects contemporary views of nature, politics, and social life that favor unplanned and decentralized modes of organization. They will be joined by Deborah Gordon, Professor of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, author of Ants at Work: How an Insect Society is Organized and Eugene Thacker, Assistant Professor at the School of Literature, Culture & Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, author of Biomedia and The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics and Culture. This program is partially funded by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council.
Swarm Catalog
96 page, full-color, illustrated catalog with contributions by Marion Boulton Stroud, Abbott Miller, Ellen Lupton, and William Smith is available through The FWM Museum Shop.
The Swarm publication is modeled on a field guide, particularly in its rounded edges and journal-like format. Within its 96 pages, full-color reproductions of the artworks featured in Swarm alternate with beautifully rendered information graphics. The visual and tactile qualities of the publication situate swarming as something both visceral and analytical, futuristic but also ancient and primal. The catalog includes an introduction by Marion Boulton Stroud, Founder and Artistic Director of The Fabric Workshop and Museum, as well as an essay by guest curators Abbott Miller and Ellen Lupton, and contributions by William Smith. Woven into the gallery of artists images are scientific diagrams and visualizations of swarms occurring in the human and animal worldsfrom army ants and honey bees to traffic and suburban sprawl.
About the Guest Curators
Abbott Miller is a designer, editor, and art director. He is a partner in the New York office of the international design firm Pentagram, where his clients include the Guggenheim Museum, Harley-Davidson, The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna, and Knoll. He is editor and art director of the visual and performing arts magazine 2wice, and Creative Director of Steuben Glass. He has designed numerous books, magazines, and exhibitions, and is co-author with Ellen Lupton of Design Writing Research (1996) and The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992). He teaches design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.
Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the MFA program in graphic design at MICA in Baltimore. She also is curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, where she has organized numerous exhibitionseach accompanied by a major publicationincluding the National Design Triennial series (2000 and 2003), Skin: Surface, Substance Design (2002), Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), Mixing Messages (1996), and Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993).
About The Fabric Workshop and Museum
The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia is the only museum of its kind, offering internationally renowned artists the resources to create new work in experimental materials. Artists come from all mediaincluding sculpture, installation, video, painting, ceramics, and architectureand use FWMs facilities and technical expertise to create works of art that they could not create on their own. Research, construction, and fabrication occur on-site in studios that are open to the public, providing visitors with the opportunity to see works of art from conception to completion. FWMs permanent collections include not only completed works of art, but also material research, samples, prototypes, and photography and video of artists making and speaking about their work. Access to the creative process provides visitors with a point of entry into understanding challenging works of contemporary art. FWM offers an unparalleled experience to the most significant artists of our time, students, and the general public.
The programs of The Fabric Workshop and Museum are supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts, The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, The Miller-Plummer Foundation, LLWW Foundation, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Institute of Museum and Library Services, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Nimoy Foundation, The Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, Independence Foundation, The Claneil Foundation, Pennsylvania Humanities Council, The Barra Foundation, and the Board of Directors and members of The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
For further information please call 1.215.568.1111, e-mail info@fabricworkshopandmuseum.org or visit www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org
