Current and upcoming exhibitions

Exits Exist, a new commission of site-specific supergraphics by San Francisco-based Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, is on view throughout the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House galleries. Building on her 70-year exploration of letterforms, bold, hard-edged abstracted letters of black and vermillion proclaim “EXITS EXIST,” and transform the 1902 interiors of the Prairie style mansion. Solomon’s typographic experiments inhabit the vertical and horizontal planes of the rooms and extend beyond the wall in a series of three-dimensional sculptural objects. From her work on 8 ½ x 11 inch sheets of paper, to the pioneering supergraphics at The Sea Ranch in the 1960s, Solomon shifts in scale from the page to the wall—to make, as she says, the invisible visible.

Mining the Pidgeon Audio Visual (PAV) series—a collection of over 200 mail order tape/slide talks initiated in 1979 by renowned editor of London-based magazine Architectural Design, Monica Pidgeon—Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves features a selection of the talks and accompanying slide presentations by leading architects and designers produced between 1979 and 1989. At the Graham, talks by Reyner Banham, Roberto Burle Marx, Charles Correa, Balkrishna V. Doshi, Frank Gehry, Myron Goldsmith, Zaha Hadid, Lawrence Halprin, Kisho Kurokawa, Esther McCoy, Cedric Price, James Wines and Alison Sky (SITE), Alison & Peter Smithson, Stanley Tigerman, and Anne Tyng are shown in their original format on slide projectors, with synchronized audio accessed on personal mobile devices. Drawing from the archives of Royal Institute of British Architects; the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and the Graham Foundation—which supported Pidgeon and PAV with a grant in 1983—the exhibition looks at the PAV series as an alternative education platform and a new model for the development and distribution of ideas in architecture and design. Pidgeon Audio Visual is curated by Florencia Alvarez Pacheco and originated at Disponible, Buenos Aires.

Upcoming
Graham Foundation Fellow Katherine Simóne Reynolds, is working in residence at the Madlener House, to make a new body of work for the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, opening in spring 2023. Continuing her exploration of overhealing from trauma, Reynolds references the creation of a keloid, or hypertrophic scar tissue, as an outward representation of healing—a site sensitive to recovery and repair in tandem. She looks at the Rust Belt as a kind of keloidal landscape—places in Illinois such as Cairo and Brooklyn, also known as Lovejoy, the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States in 1873—to reflect on relationships between perceptions of abandonment and fertility, Black female imagination, and different manifestations of healing.

About the Graham Foundation 
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and by producing exhibitions, events, and publications.

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