Inaugural Terence Riley Curators Summit

Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) is pleased to announce the inaugural Terence Riley Curators Summit, to be held on November 21 at Avery Hall on Columbia’s Morningside Campus in Manhattan. 

Conceived as a convening of architectural curators from around the world, the Summit will bring together those whose work is transforming how the built environment is critically mobilized, debated, challenged, and intervened upon. Participants include: Noura Al-Sayeh Holtrop (BACA); Renato Anelli (Sao Paulo Architecture Biennial); Paola Antonelli (MoMA); Charles Aubin (Centre Pompidou x Jersey City); Omar Degan (Pan African Biennale); Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher (SFMOMA); José Esparza (Storefront for Art and Architecture); Beatrice Galilee (The World Around); Shelley Hayreh (Avery Archives); Nikolaus Hirsch (CIVA, e-flux); Jean Im (GSAPP); Andrés Jaque (GSAPP); Justin McGuirk (Design Museum); Ewan McEoin (National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne); Manuela Moscoso (CARA); Maria Nicanor (Cooper Hewitt); Bart-Jan Polman (GSAPP); Florencia Rodriguez (Chicago Architecture Biennial); Raymund Ryan (Carnegie Museum); Felicity Scott (GSAPP); Martino Stierli (MoMA); Irene Sunwoo (Art Institute of Chicago); Abraham Thomas (The Metropolitan Museum of Art); Ikko Yokoyama (M+); Stéphanie Quantin (Centre Pompidou). 

The Summit pays homage to Terence Riley, who graduated from Columbia GSAPP in 1982 and served as the inaugural Director of the School’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery. Riley was Chief Curator for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1992 to 2006, co-founder of the MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program, Director of the Miami Art Museum from 2006 to 2009, and a historic ACT UP activist. Widely regarded as a pioneer in architectural curating, Riley’s legacy embodies Columbia GSAPP’s enduring commitment to advancing the built environment as a site of critical inquiry, invention, and activism.

Architectural exhibiting, collecting, and programming constitute a broad and heterogeneous field of crafts, research methodologies, archives, audiences, and traditions—often too diverse to be contained within a single disciplinary frame. The same complexity defines the ecosystem of institutions, venues, temporary events, collections, media and convenings through which architectural culture is produced and disseminated. Whether materialized as buildings, practices, prototypes, archives, material investigations, conferences, exhibitions, or preservation projects, discussions on the built environment unfold through an expanded range of curatorial practices that mediate between research, design, and the public sphere.

The Summit will include a closed-door session in the morning, followed by a public program held at GSAPP’s Wood Auditorium from 1 to 6pm. The afternoon event, open to the public, will feature presentations by participants on their curatorial work, and discussions addressing:

How to create new publics across disciplines? What does it mean to build a collection NOW? How to curate processes? How to create the conditions for inclusive representation and collective debate? How to position the built environment within larger curatorial armatures?

The Summit is organized and chaired by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, with Jean Im, Assistant Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs.

The Summit is generously supported by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, and was an idea developed by the late Jeffrey Brown alongside Dean Andrés Jaque.

To attend an event at GSAPP, please register here at least two business days in advance. The afternoon program will be livestreamed through GSAPP’s digital channels.

*Image above: Documents relating to the opening of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP in 1990. Its inaugural exhibition The Filter of Reason: Work of Paul Nelson was co-curated by the Arthur Ross Gallery’s first Director Terence Riley.