The Graham Foundation announced over $560,000 in new grants for individuals around the world to support 72 innovative projects engaging original ideas in architecture. Among the funded projects are exhibitions, publications, films, performances, and site-specific installations. These diverse projects advance new scholarships, fuel creative experimentation, critical dialogue, and expand opportunities for public engagement with architecture and its role in contemporary society.

This year’s awarded projects were selected from a competitive pool of nearly 700 submissions. The funded projects are being undertaken by individuals and collaborative teams—72 projects by 99 grantees representing 20 countries—who include architects, designers, curators, filmmakers, visual artists, musicians, and writers from around the world.

The HAD associate professor Eva Díaz  was selected after writing her new book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, released last year by the University of Chicago Press. The project examines how an interdisciplinary group of artists proposed new models of art practice around the concept of experimentation, and focuses on three key Black Mountain teachers in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller.

Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative figures of modern times, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.

To learn more about the 2017 Grants to Individuals, go to grahamfoundation.org.

Eva Diaz, HAD faculty Associate Professor , will be participating in the panel “Learning communities in modern Art and Design. This panel discussion examines three case studies in experimental education that have greatly influenced subsequent generations of learners and educators. In conjunction with the opening of the People’s Studio: Design, Experiment, Build, a new education space in the Museum.

Tickets ($15; $10 members and corporate members; $5 students, seniors, and staff of other museums) can be purchased online.

Greg Lindquist, HAD faculty, will be participating in the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program (Studio Program), beginning September 5, 2017. The Independent Study Program (ISP) consists of three interrelated parts: Studio Program, Curatorial Program, and Critical Studies Program. The ISP provides a setting within which students pursuing art practice, curatorial work, art historical scholarship, and critical writing engage in ongoing discussions and debates that examine the historical, social, and intellectual conditions of artistic production. The program encourages the theoretical and critical study of the practices, institutions, and discourses that constitute the field of culture. Each year fifteen students are selected to participate in the Studio Program, four in the Curatorial Program, and six in the Critical Studies Program.

(http://whitney.org/Research/ISP)

Professor Greg Lindquist is showing Smoke and Water: Dispatches, a site-specific painting installation at Central Booking on the Lower East Side, on view until May 28, 2017. The opening reception is Thursday, May 11, 2017, from 6-8pm.

Please read his artist statement for more details:

In Smoke and Water: Dispatches, I extend imagery from a multi-year environmental and socially-engaged project focused on the continued affects from the 2014 coal ash spill running through eighty miles of the Dan River in North Carolina and Virginia. Visualizing the coal ash in water, I seek to transform toxic swirls into abstract vortices of pulsating color. Each installation of Smoke and Water places painted architecture and canvases in conversation. In this most recent dispatches, shallow vitrines of coal ash will run along the two main walls in material juxtaposition to its painted depiction. Drawing from diverse movements such as Impressionism, site specific Land Art and the grassroots activism of Environmental Justice, the Smoke and Water painting installations work with communities to facilitate social change, actively creating space for the possibility of mobilizing political action and reshaping common values.

On April 13, 2017, Professor Robertson and her Themes in Art and Culture II class hosted a RiDE Episode on the topic of Art as Resistance: Decolonizing Art History.

Latina artists, Ruby Chacón and Maria de Los Angeles presented artwork and shared personal stories of migration, displacement, identity, family and heritage with students in the introductory art history class.

Maria dressed participants in some of her painted dresses, challenging students to question how it feels to wear another person’s culture. They discovered that the artists’ work did not fit neatly into “global” art histories, and that the presentation was being offered as part of a larger decolonizing project.

Follow the links for more information about the artists Ruby Chacón and Maria de Los Angeles, as well as more information about the Risk/Dare/Experiment (RiDE) Grant.