Madison Greenstone performs Silent Paradox of Expression, a new concert-length extension of their exstatic resonances practice of playing the clarinet.

Madison Greenstone (b.1992, Los Angeles) is a clarinetist, composer, and writer based in Brooklyn. Greenstone’s solo performance practice, exstatic resonances, explores intense instrumental expressivities that arise when the clarinet is treated as a site of indeterminacy and generative instability. exstatic resonances draw on ongoing studies in phenomenology, self-generative music, acoustics, and the Jewish-mystical emanations of ruach.

Greenstone performs widely as a soloist and chamber musician. As a soloist, they have presented their work at KM28, Berlin; the Vigeland Mausoleum, Oslo; Night of Surprise, Cologne; Issue Project Room, New York; Non Event, Boston; and the Merce Cunningham Centennial Night of 100 Solos, Los Angeles. As a chamber and orchestral musician, they have performed at the New York Philharmonic; PS21, Chatham; KKL Luzern; Hamburg Elbphilharmonie; Darmstadt Ferienkurse; Indexical, Santa Cruz; Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angles; and Miller Theater, New York. They have held residencies at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, and University of Chicago.

Their debut solo album, Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness (Relative Pitch Records), was released in 2022. Greenstone can also be heard on labels such as Wandelweiser Editions, Another Timbre, TAK Editions, Pleasure of the Text Records, New Focus Recordings, Impakt Collective, and upcoming on Dinzu Artefacts.

Greenstone is the clarinetist of TAK Ensemble, and a founding member of the [Switch~ Ensemble]. Trained in contemporary classical performance, they have learned greatly from the mentorship of Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis at University of California San Diego.

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Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound ,and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Photo: Titilayo Ayangade

SATURDAY, MAY 11, 12–5 pm CT
CLICK HERE to register to attend the in-person live-stream in Chicago at the Graham Foundation
CLICK HERE to buy tickets to attend in-person in New York at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
CLICK HERE to register to live-stream the event

Join us to watch the live-stream of the The World Around Summit 2024—a convening of global architecture’s “now, near, and next”—in the Graham Foundation’s ballroom. The World Around Summit is a conference featuring luminaries from architecture, design, and beyond presented online and in-person at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. This all-day program curated by Beatrice Galilee, presents a year of architecture and design in a day, introducing the best of contemporary buildings, and exploring cutting-edge and inspiring new projects and initiatives in landscape, technology, and design—all through the lens of social and ecological justice. The 2024 World Around Summit is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation.

An international and interdisciplinary line-up of speakers will present new approaches to landscape and urbanism, material innovation, synthetic spaces, housing, museums, and community. The World Around's format of short, singular presentations are intended to share the exciting and extraordinary ways in which architects are addressing the critical topics of our time. As part of the nonprofit's mission to make its programming accessible to all, the summit will be live-streamed in partnership with Dezeen. A full schedule of presentations will be shared the week of the event.

PARTICIPANTS

Germane Barnes, Studio B-arn-S – An architecture practice disrupting the status quo, committed to hands-on, research-driven design in service of social transformation in the USA

Niklas Bildstein Zaar, Sub – A Berlin-based studio with a synthetic approach to design that encompasses emerging technologies, semantic analysis, and behavioral research alongside traditional architectural techniques

Joe Christa Giraso, MASS Design Group – A design group on a mission to promote social and environmental justice, advocating a deeper approach to “sustainability” rooted in place, community, and care on ongoing projects in Rwanda

Emanuele Coccia – A philosopher revealing the dependencies between all life on earth to write an aesthetics for the Anthropocene Era in his new book, The Philosophy of Home

Nguyễn Hà, ARB Vietnam – A landscape architecture studio reading the natural poetry in an orchard site to preserve a space of spirituality at the Dao Mau Museum and Temple on the outskirts of Hanoi, Vietnam

Mae-ling Lokko – An architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines working with agro-waste and renewable bio-based materials

Jing Liu & Florian Idenburg, SO–IL – An architecture practice envisioning new urban housing models in Brooklyn, New York through homes that allow the outdoors to enter into nurture connection

Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art – A curator, author, educator, and public advocate bringing her vision to redefine the role of art museums today to the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles

Sameep Padora, Sameep Padora & Associates – A landscape architecture firm based in Mumbai, attending to the landscape’s material histories to shape an architecture at one with its context in South India

Ernesto Picco – An investigative journalist documenting the destructive race to power the green transition in South America’s Lithium Triangle

Alexis Sablone – An Olympic athlete making “skateable” public art across Europe and the USA to invite urban communities to play in their cities

Lisa Switkin, Field Operations – A landscape architect behind some of New York City’s most revered public parks, including the High Line, Domino Park, and Gansevoort Peninsula

Rossana Hu & Lyndon Neri, Neri & Hu – A Shanghai-based architecture studio bringing their characteristic tactile minimalism and attention to massing to the extension of Xi’an’s Qujiang Museum of Fine Arts

Ma Yansong, MAD Architects – An award-winning Chinese practice drawing on nature to design a landmark arts institution, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, into the cultural fabric of Los Angeles

Kongjian Yu, Turenscape – A China-based landscape architecture and urbanism practice, building on tradition to reconnect communities to the earth and steward the environment for future generations

Founded in 2020, The World Around (TWA) is a global nonprofit platform headquartered in New York, with a simple but ambitious mission: to rethink architecture. Taking the most critical issue of our time—the climate crisis—as the lens to view all of their activities, TWA connects with global institutions to craft unique public conversations that look beyond buildings to investigate the often-invisible forces that shape our homes, cities, landscapes, and lives. The World Around Summit 2024 is co-presented with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

To learn more about the 2024 Summit and browse past presentations, click here.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Graham Foundation, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

In Music for laptops, speakers and mechanical instruments, Michelle Lou and Bryan Jacobs create a hybrid synthetic sonic space, made up of both digital synthesized and physical acoustic sound-making devices. The performance offers a potentially dizzying, at times playful experience for listeners in the round.

Lou and Jacobs follow a large-scale structure from which they explore, respond, and react—improvising on each of their own custom-designed performance systems—Lou on a laptop and 8 channels of speakers, and Jacobs on computer-controlled DIY musical devices.

“Sound is at the limit of materiality,” they write.

“It touches things, it’s modulated by surfaces, by bodies, by objects and architecture. It’s only heard if it enters your body and triggers a mechanical response. It’s terrestrial in that it requires so much stuff to travel that it can’t travel through the vacuum of space, and yet it’s immaterial in most other ways.

“With this in mind, one could say that sound may provide a pathway towards accessing unseeable and untouchable interiors. The tension between the seen and the heard, particularly when the two do not align is highlighted through the use of loudspeakers. The tension found in listening also expands to the perception of one’s location: the limits of the actual physical space reaches beyond itself as the imagination stretches, while also collapsing into a singular experience as the body is still sitting in a chair.”

Composer, performer, and sound artist, Bryan Jacobs’ (b.1979, Columbus, OH) work focuses on interactions between live performers, mechanical instruments and computers. His pieces are often theatrical in nature, pitting blabber-mouthed fanciful showoffs against timid reluctants. The sounds are playfully organized and many times mimic patterns found in human dialogue. Hand-built electromechanical instruments controlled by microcontrollers bridge acoustic and electroacoustic sound worlds. These instruments live dual lives as time-based concert works and non-time-based gallery works.

His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Wet Ink, International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Ensemble Pamplemousse, and defunensemble. His music has been featured at many music festivals in Europe and the US. He is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. He has performed his own compositions for guitar and electronics at The Stone, New York; Miller Theater, New York; and The Wulf, Los Angeles. Jacobs is also a member of the performer/composer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse and is on faculty at the Peabody Institute of the John Hopkins University.

Michelle Lou (b.1975, San Diego, CA) composes mainly in the realm of electro-acoustic music, both in hardware and in computer based forms. She has also created large-scale sound installations that are often performative and collaborative. She performs and improvises on acoustic and electric bass, electric guitar, and on laptop and various electronics. Her work has been presented at Wien Modern; Donaueschinger Musiktage; Darmstadt Ferienkurse; Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik; the Festival of New American Music, Sacramento; the MATA Festival, New York; the 66th American Music Festival at the National Gallery in Washington, DC; Rainy Days Festival, Luxembourg; Ultima Festival, Oslo; Chance and Circumstance, Brooklyn; Klub Katarakt, Hamburg; Klangwerkstatt and MaerzMusik, Berlin; among others.

She received degrees in double bass performance and music composition from University of California (UC) San Diego with additional studies at The Conservatorio G. Nicolini in Piacenza, Italy (double bass) and The UDK in Graz, Austria (composition), the latter on a Fulbright Fellowship. Graduate studies culminated in a doctorate in composition from Stanford University. Lou was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and an Elliott Carter Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She has been granted commissions from institutions like the Fromm Music Foundation, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, and the Norwegian Arts Council. She has taught as visiting faculty at Dartmouth College, the Akademie für Neue Musik in Boswil, Switzerland, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is currently on faculty at UC San Diego.

Since 2010, the Graham Foundation has partnered with Lampo to produce an international performance series held at the Madlener House. Lampo, founded in 1997, is a nonprofit organization for experimental music and intermedia projects.

Lampo, established in 1997, supports artists working in new music, experimental sound, and other interdisciplinary practices. The Chicago-based organization's core activity has been and remains its performance series. Rather than making programming decisions around tour schedules, Lampo invites selected artists to create and perform new work, and then the organization provides the space, resources, and curatorial support to help them fulfill their vision. Lampo also organizes artist talks, lectures, screenings, and workshops, and publishes written and recorded documents related to its series.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

PAST EVENTS

As the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellow for 2023–24, Cédric Van Parys has investigated and transformed the meaning of billboard infrastructures as representative monuments of American culture by juxtaposing and reconciling word, image, and object. This talk elaborates on his creative process, from initial research to conceptual and material appropriation. This presentation follows the opening of the exhibition Sentinels at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture on April 5, 2024.

Exhibition: Sentinels, April 5–May 3, 2024
UIC School of Architecture
845 W Harrison St, Chicago, IL 60607
Exhibition opening: April 5, 6 p.m.
Click here to learn more

Cédric Van Parys is an artist-architect and the founder of Cédric Van Parys | CCXD, a Rotterdam and currently Chicago based practice operating at the intersection of architecture and the visual arts. Working across media and conceptual paradigms, his work is based on analytical research and is primarily concerned with the relation between monuments, public space, symbols, rituals, and aesthetics. Van Parys’ research, sculptures, and installations have been exhibited and constructed at the Venice Art Biennale, Venice Architecture Biennale, RAUM Utrecht, Shanghai Art Biennale, Biennale de Arquitetura de São Paulo, Plus359 Gallery Sofia, Sofia Art Week, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Drawing inspiration from architectural history, archival research, and natural science, Van Parys aims to foster curiosity about the world we have made and inhabit and how this relates to the planet, the cosmos, and beyond.

Currently, Cédric Van Parys is the 2023-2024 Garofalo Fellow at the University of Illinois, Chicago, School of Architecture and the Arts. www.officeccxd.com

About the Douglas A. Garofalo Fellowship
Named in honor of architect and educator Doug Garofalo (1958–2011), this nine-month teaching fellowship provides emerging designers the opportunity to teach studio and seminar courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs and conduct independent design research. The fellowship also includes a public lecture at the Graham Foundation and an exhibition at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) School of Architecture. To learn more about the fellowship, click here.

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

Image: Cédric Van Parys, "Sentinels: Iron Portals of Chicagoland," 2024. Location: Addams (I 90) S/S .8 Mi W/O Wolf F/E; Media/Style: Permanent Bulletin/Regular; Impressions: 550000/week; Advertising Strengths: Located on the Jane Addams Tollway (I-90), this 20x60 reaches NW Suburban commuters.  With a site that is within 2 miles of O'Hare International Airport, and on the main route between Downtown and hard-to-reach suburbs such as Barrington, Hoffman Estates and Schaumburg (Woodfield Mall), this sign is extremely valuable in any general market showing.

Join us for the book launch of Julia Phillips’ first monograph Energy Exchange (Mousse, 2023), featuring a conversation between the artist and scholar and writer Nana Adusei-Poku. The event includes two commissioned performances: Sweat to melt your heart by S. Tai Tai and On Falling, Part IV by Eli Greene.

Inspired by tools and functional objects, the sculptures of Julia Phillips are metaphors for social and psychological experiences. These metaphors are both mechanical and bodily, and the experiences they describe typically focus on power relations between individuals or between an individual and an institution.

A reception will follow the event; copies of Energy Exchange will be available in the Graham Foundation bookshop.

Julia Phillips was born in Hamburg and lives and works in Chicago and Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York and Kunstverein Braunschweig, and was featured in the Berlin Biennial, the New Museum Triennial, and the 59th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, Venice. Her work has been shown at museums including the MUSEUM für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museu de Arte de São Paulo; and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Phillips recently completed her first public art commission titled Observer, Observed for the High Line, New York, and her work will be included in the Whitney Biennial 2024.

Nana Adusei-Poku is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. Her research interests include how cultural changes are articulated at the intersections of art, politics and popular culture, artistic productions from the Black Diaspora and curatorial practice as a research tool for shaping art historical discourses.

Eli Greene holds a bachelor of arts from Cornell University and an MFA from the University of Chicago. Through image, object, and performance, her practice traces the act of one thing becoming another. Greene’s recent work has been exhibited in Chicago at the Smart Museum of Art, Hyde Park Art Center, Regards, Goldfinch, and Produce Model. She lives and works in Chicago.

S. Tai Tai (Tina Wang) is an artist based in Chicago and Los Angeles, with roots in other parts of the US (California and New York) Taiwan, and Latin America. She makes installations—sculptures and photographs)—that are activated in movement-based performance. Negotiating a freedom in self-expression with the fragility of belonging (to society) are key themes in her work. For more information about her pedigree, visit taitaistudios.com/bio.

Photo: Julia Phillips, Negotiator (#1), 2020. Ceramic, stainless steel, marble, 77 × 59 × 79 in. Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery

Note: This event will be held in the ballroom on the third floor of the Madlener House, which is only accessible by stairs. The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please contact us at 312.787.4071 or info@grahamfoundation.org to make arrangements.

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