Focusing on the ethical and technical entanglements of water, Swamplands features works by Imani Jacqueline Brown; Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan; Gala Porras-Kim; Fred Schmidt-Arenales; and a new commission by Jerónimo Reyes-Retana. The exhibition takes the murky soil and unstable grounds of swamps as a conceptual framework to highlight the ecological and socioeconomic intricacies that lie at the threshold between bodies of water and land. Swamplands explores the unique social, political, and economic conditions of the tidelands in Louisiana, Yucatán, Tamaulipas, Texas, and Thailand. Initially developed as a yearlong research and exhibition series through Storefront for Art and Architecture, the New York presentation of Swamplands was supported by the Graham Foundation and the exhibition at the Madlener House in Chicago is the culmination of the initiative.
Swamplands at the Graham Foundation follows two iterations of the Swamp Summit in Merida, Mexico (February 2024) and in New York (March 2025). These programs gather artists, architects, writers, curators, researchers, anthropologists, ecologists, poets, and other practitioners to discuss the material politics of water from different geographies—from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mekong River.
CLICK HERE to learn about the upcoming Swamp Summit: Dirt and Water hosted in partnership with Dia Art Foundation.
Storefront for Art and Architecture amplifies the understanding of the built environment through artistic practice. Founded in 1982 by artists and architects in downtown New York, Storefront has chronicled the changing urban landscape of the city over the years and remains committed to producing and presenting work about diverse notions of place and public life.
Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans. Her work investigates the continuum of extractivism, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of American society, she opens space to imagine paths to ecological reparations. Brown is a researcher with Forensic Architecture, an economic inequality fellow with Open Society Foundations, and the editor of Black Ecologies (MARCH, 2021). She has initiated several collective art/activist/spatial practice projects, including Blights Out (2014–18) and Fossil Free Fest (2018), and was a member of Occupy Museums (2011–18). Brown has worked across the United States, as well as internationally in the United Kingdom, Poland, and Germany. She received her master’s with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London and her bachelor’s in anthropology and visual arts from Columbia University. Brown received a Graham Foundation grant for the project What remains at the ends of the earth? exhibited at 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin in 2022.
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to confront intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cheng is a Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2023 Wheelwright Prize recipient for TRACING SAND. Her work has been exhibited internationally as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–22); Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019); 18th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia (2018); among others, and is included in the Architectural Association’s permanent collection. Cheng holds a PhD by Design and MPhil Projective Cities from the Architectural Association and was the codirector of AA Wuhan Visiting School from 2015–17. She coled the MA architectural design studio Politics of the Atmosphere from 2019–22 and teaches an interdisciplinary module across all schools at the Royal College of Art in London. She is also Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2024–25 CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Researcher on field research as a land-dependent practice.
Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist, and independent filmmaker, trained at the Architectural Association and SOAS University of London respectively. Since 2019, Zhan has used film as a collaborative medium to conduct long-term research-oriented projects. Her projects include Orchid, Bee and I, a fictional ethnography reflecting on personal and collective experiences of living through the climate crisis and the Covid pandemic, and RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING, a transdisciplinary endeavor that tunes into how Chinese rural migrant workers make worlds. As an Architects Registration Board (ARB) registered architect, Zhan has worked on various award-winning projects across scales and sectors internationally since 2011, including the Maggie’s Cancer Care Center in Leeds, United Kingdom. Chen is currently part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s CCA-Mellon multidisciplinary research group—In the Hurricane, On the Land—looking into field research as a land-dependent practice.
Cheng and Zhan’s joint project RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING received two commendations from the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Awards for Research in 2020 and 2018, the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival in 2024, and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival in 2023. RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING was supported by the Graham Foundation with a research grant in 2022 and an exhibition grant for a presentation at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 2024.
Gala Porras-Kim received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a master’s in Latin American studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Biennial (2019); Ural Industrial Biennial (2019); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2017); the Seoul City Museum of Art (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); FRAC Pays de la Loire, France (2016); 44th Salon Nacional de Artistas, Pereira Museum, Colombia (2016); the Los Angeles Public Art Biennial (2016); the Made in LA biennial, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). She has received awards including Art Matters (2019), Artadia (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2016), Creative Capital (2015), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2015). She was a David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and an artist in residence at the Getty.
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter, the Bronx Museum, and Storefront for Art and Architecture, all in New York; the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; Fonderie Darling, Montreal; Lightbox Film Center, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), and Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Artspace, New Haven; The Museum of Fine Arts and FotoFest, Houston; Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien, Graz; and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna. His film Committee of Six was awarded a Jury Prize for Best of the Festival at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival. Schmidt-Arenales received Graham Foundation grants for the films Committee of Six in 2022 and IT IS A GOOD PROJECT AND SHOULD BE BUILT in 2024.
Jerónimo Reyes-Retana is a researcher and artist. An impulse to cultivate compositional forces through long-term projects guides his practice into the fissures (dis)connecting governance regimes built upon technological superiority. By the contingent implementation of relational and reflexive methodologies in peripheral sites across Latin America, Reyes-Retana examines hybrid territorialities exposed to the social, environmental, and economic anxieties derived from the techno-utopian determinisms of Western culture. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at Museo Tamayo, Casa del Lago UNAM, Museo Anahuacalli, OMR Gallery, Mutek, and Masa, all in Mexico City; Museo de Arte,Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Distant Gallery, Amsterdam; Todo la Teoría del Universo,Concepción, Chile; Co-Lab Projects, and Big Medium, Austin, ; Paul Kazmin, New York; among others. Reyes-Retana is a doctoral candidate in Emergent Technologies and Media Arts Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the University of Texas at Austin , for which he was awarded the Study Abroad FONCA-CONACYT Fellowship through the National Council for Arts, Culture, and Technology (Mexico). Additionally, Reyes-Retana has participated in parallel education programs such as Materia Abierta and Soma Summer in Mexico City.
