Reparations: The Other Mies Archive
Leen Katrib
Artist Statement: Reparations: The Other Mies Archive - This ongoing subversive archival project re-examines the history of modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design for the Illinois Institute of Technology’s postwar campus expansion—a project that led to the strategic erasure of a primarily Black neighborhood in Chicago’s South Side. The installation departs from van der Rohe’s 1941 photomontage of the campus proposal, which shows a photograph of a diagrammatic physical model of the campus raised on a white plinth, organized by a seemingly neutral 24-square-foot grid, and superimposed onto an aerial photograph of Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. The photomontage is reconceived into an archival apparatus through which to deconstruct the official campus history and complicate the architect’s legacy—one that rarely diverges from a discussion about form and architectural ideology—by inviting visitors to peek into a palimpsest of material records that were necessarily suppressed to perpetuate the myth of a tabula rasa created by an “apolitical” architect intent on creating an “apolitical” architecture in the name of progress and higher education.
Complementing the archival apparatus in the Neil Sulier Gallery is an informal pop-up archive in the adjacent Tiny G+ballery that invites visitors to look through an in-progress collection of found, scanned, and produced historical materials on the expansion of another campus—the Auraria Campus that wiped out a Hispanic neighborhood in Denver in the 1970s. Led by Director of Planning and Development Jacques Brownson, a former student of Mies van der Rohe at IIT, and a number of IIT graduates, the pop up archive contextualizes the lingering implications of van der Rohe's master plan and curriculum at IIT on the larger American academic and urban landscape by taking stock of his former students and second-generation disciples.
This long overdue subversive turn on the historiography of Miesian modernism and the modern university provokes a moment of critical self-reflection and a much-needed re-examination of how the erasure of a people is perpetuated through architecture’s historiography and the myth of the architecture itself. In “looking forward,” how do we confront the expansion of higher education institutions when it comes at the expense of displaced communities of color whose suppressed histories have often been justified?
Artist Bio: Leen Katrib is an architectural designer and Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of Kentucky. Her work investigates architecture’s materiality and historiography and designs new frameworks for marginalized histories and material culture. Her research has been supported by an upcoming Art Omi Architecture Residency (2024), MacDowell / National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2022), Harry der Boghosian Fellowship (2021-22), Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship (2016-18), Howard Crosby Butler Travel Grant (2017), William and Neoma Timme Travel Grant (2014), and George H. Mayr Travel Grant (2013). Her work has been published in Future Anterior, Pidgin, Room One Thousand, and Bracket, and has been exhibited at Syracuse University, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in South Korea, Van Der Plas Gallery in New York City, and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. Leen holds a M.Arch from Princeton University, where she was editor of Pidgin, and a B.Arch from the University of Southern California. Prior to academia, Leen lived and practiced in New York City at Marvel, LTL Architects, Peter Marino, and OMA.
Complementing the archival apparatus in the Neil Sulier Gallery is an informal pop-up archive in the adjacent Tiny G+ballery that invites visitors to look through an in-progress collection of found, scanned, and produced historical materials on the expansion of another campus—the Auraria Campus that wiped out a Hispanic neighborhood in Denver in the 1970s. Led by Director of Planning and Development Jacques Brownson, a former student of Mies van der Rohe at IIT, and a number of IIT graduates, the pop up archive contextualizes the lingering implications of van der Rohe's master plan and curriculum at IIT on the larger American academic and urban landscape by taking stock of his former students and second-generation disciples.
This long overdue subversive turn on the historiography of Miesian modernism and the modern university provokes a moment of critical self-reflection and a much-needed re-examination of how the erasure of a people is perpetuated through architecture’s historiography and the myth of the architecture itself. In “looking forward,” how do we confront the expansion of higher education institutions when it comes at the expense of displaced communities of color whose suppressed histories have often been justified?
Artist Bio: Leen Katrib is an architectural designer and Assistant Professor of Architecture at University of Kentucky. Her work investigates architecture’s materiality and historiography and designs new frameworks for marginalized histories and material culture. Her research has been supported by an upcoming Art Omi Architecture Residency (2024), MacDowell / National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2022), Harry der Boghosian Fellowship (2021-22), Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship (2016-18), Howard Crosby Butler Travel Grant (2017), William and Neoma Timme Travel Grant (2014), and George H. Mayr Travel Grant (2013). Her work has been published in Future Anterior, Pidgin, Room One Thousand, and Bracket, and has been exhibited at Syracuse University, Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism in South Korea, Van Der Plas Gallery in New York City, and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles. Leen holds a M.Arch from Princeton University, where she was editor of Pidgin, and a B.Arch from the University of Southern California. Prior to academia, Leen lived and practiced in New York City at Marvel, LTL Architects, Peter Marino, and OMA.
Public Gallery Hours
Wednesday 12pm-5pm
Thursday 12pm-5pm Friday 12pm-5pm Saturday 12pm - 5pm Viewings also available by appointment |
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209 Castlewood Dr. Lexington, Ky. 40505 Email: [email protected]
Phone 859-254-7024 |
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