As part of its annual funding cycle, the Chicago-based Graham Foundation has announced the organizations that will receive its 2021 grants, totaling $471,500. Earlier this spring, the Graham Foundation awarded $585,000 in grants to individuals.
This year's grants will fund 45 projects by organizations around the world. The projects include exhibitions, publications, digital initiatives, and public presentations, such as New Middles: 2021 Exhibit Columbus in Columbus, Ind., and SAY IT LOUD, an exhibition curated by Pascale Sablan, FAIA, for the National Organization of Minority Architects' 50th anniversary. The 2021 grantees join a network of more than 4,800 projects that the Graham Foundation has supported with more than $41 million in grants over the past 65 years.
A selection of the grantees follow below. A full list of this year's recipients can be found on the Graham Foundation website.
Project: Heather Hart: Afrotecture (Re)Collection, by Heather Hart
Grantee: The University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Buffalo, N.Y.
Graham Foundation project description: The University at Buffalo Art Galleries present an exhibition and a catalog of Heather Hart’s new work stemming from her research on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Examining how historical records and collective memory of the event overlap—or don’t—Hart began developing this project with the support of a 2019 Graham Foundation grant. UBAG’s 40-foot-tall gallery enables the artist to realize her vision of re-creating the balcony in an interior space. The exhibition includes 3D sketches and models that share the artist’s research and process that reflect how we piece together the bits in a collective building of history from ground up. The project is developed in consultation with faculty from UB School of Architecture and Assembly House 150, a Buffalo nonprofit that runs a career-training program in the construction trades.
Project: American Framing: US Pavilion, 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale, by Paul Andersen, AIA, and Paul Preissner, AIA
Grantee: University of Illinois at Chicago—College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, Chicago
Graham Foundation project description: Wood framing has always been wood framing, and no amount of money can buy you a better 2x4. This fundamental sameness paradoxically underlies the American culture of individuality, unifying all superficial differences. The exhibition presents the subject of wood framing in a collection of works throughout the galleries and grounds of the United States Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. A four-story installation forms a new façade for the historic pavilion; photographic work from Daniel Shea and Chris Strong address the labor and design of softwood construction; scale models by students at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture study the history, common forms, and potential of wood framed construction; and furniture explorations by Ania Jaworska and Norman Kelley encourage connection to the work.
Project: Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde, 1920–1930, by Anna Bokov and Steven Hillyer
Grantee: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art—Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, New York
Graham Foundation project description: Active in Moscow in the 1920s, the Higher Art and Technical Studios, known as Vkhutemas, translated radical experiments in art, architecture, and design into a systematized body of knowledge. This educational undertaking of unprecedented scale and complexity served as one of the major platforms for the institutionalization of the avant-garde movement. Vkhutemas: Laboratory of the Avant-Garde, 1920–1930 examines this interdisciplinary design school through the lens of an ideological campaign for mass education and traces the development of a new pedagogical model based on the school’s “objective method.” Although Vkhutemas is often referred to as the Russian Bauhaus, the two schools had substantially different futures. While much attention has been given to the Bauhaus, Vkhutemas fell into obscurity for nearly a century. This exhibition commemorates the school’s decade-long existence and seeks to rediscover its vast creative legacy within the history of Modernism.
Project: Houses of Tomorrow, by Robert Boyce and Jan Tichy
Grantee: Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Ill.
Graham Foundation project description: Houses of Tomorrow encompasses an exhibition and programming that explores the groundbreaking work of Keck and Keck, two architect brothers from Chicago working in the early part of the 20th century, and follows how their innovative ideas have evolved through today. For the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, George Fred Keck developed a visionary design for a new, modernized home and called it the House of Tomorrow. His House of Tomorrow was the first glass house in America, predating the same uses and adaptations of these materials and methods driven into popularity (or notoriety) by modernists such as Mies van der Rohe by more than 15 years. By furthering efficiency issues from their own House of Tomorrow, Keck and Keck innovated new designs to become the first solar architects. The exhibition shows how their development of passive solar energy and other modern construction methods were early precursors to the sustainable building practices of today.
Project: Accumulation: The Art, Architecture, and the Media of Climate Change, by Nick Axel, Daniel A. Barber, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Anton Vidokle
Grantee: E-flux Architecture, New York
Graham Foundation project description: Although we can experience weather, we can only understand climate through media. This volume examines a new epistemological location for media as a site for scholarly analysis. Familiar causal assumptions, relationships between interior and exterior, and specters of instrumentality and hope inform how methods and objects are framed and become available for inquiry. The processes leading to climatic changes are slow and agglomerative, and resist familiar forms of representation. Scholars of art, architecture, and media have explored new analytic methods and historical narratives. Humanistic inquiry has, in this sense, encountered a threatened environment through embracing uncertainty, unpredictability, and risk. The cultural imaginary exploring biotic processes and social systems is in transition and can be critically evaluated for the visions of the future it contains. Images and the mediatic propensities that they elicit, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, are caught between conditioned passivity and renewed urgency.
