Through February 25, 2023
Gallery and Bookshop Hours
Wednesday–Saturday, 12–5 p.m.
On view: Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Exits Exist

For gallery hours and timed-entry reservations, click here to book on tock.com/grahamfoundation

Visitor Guidelines
Please note: The audio component of the Pidgeon Audio Visual installation is only accessible to stream in the galleries through the exhibition's dedicated website on a mobile device. The use of a personal mobile device is encouraged and headphones are required. Headphones and chargers are available for use as needed.

The first-floor galleries and bookshop are accessible via outdoor lift. Please call ahead to make arrangements. The second-floor galleries and the third-floor ballroom, where events are held, are only accessible by stairs.

Group tours available by request

For more information on the exhibition, Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves, click here.

6 p.m. Introductory talk by curator Florencia Alvarez Pacheco, followed by a conversation with Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta
Reception to follow

Join us for a reception and introductory remarks to celebrate the opening of our fall exhibition Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves in the second-floor galleries. The conversation with curator Florencia Alvarez Pacheco begins at 6 p.m. in the third-floor ballroom. Alvarez Pacheco will be joined by Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta, co-directors of the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) program, at Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP).

Mining the Pidgeon Audio Visual (PAV) series—a collection of over 200 mail order tape/slide talks initiated in 1979 by renowned editor of London-based magazine Architectural Design, Monica Pidgeon—this exhibition features a selection of the talks and accompanying slide presentations by leading architects and designers produced between 1979 and 1989. At the Graham, talks by Reyner Banham, Roberto Burle Marx, Charles Correa, Balkrishna V. Doshi, Frank Gehry, Myron Goldsmith, Zaha Hadid, Lawrence Halprin, Kisho Kurokawa, Esther McCoy, Cedric Price, James Wines and Alison Sky (SITE), Alison & Peter Smithson, Stanley Tigerman, and Anne Tyng will be shown in their original format on slide projectors, with synchronized audio accessed on personal mobile devices. Drawing from the archives of Royal Institute of British Architects; the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and the Graham Foundation—which supported Pidgeon and PAV with a grant in 1983—the exhibition looks at the PAV series as an alternative education platform and a new model for the development and distribution of ideas in architecture and design.

Exits Exist, site-specific supergraphics by San Francisco-based Barbara Stauffacher Solomon (b. 1928) for the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House are also on view throughout the galleries.

Florencia Alvarez Pacheco is an architect and curator who teaches at the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires. She holds a master’s degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University, GSAPP. She was assistant exhibitions coordinator at the Arthur Ross Architectural Gallery where she acted as assistant curator for Environmental Communications: Contact High, Information Fall-Out: Buckminster Fuller’s World Game, Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals, 1965–1975, and cocurator for Every Building in Baghdad: The Rifat Chadirji Archives at the Arab Image Foundation, and Detox USA among other exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Graham Foundation, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and LAXART. Her research focuses on the implications and challenges of diverse techno-pedagogical experiences from the postwar period at the convergence of politics, education, and media.

For more information on the exhibition, Pidgeon Audio Visual: Architects Speak for Themselves, click here.

Lea and Ben will present My Words Came Out Slow and Odd, a text-based composition for voices and electronics, trumpet, and reeds.

The duo's new work pushes the boundaries of language and intelligibility and extends the human voice through the aid of creative electronic processing. What new modes of communication emerge when language is in a constant state of morphology? How quickly can we recalibrate to allow for complex meaning to be projected onto abstraction? My Words Came Out Slow and Odd is a clattering, psychedelic whirl of heteroglossia, smears, and stutters.

Ben Vida and Lea Bertucci began collaborating during the summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, New York. What started as a conversation between friends slowly developed into a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation, one that examines the very nature of creative dialogue.

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.

Note that seating for this performance is very limited. Reservations are required for entry. If you make a reservation and then are no longer able to attend, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or email info@grahamfoundation.org to release the spot to someone on the waiting list. 

Ben Vida (b.1975, Dubuque, Iowa) is a composer, improviser and artist. His work explores aural phenomena, language, durations and systems. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the minimalist quartet Town & Country in Chicago. Later, after a move to Brooklyn, he shifted his focus to electronics and systems-based compositions that used psychoacoustics, aural phenomena and advanced synthesis techniques. Since 2015 he has composed pieces that combine his interest in experimental writing with his love of singing with people.

Slipping Control (2015), Vida’s multimedia composition for voices, video and electronics, premiered at Audio Visual Arts in New York and then traveled to Los Angeles and Athens. His six-hour performance piece for vocal ensemble and electronics, Reducing the Tempo to Zero premiered for Lampo in June 2016 and was staged at The Kitchen, New York; STUK in Leuven, Belgium; and Centro Pecci, Prato. And So Now (2018) was commissioned for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and performed at the BAM Fisher Space. Always Already, which was created in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire ensemble and vocalist Nina Dante, premiered for Lampo in March 2020 and was also performed in New York.

In addition to these works, he has developed projects with Marina Rosenfeld, Lucio Capece, and Lea Bertucci. He has released his music with many labels including Shelter Press, Kranky, PAN, iDEAL and 901Editions, among others. Vida teaches in the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.

Lea Bertucci (b.1984) is an artist who works with sound. Her projects describe relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation, and creative misuses of audio technology. Recent projects have tapped into a space's unique acoustic properties, as in 2018’s Acoustic Shadows, a suite of compositions for the enclosed hollow body of the Deutz Suspension Bridge in Cologne.

She has released several solo albums and a number of collaborative projects, including Metal Aether and Resonant Field (NNA Tapes), and Phase Eclipse with Amirtha Kidambi (Astral Spirits). In 2021 she founded Cibachrome Editions and released A Visible Length of Light. Earlier this year the label issued Murmurations, her debut recording with Ben Vida.

Bertucci has performed her work throughout the U.S. and Europe, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Issue Project Room, Pioneer Works, and The Kitchen, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tempo Reale, Florence; Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and at international festivals, including Brückenmusik, Cologne; Sound of Stockholm, Stockholm; ReWire, The Hague; and Unsound, Kraków, among others.

Additionally, Bertucci has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha; MacDowell, Peterborough, N.H.; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, Calif.; and Issue Project Room, New York. Bertucci's work has been commissioned by the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia.

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.

Photo: Peter Ganushkin

Join us for the final monthly extended gallery and bookshop hours (5–8 p.m.) for our current exhibition, Exits Exist by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon on the last Thursday of the month. A walkthrough of the exhibition led by Graham Foundation staff will begin at 6:30 p.m.

All purchases in the bookshop during evening hours will be 15% off.

Exits Exist, an exhibition by San Francisco-based Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, presents site-specific supergraphics for the Graham Foundation’s Madlener House galleries along with works on paper, artist's books, and a new series of sculptures.

To learn more about the Graham Foundation Bookshop, click here

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (b.1975, Kansas City, Mo.) premieres Three-Sided Figure, his new modular synth and voice performance. Lowe is an artist and composer working primarily with voice and modular synthesizers in the realm of spontaneous music. Speaking about his work, he reflects that “the marriage of synthesis and voice has allowed for a heightened physicality in the way of ecstatic music.” The sensitivity of analogue modular systems echoes the organic nature of vocal expression, which in this case is meant to put forth a trancelike state, to usher in a deeper listening through sound and feeling.

Collaborators include Ben Russell, Ben Rivers, Rose Lazar, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Ben Vida, Lucky Dragons, Alan Licht, Patrick Smith, Monica Baptista, Lee Ranaldo, Kevin Martin, Chris Johanson, Tyondai Braxton, David Scott Stone, Genesis P-Orridge and Rose Kallal, as well as many others. Select appearances include Doug Aitken’s Migration happening at 303 Gallery (2008) and Princeton University (2010), La Suite for Serpentine Gallery (2012), In the Wan Light of Napalm and Moon with Evan Calder Williams (2012), Peradam with Sabrina Ratté at EMPAC (2014), Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Georges Pompidou (2014), performances with Ariel Kalma at Lincoln Center (2015), Unsound Festival and San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (2018), and Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within at Kurimanzutto and the Guggenheim Museum (2019). In November 2014, Lowe premiered Early Hypnagog in the Lampo series. Recent projects include composing the Candyman score (2021), which was on the shortlist to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, and sound for Rashaad Newsome’s Assembly at the Park Avenue Armory (2022). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

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