Yesomi Umolu

The 2020 exhibition Harold Mendez: The years now presented a suite of existing and newly commissioned works—including photography, sculpture and sound—by visual artist Harold Mendez at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Mendez’s practice draws on artifacts and rituals from sites across the Americas, spanning from pre-Columbian times to the present, to create poetic assemblages that connect histories of violence and erasure with acts of renewal and remembrance. Building on a process-driven approach, in The years now, the artist employed various techniques such as digital scanning, three-dimensional printing, photo transfer, and sonic amplifications to explore the apparitions of bodies, and the ego across materials, site, and memory. Featuring installation views and research material, this volume is the first substantial monograph dedicated to the artist’s work. This publication includes a foreword by director and curator Yesomi Umolu, contributions from scholar and curator Candice Hopkins and poet J. Michael Martinez, and an interview with Mendez and curator Katja Rivera.

This publication showcases A Hard White Body, an evolving project by Candice Lin presented at B tonsalon--Centre d'art et de recherche, Paris; at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main; and at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. A Hard White Body weaves together material and nonhuman histories alongside the life and work of three historical figures: American writer James Baldwin (1924-1987); French explorer and global traveler Jeanne Baret (1740-1807); and artist and naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). Lin uses porcelain, a material whose history includes nineteenth-century imperial and scientific uses, to highlight fantasies surrounding whiteness and purity, only to subject her porcelain assemblages to pungent organic materials. She thus stages processes of contamination between organic and inorganic materials, creating an unstable sculptural ecosystem. In addition to an essay by curator Lotte Arndt that discusses the various iterations of Lin's project, the publication features an essay by Rizvana Bradley; a conversation between Jih-Fei Cheng and Mel Y. Chen; and a conversation between the artist and C. Riley Snorton. These texts are accompanied by a visual essay by the artist and a selection of exhibition views.

What constitutes the social context of architecture? What kind of stories can be told about how lived experiences across global communities, cities, territories, and ecologies resonate with architectural and space-making practices? The 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial explores the implications of architecture and the built environment as they relate to land, memory, rights, and civic participation—drawing buildings, planning, art, policy making, education, and activism into new conversations at global and civic scales.Published in conjunction with the third iteration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, …and other such stories extends the exhibition’s core questions through a range of essays, interviews, and visual dossiers, along with a section introducing the Biennial’s contributors. It is structured by a series of curatorial frames: (1) No Land Beyond reflects on landscapes of belonging and sovereignty that challenge narrow definitions of land as property and commodity; (2) Appearances and Erasures explores both shared and contested memories in consideration of monuments, memorials, and social histories; (3) Rights and Reclamations foregrounds aspects of rights, advocacy, and civic purpose in architectural and spatial practices; and (4) Common Ground addresses practices invested in producing and intervening in public space within and beyond the field of architecture.

Kapwani Kiwanga is a Canadian-born, Paris-based artist who creates installations, performances, and video art that bring together her training in anthropology and comparative religions, while also drawing on her interest in history, memory, and mythology. Kiwanga deliberately mixes truth and fiction in her work, confusing the two in order to create fantastical narratives that are nonetheless rooted in rigorous research. This book presents works by Kiwanga investigating disciplinary architectures that were presented at the Logan Center Gallery at the University of Chicago and the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Opening with a compelling array of installation images, research documents, and film stills from a newly commissioned video, the book also includes a curatorial essay surveying Kiwanga's work to date, an essay that offers an unfinished cartography of the genealogy of disciplinary spaces, and an interview with Kiwanga that covers her research interests and methodology.