Taking the Shows on the Road
SOME OF THE CENTER'S PROGRAMMING seemed to find its way abroad in 2010. In September 2010 the Center’s exhibit Emergency State: First Responder and Law Enforcement Training Architecture was retitled Etat D’Urgence: Les Centres de Formation et de Simulation Grandeur Nature aux USA for its run at the Salle de Bains, in Lyon France. In Germany, the Center contributed some material including the film Rivers in Miniature from its archives to the exhibit The Imaginarium: A Theater for Constructed Ecologies shown in Berlin from September 3-November 10, 2010. The Center prepared an exhibit and map about the Nevada Test Site for the exhibit Theater of Peace at NGBK in May 2010, also in Berlin.
The Center’s Model Earth Project, depicting hydraulic models in the USA, is becoming well traveled in the UK, as part of the exhibit Ground Level produced by the Hayward Gallery in London. It went to Southampton in June, then Derby in September, and then Llandudno, in Wales, in November. Ground Level will be opening at the Museum and Art Gallery at Leamington Spa, in February, 2011.
Back in the USA, a CLUI program about Terminal Island was shown in the exhibit Precious Cargo, at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery, March 18-May 15. CLUI images were used in the exhibit Mirror Images: Great Salt Lake at the Jewett Center for the Performing Arts at Westminster College, Salt Lake City, May 1-7, 2010. In April 2010 the Center’s Houston Petrochemical Corridor Landscan was shown at Occidental College’s Thorne Auditorium, as part of a program curated by Lawrence Weschler. And images from the CLUI project Ultima Thule and The Trans-Alaska Pipeline were featured in the exhibit Magnetic Norths, at Concordia University, in Montreal, last Spring.
Possibly the most traveled CLUI material, though, are the project posters produced for the exhibit Experimental Geography, organized by Independent Curators International, and curated by Nato Thompson, which has been on the road since 2008. In 2010 Experimental Geography was shown in galleries at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh; Colby College in Maine; the City University of New York; and the Museum London, in Ontario. It is opening next in January 28, at the Foreman Art Gallery at Bishop’s University, in Sherbrooke, Quebec.
Members of the CLUI are often asked to present lectures and participate in symposiums, and we try to accommodate these requests as we can. In 2010, in addition to tours, talks at CLUI locations, and teaching work with the California College of Art, CLUI Director Matthew Coolidge presented lectures at the Pratt Institute in New York; the Canadian Center for Architecture; the Capital City Arts Initiative, in Carson City, Nevada; Colby College in Maine; at a UC San Diego program at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla, California; Ohio State University; Chapman University; the University of Florida; Florida State University; and at the University in Valencia, Spain. He also delivered the Keynote Address for the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, on the theme of Obsolescence, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sponsored by the University’s wonderfully up-to-date Center for 21st Century Studies. ♦