CURATORIAL WORK
Selections of research and exhibition design
Mapping Chicago
Curatorial Fellow, Chicago History Museum
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The reimagined Encyclopedia of Chicago sees space as an integral component in the telling of Chicago history, alongside the peoples, events, and buildings that characterize the city’s past, present and future. Despite the importance of space to the construction of collective memories, the city’s fabric is ever-changing. Many of the cultural, institutional, and domestic sites important to the city’s history have been displaced or erased. Chicago communities and peoples have also migrated, either forcibly or by choice, throughout history. And though they have left a mark on the city in numerous ways, key events have not always been commemorated with physical or material markers. The digital map allows the spaces, peoples, and events of the city’s past to be understood in relation to the built environment. It demonstrates how the segregated city is a product of racial discrimination, including those processes of demolition and displacement to have occurred under Urban Renewal, and it elevates those suppressed or immaterial histories of survival, resistance, and cultural expression both with and without material representation. With this, the Encyclopedia of Chicago intends to present a more nuanced and complicated history than evident in the built environment, one characterized by racial and ethnic diversity and the continual fight for equality and social justice.
Virtual Exhibition Design, Curation & Symposium Co-Organization
cityLAB OPENS HOUSE, Activism in Design + Dialogue, Fall 2020, Perloff Hall Gallery, Los Angeles
The CityLAB OPENS HOUSE symposium and exhibition situated design research performed by the team at CityLAB within wider discourses on spatial justice and activism. A virtual venue supported an immersive environment otherwise lost during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The selected platform (Mozilla Hubs) allowed for the integration of print work alongside models, where users could walk through the gallery in real time, as represented by avatars, and comment on the work in a shared space. The design was conceived as a procession from the interior (experienced upon entering a virtual Perloff Hall, to the city (experienced by emerging into the building site of one of the featured projects, the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy). The accompanying symposium brought the work of the exhibition into dialogue with leading architectural practitioners, scholars, advocates and community representatives. By engaging with architectural research, scholarship, practice and (virtual) space, the exhibition and symposium aimed to spatialize issues of social justice, and to connect the university, an unrestrictive home for the generation of ideas, within the city, an environment where ideas are tested.
Design Research, Exhibition, Report Writing
Fitting In/Fitting Out Exhibition and "My Commute is Hell Report," with cityLAB UCLA, Perloff Hall Gallery, Los Angeles, Fall 2019
The Fitting In, Fitting Out Report and Exhibition explored the diverse stories, motivations, and desires of "non-traditional" students and students who experience extreme commutes. As Research Associate, I facilitated focus groups with students, surveyed existing student housing conditions, researched precedent alternatives, and developed textual and visual materials to communicate our findings to interest groups within the UCLA community. The team collaborated with UCLA design faculty and students to suggest alternative accommodations as a direct response to our research findings.
Link to Full Report
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The learning project, Barrio Suburbanisms, was developed with the support of a Mellon Teaching Innovation Grant, and was launched with an undergraduate class in Chicanx Studies at UCLA in Winter 2021. The open source digital mapping platform (hosted on github) was developed as a generative and representational tool to demonstrate the ways that Latinx individuals, communities and populations have and are impacting the socio-spatial contours of Greater Los Angeles. Students were asked to contribute locational pins, descriptive and analytic text, and visually rich resources to the collective site, to disrupt static ideas of the suburban that erase the multi-variant placemaking strategies of Latinx peoples. An advisory board of archivists, librarians and community activists, was organized to engage with students and publics in diverse and informed ways. As a public oriented resource, the map encourages users to reflect on the significance of these spaces by asking them to share their own place-based experiences in an ongoing web submission process.
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Video Production
Layered media visualization produced for cityLAB, UCLA and the Urban Humanities Institute
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Representative of the work done by cityLAB and the AB50 bill against single-family residential zoning, allowing for the addition of accessory dwelling units on properties across the state of California.
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Demonstrating the latent opportunities for housing densification on vacant school land properties. The video has since helped to gain support for AB 2295, streamlining education workforce housing development statewide.
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