Description /
Floating Monuments: The Garden with Kushala Vora places the monument–an already complex, hybrid, and enigmatic object–at the center as a catalyst for conversation, scenographic intervention, and a performance platform. The project includes a new inflatable sculpture exhibit in Floating Museum's Floating Monuments series. Docents engage the general public during the day and the sculpture and platform transform into a performance series at night. A curated series of sets will explore project themes of diaspora, improvisation, and create a space for musicians and performers.
The project focuses on the role of plants as world makers. The ephemeral monument, platform and performance series serve as a catalyst for conversation about the movement of people and plants such as cotton, black pepper, poppy, rice and clove. The word, diaspora–'dia' meaning across and 'spora' meaning scatter–itself has botanical roots. Vasco Da Gama and Columbus sought out the Indian subcontinent for direct access to spices. This 'discovery’/exploitation of people and plants as 'resources' have continued to shape the way we see ourselves, each other and the landscape that we reside with. The monument aims to connect multiplicities through these routes of trade and passage.
Profoundly linked to the empire, cultivation and trade, plant types have shaped and continue to shape wide-reaching systems. With an evident disruption of our global supply chains resulting from the pandemic, wars and climate change, how might we make different choices which would diminish neo-colonial tendencies? The project aims to use the metaphor of garden to conjure up these themes and associated questions, and the ways in which they have affected ecological change, colonialism, capitalism, and violence. Additionally, the piece aims to blur the lines between dialogic platform, sculpture, and performance to model a pluralistic approach to monumentality.
If, like Rebecca Solnit writes in the 'Ruins of Memory' from 2007, the United States is a country that in many ways functions as a country without a past, an amnesiac landscape, a country filled with cities that are the eradication, even the ruin, of the landscape from which it rose, Floating Monuments: The Garden proposes a monumental remembering of specific plant's histories as a framework to contest contemporary globalism's speed, dislocation and endless churning. In recognizing the ways in which ‘free' trade, and monoculture of plants have shaped the diaspora's of the world while taking time to reflect on movement of plants and people, our project aims to build a conversational structure.
This project is made possible with the generous support of the Illinois Arts Council, and the Joyce Foundation.
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Floating Monuments: The Garden with Kushala Vora places the monument–an already complex, hybrid, and enigmatic object–at the center as a catalyst for conversation, scenographic intervention, and a performance platform. The project includes a new inflatable sculpture exhibit in Floating Museum's Floating Monuments series. Docents engage the general public during the day and the sculpture and platform transform into a performance series at night. A curated series of sets will explore project themes of diaspora, improvisation, and create a space for musicians and performers.
The project focuses on the role of plants as world makers. The ephemeral monument, platform and performance series serve as a catalyst for conversation about the movement of people and plants such as cotton, black pepper, poppy, rice and clove. The word, diaspora–'dia' meaning across and 'spora' meaning scatter–itself has botanical roots. Vasco Da Gama and Columbus sought out the Indian subcontinent for direct access to spices. This 'discovery’/exploitation of people and plants as 'resources' have continued to shape the way we see ourselves, each other and the landscape that we reside with. The monument aims to connect multiplicities through these routes of trade and passage.
Profoundly linked to the empire, cultivation and trade, plant types have shaped and continue to shape wide-reaching systems. With an evident disruption of our global supply chains resulting from the pandemic, wars and climate change, how might we make different choices which would diminish neo-colonial tendencies? The project aims to use the metaphor of garden to conjure up these themes and associated questions, and the ways in which they have affected ecological change, colonialism, capitalism, and violence. Additionally, the piece aims to blur the lines between dialogic platform, sculpture, and performance to model a pluralistic approach to monumentality.
If, like Rebecca Solnit writes in the 'Ruins of Memory' from 2007, the United States is a country that in many ways functions as a country without a past, an amnesiac landscape, a country filled with cities that are the eradication, even the ruin, of the landscape from which it rose, Floating Monuments: The Garden proposes a monumental remembering of specific plant's histories as a framework to contest contemporary globalism's speed, dislocation and endless churning. In recognizing the ways in which ‘free' trade, and monoculture of plants have shaped the diaspora's of the world while taking time to reflect on movement of plants and people, our project aims to build a conversational structure.
This project is made possible with the generous support of the Illinois Arts Council, and the Joyce Foundation.
A lion for every house / Art Institute of Chicago / June 11 - October 17 2022 /
The Art Institute’s lion statues are beloved by many as icons welcoming them to a place that feels like a second home, but to others they represent gatekeepers who silently exclude. For this exhibition, the four members of Chicago-based art collective Floating Museum took these statues as a jumping-off point to consider questions of access, inequality, and the totemic power of art objects. The project results from interconnected collaborations that took place during the first two years of the pandemic. Curators in Photography and Media invited Floating Museum to explore the department’s collections. In response, Floating Museum invited ten community organizers and cultural hosts in Chicago, as well as ten local photographers, to help create new works based on the collection.
Hosts, photographers, Floating Museum, and the Art Institute curators learned more about one another in ten hour-long Zoom calls; excerpts play at the end of this show. In follow-up conversations, also conducted online, each host selected one of three photographs that Floating Museum offered from the museum’s collection (all of the images are on view in the next two galleries). The museum delivered reproductions of the selected works to the location each host designated as their home, after which the photographers produced new images in these settings, featuring the hosts and the works they selected. Finally, Floating Museum closed the circle by incorporating these commissioned pictures into the photo-sculptures on view in this gallery.
This project formed the basis of a new collaborative, community-based network, with art as the medium of communicatio. It encourages us to consider the potential of the Art Institute’s holding to act as a collective resource for all Chicagoans.
Hosts, photographers, Floating Museum, and the Art Institute curators learned more about one another in ten hour-long Zoom calls; excerpts play at the end of this show. In follow-up conversations, also conducted online, each host selected one of three photographs that Floating Museum offered from the museum’s collection (all of the images are on view in the next two galleries). The museum delivered reproductions of the selected works to the location each host designated as their home, after which the photographers produced new images in these settings, featuring the hosts and the works they selected. Finally, Floating Museum closed the circle by incorporating these commissioned pictures into the photo-sculptures on view in this gallery.
This project formed the basis of a new collaborative, community-based network, with art as the medium of communicatio. It encourages us to consider the potential of the Art Institute’s holding to act as a collective resource for all Chicagoans.
Plan Your Visit:
Exhibit Information
More to Read:
“With No Fear or Fence”: An Experiment in Collective Exhibition Making
by Matthew S Witkovsky
“If They Won’t Come to the Museum, Then the Museum Must Go to Them”
by Lori Waxman for HYPERALLERGIC
“Emergent Institutions: The Floating Museum’s 'A Lion for Every House' Makes New Connections”
by Pia Singh for NewCityArt
“An Exercise in Empathy and Trust: Collaborating with Lions”
by Joann Podkul-Murphy and Kirsten Leenaars for the Art Institute of Chicago
“A Lion For Every House: Interrogating How Art Exists In Space”
by Ayana Contreras for Vocalo
Photographers:
Sulyiman Stokes
Jonathan Castillo
Kirsten Leenaars
Nicole Harrison
Vidura Bahadur
Monica Boutwell
Tonika Johnson
Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
Guanyu Xu
Leonard Suryajaya
Hosts:
Serge JC Pierre-Louis
Maria & Roman Villarreal
Joann Podkul Murphy
Levette Haynes
Shireen & Afzal Ahmad
Heather Miller
Erika Allen
Curtis J. Tarver II
Alaka Wali
Stephanie Harris
Supporting Organizations:
Black Dog Fund
The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation
Floating Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.![]()
Exhibit Information
More to Read:
“With No Fear or Fence”: An Experiment in Collective Exhibition Making
by Matthew S Witkovsky
“If They Won’t Come to the Museum, Then the Museum Must Go to Them”
by Lori Waxman for HYPERALLERGIC
“Emergent Institutions: The Floating Museum’s 'A Lion for Every House' Makes New Connections”
by Pia Singh for NewCityArt
“An Exercise in Empathy and Trust: Collaborating with Lions”
by Joann Podkul-Murphy and Kirsten Leenaars for the Art Institute of Chicago
“A Lion For Every House: Interrogating How Art Exists In Space”
by Ayana Contreras for Vocalo
Photographers:
Sulyiman Stokes
Jonathan Castillo
Kirsten Leenaars
Nicole Harrison
Vidura Bahadur
Monica Boutwell
Tonika Johnson
Darryl DeAngelo Terrell
Guanyu Xu
Leonard Suryajaya
Hosts:
Serge JC Pierre-Louis
Maria & Roman Villarreal
Joann Podkul Murphy
Levette Haynes
Shireen & Afzal Ahmad
Heather Miller
Erika Allen
Curtis J. Tarver II
Alaka Wali
Stephanie Harris
Supporting Organizations:
Black Dog Fund
The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation
Floating Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Description /
Building on the first exhibition presented at the Malmö Konstmuseum, Sustainable Societies for the Future : Chicago Edition includes work that engages with the following questions: How do we make societies more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable with all of the challenges we are facing today regarding climate, social inequality and the world’s growing population? And how can we accumulate change through art that explores collectiveness and social engagement for a better future together?
The second edition, which includes artists presented in the first exhibition in Sweden, is curated by Floating Museum and uses an LED truck as the exhibition platform and moves through the city over a period of three days. The exhibition presents a program that is mobile and investigates urban landscape, social geography and creates juxtapositions and complimentary moments between streetscape and the Nordic and American artist contributions.
The mobile exhibition format builds on using the ‘space of flows’ to stake a curatorial position outside of a static brick and mortar presentation, imagining possibilities for mobility, geography and mapping networks. The gesture also exists in the continuum of artists examining their relationship to institutions, and responds symbiotically to the evolution of museums—ranging from the cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkrammer between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, transitioning to the dense accumulations of time-capsule vitrines in nineteenth century museums, to the complete contrast of the contemporary art space, or as James Putman writes, “the modern art museum with its own, purist display aesthetic, a highly self conscious viewing space which proclaims the institutionalization of art.”[1]
Shifting from the modern art museum and repurposing a format generally used for mobile advertisement, the LED exhibition program visited locations across Chicago ranging from major art institutions, community spaces, a vehicle emission testing site, and historical spaces across the south, west and northsides.
[1] James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (New York: Thames and Hudson 2001)
Participating Artists /
Christian Falsnaes (DK), Max Guy (US), Minna Henriksson (FI), Hesselholdt & Mejlvang (DK), Ingela Ihrman (SE), Toril Johannessen (NO) & Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Cheryl Pope (US), Wang & Söderström (SE/DK), Amanda Williams (US), and Michael x Ryan (US).
Curated by the Floating Museum (Faheem Majeed, Andrew Schachman, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, and Avery R. Young, US).
Building on the first exhibition presented at the Malmö Konstmuseum, Sustainable Societies for the Future : Chicago Edition includes work that engages with the following questions: How do we make societies more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable with all of the challenges we are facing today regarding climate, social inequality and the world’s growing population? And how can we accumulate change through art that explores collectiveness and social engagement for a better future together?
The second edition, which includes artists presented in the first exhibition in Sweden, is curated by Floating Museum and uses an LED truck as the exhibition platform and moves through the city over a period of three days. The exhibition presents a program that is mobile and investigates urban landscape, social geography and creates juxtapositions and complimentary moments between streetscape and the Nordic and American artist contributions.
The mobile exhibition format builds on using the ‘space of flows’ to stake a curatorial position outside of a static brick and mortar presentation, imagining possibilities for mobility, geography and mapping networks. The gesture also exists in the continuum of artists examining their relationship to institutions, and responds symbiotically to the evolution of museums—ranging from the cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkrammer between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, transitioning to the dense accumulations of time-capsule vitrines in nineteenth century museums, to the complete contrast of the contemporary art space, or as James Putman writes, “the modern art museum with its own, purist display aesthetic, a highly self conscious viewing space which proclaims the institutionalization of art.”[1]
Shifting from the modern art museum and repurposing a format generally used for mobile advertisement, the LED exhibition program visited locations across Chicago ranging from major art institutions, community spaces, a vehicle emission testing site, and historical spaces across the south, west and northsides.
[1] James Putnam, Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium (New York: Thames and Hudson 2001)
Participating Artists /
Christian Falsnaes (DK), Max Guy (US), Minna Henriksson (FI), Hesselholdt & Mejlvang (DK), Ingela Ihrman (SE), Toril Johannessen (NO) & Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Cheryl Pope (US), Wang & Söderström (SE/DK), Amanda Williams (US), and Michael x Ryan (US).
Curated by the Floating Museum (Faheem Majeed, Andrew Schachman, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, and Avery R. Young, US).
Thank you to the Nordic Culture Fond, Nordic Council of Ministers (Nordic Talks), The Danish Arts Foundation (DK), Danish Arts in Chicago (DK), Mondriaan Foundation (NL), OCA (NO), FRAME (FI), and Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation (US).
Critical Distance / Chicago Illinois USA / 2021 /
Floating Museum / Critical Distance / Summer - Fall 2021
Floating Museum’s Critical Distance is an open-air and online exhibition program that will invite audiences to draw connections between the rich histories of Chicago’s neighborhoods, as well as our complex present moment. The exhibition will feature curated artworks, public performances, and free cultural activities created through collaborations between the diverse civic and cultural institutions, artists, and community stakeholders that make up our city. Critical Distance will place these entities in conversation with each other, embodying an aggregated expression of our city. It will also utilize the strengths of our collective-namely our expertise in curating high quality, outdoor, public art exhibitions-to bring safe and socially distant art and cultural programming to our city this Summer.
Critical Distance consists of three primary program areas: Translator, Floating Monuments, and Breaking Bread. Each program will artistically feed the next, creating a collaborative and iterative exhibition design process. Artists will be offered stipends for each engagement.
Translator is an ongoing performance series that focuses on the development of collaborative performances. For Critical Distance, we will invite performers from a range of backgrounds, including music, dance, and alternative performance, to respond to sites, art objects, poems, and more to collaboratively create a sequence of place-based performance.
Watch the entire Translator series here:
Breaking Bread involves a series of conversations between artists and cultural producers coming from a wide range of disciplines within and beyond Chicago. Conversations will address questions of disciplinarity, practice, politics, economics, and equity in representation that are pervasive across the globe but express themselves differently in relation to the contingencies of place and space. These programs will be recorded, broadcast via Instagram Live, and archived.
Watch the Breaking Bread series here:
Floating Monuments will present a series of inflatable monuments that highlight undertold narratives about the communities that make up our city’s history and present moment. We will develop these monuments through collaborations with artists, cultural institutions, archivists and collections items including artists Kushala Vora, and the South Asia Institute.
The ephemeral monuments created through these collaborations will operate as hybrid enigmatic objects and exhibitions for conversation, scenographic intervention, and program platform. As we learned with Founders (2019), this model is rapidly deployed, easily installed and supported by docents (whether in-person or pre-recorded for engagement on mobile devices), and allow us to meet many of our artistic and collective goals:
Floating Museum’s Critical Distance is an open-air and online exhibition program that will invite audiences to draw connections between the rich histories of Chicago’s neighborhoods, as well as our complex present moment. The exhibition will feature curated artworks, public performances, and free cultural activities created through collaborations between the diverse civic and cultural institutions, artists, and community stakeholders that make up our city. Critical Distance will place these entities in conversation with each other, embodying an aggregated expression of our city. It will also utilize the strengths of our collective-namely our expertise in curating high quality, outdoor, public art exhibitions-to bring safe and socially distant art and cultural programming to our city this Summer.
Critical Distance consists of three primary program areas: Translator, Floating Monuments, and Breaking Bread. Each program will artistically feed the next, creating a collaborative and iterative exhibition design process. Artists will be offered stipends for each engagement.
Translator is an ongoing performance series that focuses on the development of collaborative performances. For Critical Distance, we will invite performers from a range of backgrounds, including music, dance, and alternative performance, to respond to sites, art objects, poems, and more to collaboratively create a sequence of place-based performance.
Watch the entire Translator series here:
Breaking Bread involves a series of conversations between artists and cultural producers coming from a wide range of disciplines within and beyond Chicago. Conversations will address questions of disciplinarity, practice, politics, economics, and equity in representation that are pervasive across the globe but express themselves differently in relation to the contingencies of place and space. These programs will be recorded, broadcast via Instagram Live, and archived.
Watch the Breaking Bread series here:
Floating Monuments will present a series of inflatable monuments that highlight undertold narratives about the communities that make up our city’s history and present moment. We will develop these monuments through collaborations with artists, cultural institutions, archivists and collections items including artists Kushala Vora, and the South Asia Institute.
The ephemeral monuments created through these collaborations will operate as hybrid enigmatic objects and exhibitions for conversation, scenographic intervention, and program platform. As we learned with Founders (2019), this model is rapidly deployed, easily installed and supported by docents (whether in-person or pre-recorded for engagement on mobile devices), and allow us to meet many of our artistic and collective goals:
- Engaging multiple, simultaneous audiences and sites in the South and West sides of Chicago.
- Broaden and deepen collaborations and related conversations around equity, representation, and access to economic, ecologic, cultural and infrastructural networks
- Directing resources to under-represented constituencies.
- Promoting individual artists, constituencies, organizations, institutions and municipal partnerships.
- Increasing the frequency of participatory events, building closer relations with and between constituencies through rehearsal and performance.
- In this time of social and physical distancing, engage our limitations around physically gathering as an object of inquiry and innovation.
Participating Artists:
Chris Pappan
Jeff Harris
Jesse 5000
Justin Dillard
Kameron Lowe
Kushala Vora
Lional Brother El Freeman
Marcus Evans
Monica Rickert Bolter
Starla Thompson
Timothy “Cream” Jones
Participating Organizations:
Chicago Park District
DuSable Heritage Association
DuSable Park Coalition
ETA Creative Arts Foundation
Garfield Park Advisory Council
Hyde Park Jazz Festival
Museum of Science and Industry
SkyArt
South Asia Institute of Chicago
T.R.A.C.E.
See the Schedule of Events for dates.
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Chris Pappan
Jeff Harris
Jesse 5000
Justin Dillard
Kameron Lowe
Kushala Vora
Lional Brother El Freeman
Marcus Evans
Monica Rickert Bolter
Starla Thompson
Timothy “Cream” Jones
Participating Organizations:
Chicago Park District
DuSable Heritage Association
DuSable Park Coalition
ETA Creative Arts Foundation
Garfield Park Advisory Council
Hyde Park Jazz Festival
Museum of Science and Industry
SkyArt
South Asia Institute of Chicago
T.R.A.C.E.
See the Schedule of Events for dates.
Description /
Monument Reassembly, 2021, wood, paper, ink, adhesive, cement, hardware, framed photograph with Cecil McDonald Jr, dimensions variable
First staged as an intervention and performance in public space in 2018, the installation Monument Reassembly invites participants to recreate an iconic moment in Chicago's history: the anti-war protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The artwork connects the discontent and protests of today with those of Chicago's past, demonstrating how all Chicagoans participate in the city’s history. The civic sector constantly grapples with redressing the decisions of yesterday while simultaneously creating new policies, programs, and choices that draft the history of tomorrow. The piece is inspired by Peter Bullock's iconic photo of protestors in 1968 in Grant Park at the Logan Monument in the Chicago History Museum's collection.
Monument Reassembly, 2021, wood, paper, ink, adhesive, cement, hardware, framed photograph with Cecil McDonald Jr, dimensions variable
First staged as an intervention and performance in public space in 2018, the installation Monument Reassembly invites participants to recreate an iconic moment in Chicago's history: the anti-war protests during the 1968 Democratic Convention. The artwork connects the discontent and protests of today with those of Chicago's past, demonstrating how all Chicagoans participate in the city’s history. The civic sector constantly grapples with redressing the decisions of yesterday while simultaneously creating new policies, programs, and choices that draft the history of tomorrow. The piece is inspired by Peter Bullock's iconic photo of protestors in 1968 in Grant Park at the Logan Monument in the Chicago History Museum's collection.