Tyondai Braxton premieres Vali, a sprawling set of new electronic and sample-based music for Lampo, built on ideas of space and contrast, stasis and forward motion.

Tyondai Braxton has been writing and performing music under his own name and collaboratively, under various group titles, since the mid-1990s. He is the former front man of experimental rock band Battles. Braxton has composed commissioned pieces for ensembles such as the Bang on a Can All Stars, Alarm Will Sound, Brooklyn Rider, Third Coast Percussion and Yarn/Wire. In 2012, he collaborated with Philip Glass during the ATP I’ll Be Your Mirror festival. He has also performed his orchestral work Central Market with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and New York’s Wordless Music Orchestra. In 2013, Braxton premiered the multimedia piece HIVE at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, with subsequent performances at Sacrum Profanum Festival, Krakow; the Barbican, London; and at the Sydney Opera House. His 2022 album Telekinesis is an 87-piece work for electric guitar, orchestra, choir and electronics (Nonesuch). Braxton was recently appointed to Princeton University’s Music Composition faculty as an Assistant Professor of Music.

Presented in partnership with Lampo

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.

Reading from her debut poetry collection, Bittering the Wound—a first-person retelling of the 2014 Ferguson uprising—and other recent works, Jacqui Germain explores and interrogates periods of political rupture, alongside the related histories, revelations, interiorities, anxieties, and generative possibilities in response to Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing. Part documentation, part conjuring, Bittering the Wound works to share the narrative of the event with more complexity, audacity, care, and specificity than public media accounts typically allow. Here, Germain’s words echo Reynolds’ work on surveillance, vulnerability, and different manifestations of healing. 

This event will take place within the exhibition in the first-floor galleries and will be followed by a reception. Copies of Bittering the Wound will be available for purchase in the Graham Foundation Bookshop.

Jacqui Germain is a poet and journalist living and working in St. Louis, Missouri. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Bittering the Wound (Autumn House Press, 2022), was selected by Douglas Kearny for the 2021 Center for African American Poetry and Poetics book prize. Germain's poems have been published in The Offing, Poem-A-Day, Muzzle Magazine, The Rumpus, Bettering American Poetry, and elsewhere, in addition to being anthologized in several texts. She has received poetry fellowships from the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her chapbook, When the Ghosts Come Ashore, was published in 2016 through Button Poetry and Exploding Pinecone Press. Germain’s journalism, original reporting, political commentary, and feature profiles have been published in The Nation, The Guardian, VICE, Artsy, and more. She served as Teen Vogue's Economic Security Project journalism fellow, reporting for the outlet’s politics section.

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

Artist Katherine Simóne Reynolds delivers a performative lecture in conjunction with her Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing. In the exhibition, Reynolds continues her exploration of overhealing from trauma in a new body of work that includes photographs, a two-channel film, sculptures, and other works. Centered on two towns: Cairo, Illinois, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and Brooklyn, Illinois—also known as Lovejoy, founded by Priscilla “Mother” Baltimore in 1829 after buying her own freedom, it became the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States in 1873—the exhibition addresses relationships between perceptions of abandonment and fertility, Black female imagination, and different manifestations of healing as Reynolds looks at the Rust Belt as a kind of keloidal landscape. A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing is on view at the Foundation through June 10, 2023.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Her work physicalizes emotions and experiences by constructing pieces that include portrait photography, video works, choreography, sculpture, and installation. Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour and beauty while interrogating the notion of “authentic care.” Her practice generally deals in Blackness from her own perspective, and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work.”

Reynolds has exhibited and performed at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and SculptureCenter, Long Island City, NY, among other spaces. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at SculptureCenter; Stanley Museum of Art, Iowa City; and Clyfford Still Museum, Denver. She is the 2022–23 Graham Foundation Fellow.

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

Alicia Olushola Ajayi, Kelley Lemon, and Katherine Simóne Reynolds discuss and explore overlaps and new discoveries in their practices in response to the Reynolds’ Graham Foundation Fellowship exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing. As Reynolds centered her focus for this exhibition on the towns Cairo and Brooklyn in southern Illinois, Ajayi’s research on Brooklyn and Black place making in American history, and Lemon’s initiatives exploring connections between Black owned farms and native landscapes across the state of Illinois provide critical context for considering the historic and current conditions—as well as potential futures—of these Midwest communities and landscapes.

Alicia Olushola Ajayi is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer based in New York and holds master’s degrees in architecture, social work, and criticism. She is currently the program developer for BlackSpace Urbanist Collective and is engaged in independent research about antebellum Black settlements.

Kelley Lemon is a registered professional landscape architect, LEED accredited professional, and EDAC certified. She practices both architecture and landscape architecture, with an emphasis in food, productive landscapes, and healthcare and mental/behavioral health environments. Her interests further dive into design and theory of the built environment by researching and uncovering histories and ecological processes, engaging the people of the community, and developing new techniques and strategies to provide a solution that is of the place and vernacular.

Katherine Simóne Reynolds practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness, and the importance of “anti-excellence.” Taking cues from the midwestern post-industrial melancholic landscape having grown up in the metro east area of Saint Louis, she formed an obsessive curiosity around the practices of healing as well as around a societal notion of progress spurning from a time of industrial success. Utilizing Black embodiment and affect alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She is the 2022–23 Graham Foundation Fellow.


Image: Alicia Olushola Ajayi, 1903 Regional Map Missouri and Illinois. Courtesy Alicia Olushola Ajayi

For more information on the exhibition, A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing, click here.

3:00pm | Barbara Kasten in conversation with Stephanie Cristello
4:00pm | Book Signing

Join artist Barbara Kasten alongside author and editor Stephanie Cristello for the official book launch of the monograph Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020), published by Skira. Delving into unearthed comparisons and histories, this conversation contextualizes Kasten’s ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms.

Since the 1970s, Kasten’s nearly five-decade engagement with abstraction and light has developed through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile, and installation. Well-known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, this publication reconsiders the artist through the broader context of architectural theory. Spanning five years of recent installations following the artist’s first major museum survey Barbara Kasten: Stages (2015–16) at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), the Graham Foundation (Chicago), and MOCA Pacific Design Center (Los Angeles), momentous encounters including Kasten’s Crown Hall (2018) installed within architect Mies van der Rohe’s iconic glass and steel structure and her solo exhibition Scenarios (2020–21) at the Aspen Art Museum serve as a primer to her revolutionary methods of abstraction.

Replete with full-color plates, the book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist following significant collaborations on the design of the stage for Obrist’s Interview Marathon (2018) and the film The New Bauhaus (2019) on artist László Moholy-Nagy; curator Humberto Moro’s interwoven comparison to the sensitivities of space, geometry, and color in the buildings of Mexican architect Luis Barragán; how Kasten’s work remains in conversation with new practitioners from architecture critic and curator Mimi Zeiger; and an elective history informed by Kasten’s early cyanotypes of sacred sites and goddess structures that provide a “stage” to disclose the spiritual basis of her approach to light by editor Cristello.

Presented in partnership with Skira

Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art critic, curator, and author based in Chicago. Her work focuses on artists who critically engage with the image and its role in visual culture. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 with a liberal arts thesis in visual critical studies. Cristello was previously the Senior Editor US for ArtSlant (2012–18) and the founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN, Chicago’s International Journal of Contemporary & Modern Art (2013–20). Her writing has been published in ArtReview, BOMB Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Frieze Magazine, Mousse Magazine, OSMOS, and Portable Gray. She has delivered panels at the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, Independent Curators International (ICI), the Terra Foundation for American Art, Manifest Institute, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Nordic Talks. Cristello served as the artistic director of EXPO CHICAGO (2013–2020) and is currently the director / curator at Chicago Manual Style (Chicago) and Curator-at-Large at Kasmin (New York). In 2020–21, she was a curatorial advisor to the 2020 Busan Biennale (South Korea) as well as a guest curator at Kunsthal Aarhus (Denmark), the Malmö Art Museum (Sweden), and the Driehaus Museum (Chicago). Cristello has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues nationally and internationally, including monographs on the work of Lap-See Lam (Bonniers Konsthall / Lenz Press, 2021), Mamma Andersson and Tal R (Kunsten Museum / Malmö Art Museum, 2022). She is the author of Theodora Allen: Saturnine (Motto / Kunsthal Aarhus, 2021), Sustainable Societies for the Future (Motto / Malmö Art Museum, 2021), and Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film 2015–2020 (Skira, 2022). In 2020, she was awarded a publication grant by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Barbara Kasten (b. 1936, Chicago) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1959 and MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1970. Kasten’s practice centers around an exploration of the nature of perception and materiality. Her photographic output using both studio and natural lighting has been essential to the last decade of multi-disciplinary work in sculpture, video, installation, and public art. These works continue to examine an object’s presence within both illusionistic and real space. Forms--designated by shadow, color, and the space between objects--oscillate between representation and abstraction. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and Europe. Most recently, Kasten was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany, which traveled to Sammlung Goetz, Germany, and is open through April 2023. Other recent exhibitions include Barbara Kasten: Scenarios, Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Women in Abstraction, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, and Centre Pompidou, France; The 2020 Busan Biennale: Words at an Exhibition—an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems, South Korea; Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, TATE Modern, UK; Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; and a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia that traveled to the Graham Foundation in Chicago and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is featured in the collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC among many others.


Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020) was supported by a Graham Foundation publication grant, click here to learn more.

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