About the program
Join Intuit Art Museum for a talk with Gabrielle Christiansen as she explores artist-built environments—spaces transformed by self-taught artists to reflect their personal stories, surroundings, and cultures—as key architectural experiments within landscapes of private property. Focusing on art environment builders such as Aldo Piacenza, whose work is currently on view in the museum’s exhibition Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-Taught Art, Christiansen will examine what we can learn from the creative reuse and construction strategies these artists employ in response to mass migration, the housing crisis, and environmental collapse. Together, we’ll consider what these deeply personal spaces reveal about resilience, imagination, and the meaning of place.
Gabrielle Christiansen is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University and the Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she studies twentieth-century artist-built environments in the United States. Her dissertation project, titled Salvage Reworlding along the Renewal Frontier, considers conflicting theories of land use, material value, and public art aesthetics that have emerged through decisions to preserve or demolish uncommissioned artist-built environments on private property.