SHIFT: Melting Solids

Studio Sam Jacob, "Soft Dolmen," 2024. Inflatable dolmen. Welded PVC, 9’-8” x 15’-7” x 9’-3”. Photo: Markus Pilhofer.

About the program

SHIFT: Melting Solids

at Stony Island Arts Bank

6760 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60649

Open Saturday and Sunday from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Led by Artistic Director Florencia Rodriguez, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change signals the opportunity and need to change direction—an invitation to think with others and to set new grounds for the interpretation and design of our built environments. The exhibition is organized around a series of thematic capsules: exhibitions and programs that each explore a particular idea, question, or mode of practice.

At the Stony Island Arts Bank, Melting Solids presents works by five architects and artists reimagining architecture not as fixed or monumental, but as impermanent, adaptive, and rooted in cultural memory. Participants include: Abigail Chang; Dominic Kießling; Laboratorio de Arquitectura and José Cubilla; Edra Soto; Studio Jacob; and WAI Architecture Think Tank.

Venue

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Stony Island Arts Bank

Address

6760 S Stony Island Ave, Chicago, IL 60649

Neighborhood

South Side

Description

Designed by William Gibbons Uffendell and built in 1923, the Stony Island Loan & Savings Bank at 68th and Stony Island was slated for demolition before artist Theaster Gates rescued, restored, and reconstituted the structure in 2015. One of Gates’s most notable spatial projects in Greater Grand Crossing, the Stony Island Arts Bank—a 17,000-square-foot historic building housing Rebuild Foundation’s contemporary art and experimental archival program on Chicago’s South Side—has hosted free exhibitions, screenings, performances, live recordings, artist retreats, artistic and archival residencies, workshops and classes in partnership with local and globally-renown artists over the past decade.

Credit: Theaster Gates, Stony Island Arts Bank. Photo: Tom Harris, Hedrich Blessing. Courtesy of Rebuild Foundation.
Chicago Architecture Biennial