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Experienced architect and curator Beth Stryker joins LA's MAK Center as new Director

2024-08-28T18:19:00-04:00

Architect and curator Beth Stryker has been appointed Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. The Utensil Art + Design Studio co-founder has extensive experience in arts administration, including a recent five-year tenure as the Executive and Artistic Director of a nonprofit ArteEast and other nonprofit LA spaces.

Stryker's C.V. also boasts past experience working with the arts community of Cairo, Egypt, and other creative arts professionals in the SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) region.

Lilli Hollein, the General Director of the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna said: “With her wide-ranging expertise in architecture and art, her cross-genre, cross-cultural approach, and her many years of experience in interdisciplinary discourse, Beth Stryker is the ideal person to further the MAK Center’s avant-garde program and the internationally renowned MAK Center Artists and Architects-in-Residence Scholarship Program.”⁠

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Cooper Hewitt and MAK Center among 19 Getty Foundation grantees

2021-07-14T20:20:00-04:00

Two design museums are part of a $1.55 slate of grants from the Getty Foundation that was announced by the institution yesterday.

New York’s Cooper Hewitt and West Hollywood’s MAK Center for Art and Architecture were among the nineteen grant recipients on a list that included projects at museums across the world.

The grants were part of a Getty initiative called The Paper Project that focuses on elevating cultural institutions whose holdings in prints and drawings are integral parts of their permanent collection and public program. Other winners included an examination of German expressionist printmaking put on by the Rifkind Center at LACMA, a digital census of Italian woodcuts before 1550 at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, and an exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum that will explore the global inspirations of Black Arts movement leader Betye Saar.

Jia Yi Gu appointed new director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture

2021-01-12T19:09:00-05:00

An active member of LA's architecture and design scene, Jia Yi Gu is appointed as the MAK Center for Art and Architecture director. After a long search by the Center, she will take on directorial and curatorial responsibilities with her wide-ranging expertise in architectural curation, history, research, and design leadership.

Currently a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA for Critical Studies in Architecture, she graduated with honors from the University of California San Diego with a B.A. in Visual Arts and a Master of Architecture degree from UCLA Architecture and Urban Design. She explains that her Ph.D. work focuses on "the instrumentality of models in the postwar architecture office as a site of demonstration for architectural expertise."

Archinect Feature: Spinagu Exemplifies a Contemporary Practice with Academia, Profession & Experimentation all Running at Full Steam. Image Thick, the exhibition. SCI-Arc Gallery, 2017

She brings her vast knowledge in curatorial practice and institution ...

Meditating on the "Past Future Housing" of Los Angeles with Morgan Fisher and Karina Nimmerfall at the MAK Center

2016-05-10T13:56:00-04:00

“How can you morally and ethically justify in your own mind working on a project that would take people accustomed to living on the ground, of having their gardens, chickens, and their little animals in their yards, having space around them, having flowers, to live in these twenty-four thirteen-story-high buildings?” The architecture critic asks the architect – modeled after Richard Neutra – in a play by the artist Karina Nimmerfall, part of her installation with Morgan Fisher at the Garage Top at the MAK Center in Los Angeles.

Entitled Past Future Housing, the exhibit comprises a painting by Fisher paired with a bare-if-not-quite-minimalist installation by Nimmerfall that includes a video and the play, printed out and stapled. An accompanying exhibit text clarifies the intention of the work as a meditation on historical, optimistic visions for public housing in the city, with some look towards the “future” implied if not readily evident.

More specifically, the show revolves around tw...

Exclusive: Graham Foundation announces winners of 2015 Grants to Organizations

2015-08-11T09:01:00-04:00

From Kiev to Los Angeles, from mind-bending artist Dan Graham to stately architect Kevin Roche, the Graham Foundation has announced the 49 international winners of its 2015 Grants to Organizations. Each year, the Foundation gives out two sets of grants: one for individuals including architects, writers, and artists, and one specifically for organizations, such as museums, universities, publishers, and trusts. The grant categories include film, exhibitions, public programs, and publications. This year, $496,500 was awarded to 49 winners from a competitive pool of 200 entries featuring both emerging and established organizations.

In keeping with the Graham Foundation's mission to foster innovative explorations of architecture and art, the winning projects encompass a variety of perceptual and investigative terrain, from the MoMA's exploratory exhibition on Toyo Ito, SANAA and other Japanese architectural firms, to the creation of several new projects for this fall's Chicago Architectur...

Schindler Lab Initiative recounts intricate process behind Schindler House artistic interventions

2015-03-24T10:20:00-04:00

This publication documents an exhibition-oriented initiative that prompts artists and architects to develop installations highlighting Rudolph M. Schindler’s domestic experiment...Visitors often ask detailed questions. They are curious about Schindler’s thought process when designing and constructing the house; how the house has been used, understood, and canonized throughout the decades; and how the house is holding up today.

For years, the Schindler House in West Hollywood has served as a cultural backdrop for a multitude of MAK Center exhibitions that have -- in turn -- continuously reinvented the experience of the house and also uniquely demonstrate the ongoing need to preserve the house. Whether engaging with the house itself, examining its use as a domestic space, or reflecting on its 93-year-old history as a modernist icon, every one of these artistic interventions resulted from a meticulous process of discussion, debate, and creative problem solving -- all of which the MAK Center chronicles in an online publication known as the Schindler Lab.

First initiated in 2011 by MAK Center consultant and cultural producer Sara Daleiden, the Schindler Lab is divided into sections that starts off with the Schindler House's architecture and history. The publication then goes on to present the variety of perspectives, proposals, and after-thoughts that architects, designers, artists, curators, and administrators...

Homes by Frank Gehry, Eric Owen Moss, Neil Denari open for tour

2013-06-19T13:41:00-04:00

"Tip the world on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles," Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly said. That looseness -- a spirit of experimentation, a refusal to be bound by convention -- will be on display June 23 when the MAK Center for Art and Achitecture hosts a tour of groundbreaking modern homes by Frank Gehry, Neil M. Denari Architects, Eric Owen Moss and artist Peter Alexander.

L.A. artists, architects' effect on each other at MAK Center exhibit

2013-05-24T18:49:00-04:00

The exhibition at the MAK Center in West Hollywood, curated by UCLA architectural historian and critic Sylvia Lavin, is a wry study of the ways Los Angeles artists and architects worked with, leaned on, stole from and influenced one another in the 1970s. In a larger sense, it charts the way Southern California architects threw off the influence of establishmen Modernism and helped remake the profession in that decade.

Packed with mostly small-scale work by artists Judy Chicago, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Smithson, Ed Moses and architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli and Frank Gehry, among many others, it is easily the most surprising and opinionated of the exhibitions to open as part of the Getty L.A. architecture series "Pacific Standard Time Presents."

Architects, artists create lights for MAK Center auction

2012-11-08T17:34:00-05:00

Some of L.A.’s best known architecture firms and artists have designed one-of-a-kind lamps to be auctioned Nov. 2 at a fund-raiser for the MAK Center in West Hollywood. Among those who designed, produced and donated their work for the event, dubbed “Light My Way, Stranger”: Ball-Nogues Studio, Cory Buckner, Ehrlich Architects, Hodgetts & Fung, Eric Owen Moss, Barbara Bestor, Dewey Ambrosino, Liz Larner and Sam Durant.

Editor's Picks #234

2011-10-23T19:45:44-04:00

Orhan noted that in the language of "architectural poetics, the living room bathes you in a beautiful California light, washes your soul and takes your thoughts into the Pacific Ocean through the large window which sets the elevation on that side. Outside is wide and open, nurturing the peaceful inner space, this is something only great architecture can bless you with and masterfully achieved as in Schindler made experience."

Orhan Ayyüce, reported on his visit to Schindler's 1926 Lovell Beach House which the MAK Center and its brilliant curatorial team were able to gain access to as a 2011 fund raising event. Orhan noted that in the language of "architectural poetics, the living room bathes you in a beautiful California light, washes your soul and takes your thoughts into the Pacific Ocean through the large window which sets the elevation on that side. Outside is wide and open, nurturing the peaceful inner space, this is something only great architecture can bless you with and masterfully achieved as in Schindler made experience." SDR then posted some older B+ W documents "As a contrast to (or context for) Orhan's new photos".

In The Ideal Firm's Profile, Sherin Wing, laid out a number of working conditions by which firms large and small can try to whether the effects of poor economic policies and deregulation throughout the 2000’s will be felt for years to come. Lian Chikako Chang commented "'But ...

R. M. Schindler's Lovell Beach House, A Rare Look

2011-10-10T23:00:00-04:00

Known as one of the finest example of Los Angeles' canonical modernism period, R. M. Schindler's Lovell Beach House will be open to public on a 'very' rare occasion.

In conjunction with the exhibition Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House is pleased to open the Lovell Beach House (R.M. Schindler, 1926) in Newport Beach for public tours on Sunday, October 16 as a fundraiser.

Don't miss this EXTREMELY RARE opportunity to visit the Lovell Beach House, 1926, in Newport Beach, AND be part of a small group guided into the house by one of these esteemed speakers:

Thom Andersen, Filmmaker, Professor of Film and Video at CalArts
Frances Anderton, Writer, Host of KCRW's DnA: Design and Architecture, Los Angeles Editor of Dwell magazine
John Crosse, Historian of Southern California Architecture
Jocelyn Gibbs, Curator of Architecture and Design Collection at Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UCSB
Greg Goldin, Architecture Critic
Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
Craig Hodgetts, Arc...