Biennial of the Americas 2013
Draft Urbanism
July, 16 – September 2, 2013
Executive Curator: Carson Chan
Curators: Paul Andersen and Gaspar Libedinsky
Associate curator: Cortney Stell
Paul Andersen is the founder and director of Indie Architecture, a Denver-based office that designs buildings, books, and exhibitions worldwide.As an alternative to mainstream, mass produced, and corporately funded architecture, the office embraces its fringe status, is associated with collegiate backpack intellectualism, and consistently seeks new ways of disseminating architectural and urban ideas. Andersen founded Indie in 2008. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has previously been on the architecture faculties of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University. He has also been a guest curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and is the author of The Architecture of Patterns (W.W. Norton, 2010). Paul is a licensed architect (NCARB Cert., CA, CO, NY).
Carson Chan is an architecture writer and curator based in Berlin. Chan studied design, history and theory of architecture at both Cornell University and Harvard University, where he received a Master’s in the History and Theory of Architecture. After working at Barkow Leibinger Architects and the Neue Nationalgalerie’s architecture exhibitions department in Berlin, with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, he founded PROGRAM in 2006, a non-commercial initiative for art and architecture collaborations. He has variously curated and overseen more than 30 international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture, including the 4th Marrakech Biennale 2012, which Chan curated with Nadim Samman. This Biennale presented newly commissioned works by more than 40 artists, architects, writers, musicians, and composers at five locations throughout the city. Chan’s writing on art, architecture and contemporary culture appears in books and periodicals worldwide, including Kaleidoscope, where he is a contributing editor, and032c (Berlin), where he is editor-at-large.
Gaspar Libedinksy is an architect, artist, and educator. His work operates within private and public space mediating the realm between the urban scale and the intimacy of the human body. Trained at the Architectural Association (AA) in London, he has worked for OMA/Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam and Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York. At DS+R Libedinsky was on the design team of Manhattan’s High Line Park and was in charge of design and installation of the High Line exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. He worked on the redevelopment of Lincoln Center’s new public spaces, Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall and was part of the design team for the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Libedinsky has taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and at the Architectural Association in London. He is regular guest critic and lecturer at Columbia, Pratt and Cornell Universities and at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.
Cortney Lane Stell is an independent curator and gallery director based in Denver, Colorado. Stell is currently the Gallery Director at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design (RMCAD) in Denver, a campus housing four galleries, which show local, national, and international contemporary art. As an independent curator, Stell has curated numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally for museums, galleries, and large-scale art events. Stemming from an interest in arts as communication and experience, Stell has organized exhibitions that focus on artworks experimental in both conceptual and material nature, including solo exhibitions by Shirley Tse, Roger Herman, Mike and Doug Starn, Justin Cooper, and Jimmy Joe Roche. Trained as a studio artist, Stell holds a BFA from the University of Colorado at Denver. She is currently a PhD candidate in Media Communications at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.