CLUI Exhibits On the Road and in the Field

A NUMBER OF CLUI EXHIBITS are getting some mileage on them, travelling to other institutions to be put on public display.Vacation: Dauphin Island was shown at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in the winter of 2007, as part of a program about habitats. Vacation: Dauphin Island was displayed originally in an electronic form at the CLUI Los Angeles, in 2006, and was printed out and framed for presentation at the Museum. Following exhibition there, it will travel elsewhere.

In October, 2006, images from the Center’s Ground Up: Photographs of the Ground in the Margins of Los Angeles exhibition appeared in an group show called Land Sakes Alive at California State University, Northridge, along with Ken and Gabrielle Adelman’s Coastal Records Project (which was featured at the CLUI in 2004).

In 2005, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning showed a number of CLUI exhibits on their walls, including Supermodel, which depicts and describes the three largest hydraulic engineering landscape models built by the Army Corps in the USA (the San Francisco Bay Model, the Chesapeake Bay Model, and the Mississippi River Model). The department also displayed a printed version of Emergency State: First Responder and Law Enforcement Training Architecture in a gallery at the university. In 2004, the Princeton School of Architecture exhibited the Center’s Formations of Erasure: Earthworks and Entropy in a hallway. That exhibit was also shown in the Sonoma County Museum in 2003.

Curators have bought or borrowed images from the Center’s archives for use in their own exhibits, as a sort of raw material, sometimes adding curious vectors that reflect and absorb meanings from other works. In February 2006, several CLUI Photo Archive images were included in an exhibit called Skirting the Line at DePauw University, in Indiana. In 2005 and 2006, CLUI images were included in a number of exhibits at commercial art galleries, including an exhibition called Interstate at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, in New York City.

Though the Center is happy to provide existing exhibits to other institutions whenever time and resources permit, it is perhaps most compelling when the exhibits find places that are related to their content in a direct way, and help to get people out to explore their environment. For example, Back to the Bay: An Exploration of the Marginal Zones of the San Francisco Bay has recently been installed in a dramatic location on the shores of the Bay itself. Originally commissioned by and shown in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, in 2001, Back to the Bay is now in the control tower building at the former Alameda Naval Air Station (one of dozens of sites depicted and described in the exhibit) in a building that overlooks the contaminated no-mans-land at the tip of the island, with the Bay, the Port of Oakland, the Bay Bridge, and the skyline of San Francisco visible beyond. ♦