Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Jill Magid spent years plotting the perfect proposal—the location, the rock, the words—but what she had in mind was a bit different from most. On September 9 at the San Francisco Art Institute, Magid will exhibit a 2-carat diamond ring, created by compressing the cremated remains of Mexican architect Luis Barragán, to represent her proposal to the owners of his professional archive: open Barragán’s legacy to the public.
When the Pritzker Prize–winner died in 1988, his estate was divided between two close business colleagues. Barragán’s library became the museum Casa Luis Barragán—a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004. But the rights to the architect’s papers, drawings, and photographs have proved a more complicated matter. After Barragán’s beneficiary committed suicide in 1993, the archive was sold for a reported $3 million to Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman emeritus of his family’s furniture company, Vitra, and his wife, Federica Zanco, an Italian architectural historian. The couple shipped Barragán’s estate to Vitra’s headquarters in Birsfelden, Switzerland, where it has remained ever since, accessible only to Zanco, a few scholars, and an assistant.
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