The spotlight given to Lina Bo Bardi’s work leading up to her centennial last year revises one of the great oversights of 20th-century design history. Though the Italian-born architect who practiced most prominently in Brazil designed several monumental projects, her legacy had long been overshadowed by the likes of Niemeier and Costa. But to a contemporary eye, her work offers a humanist rejoinder to the grandiose forms of her male peers, and it has recently found a wider audience with a wave of monographs and exhibitions.
One small, but well-traveled show, Lina Bo Bardi: Together, conjures the architect’s embracing attitude toward her adopted country. The exhibition opened on Friday at the Graham Foundation in Chicago, its 10th venue since originating two years ago at the British Council Gallery in London and its first in the United States. For the exhibition, which runs through July 25, curator Noemi Blager commissioned three artists—OMA co-founder Madelon Vriesendorp, photographer Ioana Marinescu, and filmmaker Tapio Snellman—to create new work about Bo Bardi. She also called on the London-based collective Assemble to design the exhibition. The result is an evocative and idiosyncratic show that fills two floors of the Foundation’s home—a Prairie-style mansion completed in 1902—like a noisy crowd that has come in from the street.
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