Meet the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale Contributors: Hood Design Studio
Photo: Hood Design Studio
Newcity gets to know the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale contributors. This segment highlights Hood design studio, a social art and design practice based in Oakland, California. The studio’s practice is described as tripartite: art and fabrication, design and landscape, and research and town planning. Their mission? “We reinforce endemic patterns and practices – those ecological and cultural, contemporary and historical, and those that remain invisible or unrecognized. Urban spaces and their objects act like public sculptures, creating new openings through which to see the emerging beauty, strangeness and peculiarities that surround us. Hood design studio founder and creative director Walter Hood, who is also a professor of landscape architecture, environmental planning, and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley, talks about the upcoming TAXI, saying that we are all part of history and that this moment matters.
Walter Hood, Hood Design Studio
In what ways has your background prepared you and how will it influence your role at the upcoming Chicago Architecture Biennale?
As a graduate of the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a recent exhibitor at the 2019 Biennale, we have a long history with the city. Besides, Hood design studio works in the Bronzeville and Lawndale neighborhoods.
Can you talk about the importance of a festival like CAB in times of pandemic and social and political unrest?
I believe the festival can be restorative and speculative by reminding citizens of the importance of culture and civic participation. Art has always brought people together, whether in times of protest or of unity.
What do you hope viewers take away from this exhibition?
That we are all part of history and that this moment matters.
What excites you the most about going forward?
Make a beautiful grove of trees.
Of Greek descent, Vasia Rigou is a Chicago-based art critic and pop culture journalist, primarily on the subjects of contemporary art, design and fashion. She moved to Chicago in 2013 to study art journalism at the School of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she received the New Artist Society Merit Scholarship. She grew up appreciating art after years of carefully planned, culture-filled travel routes and museum visits across Europe with her family. During this time, she obtained a BA in English Literature, in her native Athens; a master’s degree in media, in Nottingham, UK; and studied foreign languages ​​- English, German and Spanish at the University of Salamanca, Spain. His writings, reviewing museum exhibits, gallery exhibitions, art fairs, fashion shows and music festivals, among others, have been published nationally and internationally both in print. and online. In 2017, she founded and is now Editor-in-Chief of Rainbowed. — an independently published website focused on visual and performing arts, digital media and popular culture. When not writing about art or looking at art – wine in hand, she follows Chicago’s creative community of entrepreneurs and startups, makes lists for just about everything, drinks ‘huge amounts of coffee and makes trips across the country whenever she gets the chance.
Contact: [email protected] Website: www.rigouvasia.com
