Amber Ginsburg: Whole Life Buildings and the Material Life of Cities

You are invited to join us on the evening of October 26 at the Logan Center for the Arts for a lecture and discussion with artist and Visual Arts faculty member Amber Ginsburg hosted by the Open Practice Committee (https://dova.uchicago.edu/events/amber-ginsburg-whole-life-buildings-and-material-life-cities) in the Department of Visual Arts. Rethinking the life of buildings to include their birth and death, Amber Ginsburg reimagines our collective extraction as a means for carbon banking toward a more abundant future. In this talk, Ginsburg will discuss the transformation of a 1923 house of worship into a co-making space for artists on the South Side of Chicago. This retrofit offers a model for leveraging the embodied carbon in our existing buildings as a bank to finance carbon-neutral cities. Afterward, Ginsburg will be joined by Bill Brown, Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, and Hajin Kim, Assistant Professor of Law, for a moderated discussion.Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual ArtsAmber Ginsburg creates site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present-day situations, as well as engages present-day histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. Amber teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and shows broadly including at the Thailand Biennale, the Bristol Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Craft and Design, various sidewalks, and empty lots, to name a few.Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, appointed in the Department of English, the Department of Visual Arts, and the College. He is a principal investigator for the Object Cultures Project within the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and has been a co-editor of Critical Inquiry since 1993.Hajin Kim is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Law School. She uses principles from social psychology and economics to study how moral and social influence can shape environmental regulation and firm behavior.