About This Event
The CORA Foundation Community Conversation with Rick Shaefer
Saturday, October 24 from 4-5pm; FREE
The CORA Foundation sponsors this event, granting visitors free entry upon registration.
Join MoCA/CT for an evening of conversation moderated by the Museum’s Executive Director, Robin Jaffee Frank, featuring artist Rick Shaefer; architect, educator, and urban-policy leader Rick Bell; and a select group of panelists. Bell heads the Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space at Columbia University and previously served as Assistant Commissioner at the New York City Department of Design and Construction. Together, the panel will explore the ideas behind Shaefer’s monumental charcoal drawings, including history, ambition, preservation, infrastructure, and the human impulse to build boundaries.
Shaefer’s drawings imagine the American landscape as a place altered by barriers, abandoned machinery, and signs of human control. Through his Colossi series, he places enormous walls in open landscapes, where they appear both ancient and strangely futuristic. These structures evoke familiar debates around borders, land use, and security, while also suggesting the failure of walls to resolve the larger fears that lead people to build them. His Baroque-inspired imagery and historical references link present-day concerns to older patterns of empire, territorial expansion, and the desire to control the natural world.
Drawing on Bell’s experience in architecture, public space, sustainable urbanization, and the changing urban landscape, the conversation will connect Shaefer’s work to questions of migration, environmental change, national identity, and exclusion. It will also consider preservation: What are we trying to protect when we preserve a landscape, a historical story, or an idea of national identity? Who may be left out in that process? The group will discuss the difference between caring for places and histories and using preservation as a reason to divide people.
Itinerary:
3:30pm — Doors open
3:50pm — Opening remarks from Robin Jaffee Frank
4:00pm — Program begins
4:50pm — Audience Q&A
5:00pm — Program concludes
About This Event
The CORA Foundation Community Conversation with Rick Shaefer
Saturday, October 24 from 4-5pm; FREE
The CORA Foundation sponsors this event, granting visitors free entry upon registration.
Join MoCA/CT for an evening of conversation moderated by the Museum’s Executive Director, Robin Jaffee Frank, featuring artist Rick Shaefer; architect, educator, and urban-policy leader Rick Bell; and a select group of panelists. Bell heads the Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space at Columbia University and previously served as Assistant Commissioner at the New York City Department of Design and Construction. Together, the panel will explore the ideas behind Shaefer’s monumental charcoal drawings, including history, ambition, preservation, infrastructure, and the human impulse to build boundaries.
Shaefer’s drawings imagine the American landscape as a place altered by barriers, abandoned machinery, and signs of human control. Through his Colossi series, he places enormous walls in open landscapes, where they appear both ancient and strangely futuristic. These structures evoke familiar debates around borders, land use, and security, while also suggesting the failure of walls to resolve the larger fears that lead people to build them. His Baroque-inspired imagery and historical references link present-day concerns to older patterns of empire, territorial expansion, and the desire to control the natural world.
Drawing on Bell’s experience in architecture, public space, sustainable urbanization, and the changing urban landscape, the conversation will connect Shaefer’s work to questions of migration, environmental change, national identity, and exclusion. It will also consider preservation: What are we trying to protect when we preserve a landscape, a historical story, or an idea of national identity? Who may be left out in that process? The group will discuss the difference between caring for places and histories and using preservation as a reason to divide people.
Itinerary:
3:30pm — Doors open
3:50pm — Opening remarks from Robin Jaffee Frank
4:00pm — Program begins
4:50pm — Audience Q&A
5:00pm — Program concludes