Architectural Record  |  November 01, 2022

Cleveland Gallery SPACES to Produce “Everlasting Plastics” for U.S. Pavilion at 2023 Venice Biennale

The phrase Everlasting Plastics evokes images of bottles floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or micro particles in human blood. It’s also the name of the exhibition planned for the United States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale that will run from May 20 to November 26, 2023. Curators Tizziana Baldenebro and Lauren Leving plan to fill the pavilion with works in plastic by two architecture professors, two designers and a sculptor in order, Baldenebro says, to examine plastic “both literally and as a cultural metaphor.”

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, with guidance from a committee of the National Endowment for the Arts, selected Cleveland’s non-profit gallery SPACES, where Baldenebro is executive director, as the pavilion’s commissioner. Leving, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, collaborated on the proposal. She and Baldenebro both had links to the 2018 U.S. exhibition in Venice: Baldenebro was a student exhibitor at one of the pavilion’s “partner programs” while Leving, formerly exhibitions manager for Chicago’s Wrightwood 659, helped bring the 2018 show to that museum. They say they were as surprised as anyone when they were selected.

Though it is too soon for the curators to say exactly what the pavilion will contain, they have commissioned work from Xavi Laida Aguirre, who teaches at MIT and runs the design practice stock-a-studio; Ang Li, assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University and a practicing architect; designers Norman Teague of Chicago and Simon Anton of Detroit; and Cleveland-based sculptor Lauren Yeager

By Fred A. Bernstein, Architectural Record

Original Article