Making Home Saturday Series: Systems Shaping Our Understanding of Home (Session 2), Contrast form gestalt, cfgny in conversation with eunsong kim

The Making Home Saturday Series is a quarterly program that pairs special guests with participants from Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial. The program’s two-part sessions include conversations on exhibition-related themes, including systems, belonging, memory, care, and building, as well as the contemporary concepts of home related to race, class, migration, climate, and technology.

In our next Making Home Saturday Series, join us to learn more about the systems shaping our understanding of home through a deeper look at two Triennial installations, Unruly Subjects by artists Sofía Gallisá Muriente, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Carlos Soto and Contrast Form Gestalt by multidisciplinary collective CFGNY. Both projects probe ideas and ethics of institutional homes, like Cooper Hewitt, and their practices of acquiring and displaying objects from abroad.

In Session 2, CFGNY (Concept Foreign Garments New York), an artist collective established in New York in 2016, will lead us through a closer look at Contrast Form Gestalt, their Triennial commission which recontextualizes the Carnegie Mansion’s Teak Room with contemporary construction materials. They will be joined by writer and professor Eunsong Kim to discuss perspectives on 19th- and 20th-century collecting practices of Western museums which systematically depersonalized makers. 

The Teak Room was originally the family library when the Carnegie home was built in 1902. For its interiors, the Carnegie family engaged interior designer and landscape painter Lockwood de Forest who conceived a total environment produced by the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company in India, a venture de Forest established with trading heir Maganbhai Hutheesing in 1881 to promote and commodify the aesthetics of Indian craft. The resulting room copies and collages details from Ahmedabad tombs, mosques, mausoleums, and domestic architecture, now placed in an elite US context. 

For the program, CFGNY members Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen will draw attention to systems of classification and knowledge as perpetuated through institutions and reflect on Kim’s recent publication The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property which considers how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. 

Learn more about Session 1 of the Making Home Saturday Series.

Saturday Series Discount: Purchase a ticket for the first program and receive 50% off the second program. Please add both programs to your cart from each event listing or by selecting Back to Calendar from your cart. The discount will be automatically applied. Note that the ticket types and quantities must match for the discount to be valid.

SPEAKERS 

A group of three people in fashionable attire smile. The background is light blue with vertical white stripes.CFGNY was founded in 2016 as an ongoing dialogue on the intersection of art, fashion, and identity, artist collective CFGNY continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian”: an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience combined with the experience of being perceived as other. In addition to using fashion as a readymade, CFGNY’s practice spans mediums such as video, performance, architectural installation, and sculpture, researching the ways in which material assemblage and reproduction play a part in the formation and racialization of such “vaguely Asian” identities. CFGNY does not wish to represent what it means to be “Asian” in the singular; instead, it encourages the visualization of the countless ways one is able to be in the plural. CFGNY is composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, Kirsten Kilponen, and Tin Nguyen.

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her practice spans: literary studies, critical digital studies, poetics, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. Her writings have appeared in: Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies, Deep Fakes from the Algorithm’s & Society series, Poetics of Social Engagement and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her poetry has appeared in the Brooklyn Magazine, The Iowa Review, Minnesota Review amongst others. She is the author of gospel of regicide, published by Noemi Press in 2017, and with Sung Gi Kim she translated Kim Eon Hee’s poetic text Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? published in 2019. Her academic monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship.

AccessibiliTy & What to Expect

  • Format: The program will begin with a brief welcome, then the speakers will engage in a moderated conversation. 
  • About the space: This program will take place in Cooper Hewitt’s Lecture Room on the ground floor of the museum. It is fully wheelchair accessible. Theater-style seating is available. There is an accessible restroom on the same floor. Read more about  accessibility at Cooper Hewitt.
  • Accommodations: The program will have live CART captioning. If we can provide additional services to support your participation, email us at CHEducation@si.edu or let us know when you register. Please make your request as far in advance as possible—preferably at least ten days before the program date.
  • Recording: The program will be recorded and posted on Cooper Hewitt’s YouTube channel within two weeks.

Support 

Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial is presented in collaboration with Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. This project received federal support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative Pool, administered by the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum; the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the National Museum of the American Latino; the Asian Pacific American Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center; and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Generous support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Support is also provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation; Edward and Helen Hintz; re:arc institute; the Keith Haring Foundation; the Lemberg Foundation; Maharam; and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.