Architecture Omi
About
Architecture Omi is a program conceived to facilitate projects exploring the intersection of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. While international in scope, Architecture Omi offers a site of approximately 75 acres in the upstate town of Ghent, New York, for both the construction/production of physical installations and a laboratory-style setting for the production of innovative forms.Announcing New Director of Architecture Omi
Omi International Arts Center welcomes Marisa Jahn as Director, Archiecture Omi:
Marisa Jahn is an interdisciplinary curator, artist, and writer whose
work has been presented in public spaces and venues such as the The MIT
Museum; National Museum of Fine Arts in Tainan, Taiwan; ICA
Philadelphia; ISEA/Zero One; Eyebeam; MOCA North Miami; Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, etc. A
compulsive collaborator who has often worked with architects, designers,
engineers, and programmers, Jahn’s work has been featured in media such
as Art in America, LA Times, Frieze, Punk Planet, San Francisco
Chronicle, Make Magazine, Metropolis, the Discovery Channel, NPR, and
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.Jahn studied at UC Berkeley where she double majored in Fine Art and
Cultural Geography and received her MS from the Visual Arts Program in
MIT’s Department of Architecture (MIT). She has received awards and
grants from UNESCO, Robert & Eileen Haas Foundation, CEC Artslink,
Franklin Furnace, Canada Council, and was an artist-in-residence in
MIT’s Media Lab in 2008-9. She has worked as a teacher, outreach
coordinator, and director of development efforts with several art,
social justice, and community-based advocacy organizations including the
Center for Urban Pedagogy, I-Witness Video, NYC Park Advocates, Reverend
Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping, Street Vendor Project, and more.
Jahn is also a newly-selected member of New York City’s Community Board 8.From 2000-2009, Jahn co-directed “Pond: art, activism, & ideas,” a
gallery-based non-profit organization dedicated to socially-engaged art.
In 2009, Pond changed its name to REV- (www.rev-it.org), began operating
out of other venues, and started anew with a bang: a media-based public
art project in Tajikistan funded by CEC Artslink in New York; a
curatorial fellowship at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC)
that culminated in an exhibition this Spring; and book launches in San
Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto, and New York for ‘Recipes for an
Encounter.’ A meditation on the anticipatory and improvisatorial nature
of recipes, ‘Recipes for an Encounter’ draws examples of diagrams,
schematics, lists, and propositions from the fields of art,
architecture, and ethnography. As Jahn is often developing cultural
programming that does not traditionally fall into a single discipline,
she has found that cultivating strongly interdisciplinary practices
necessitates not only curatorially featuring the work itself but
deepening its discursive context. Jahn has thus been involved in
co-founding ‘WhereWeAreNow: Locating Art and Politics in New York’, an
online journal New York-based cultural practitioners. She is also
currently finishing the editorial production of ‘Byproducts’ (publisher:
YYZ Press, Winter 2009/2010), a book that grew from an earlier
exhibition and examines the outcome of artists when embedded in
non-artworld sectors (such as industry, science, and electoral politics).