In Staging Area: A Barn Raising in Two Parts, designer Erin Besler engages the communal and performative dimensions of a barn raising—an event that reveals the social possibilities embedded in the construction site.

Part One of Staging Area opened on March 15, 2025 inside the Newmark Gallery. Part Two, taking place in Summer 2025, will feature an outdoor installation of a barn frame in the Sculpture & Architecture Park, staged as a public raising that will bring together participants and visitors to collectively realize the construction process and further celebrate the barn as a site of collaboration and shared labor. 

Few structures have been as intensely labored over as the barn. From community raising weekends and feminist pedagogical projects to back-to-the land conversions and acts of preservation, across the rural United States barns are sites where commonly held distinctions break down: between amateur participants and expert practitioners, nature and culture, individuals and collectives, manual trades and intellectual pursuits, and the discipline of architecture and the practice of building.

While American barns are often tied to romantic myths of isolation, self-sufficiency, and pragmatism, the collective efforts of barn raisings emphasize exchange, skill sharing, and more ubiquitous building practices. Here, catering kitchens, woodcraft workshops, and informal childcare unfold at the edges of the building process, weaving everyday life into construction. These practices challenge conventional notions of property and innovation, instead fostering systems of reciprocity and community over individualism and profit.

Staging Area unfolds in two parts and through an ongoing, layered program of events. You are invited to join in social gatherings, site-specific interventions, and creative activities, including raising suppers, barn model workshops, and lumber parades.

Staging Area: A Barn Raising in Two Parts is curated by Julia van den Hout, Senior Architecture Curator with Guy Weltchek, Curatorial Assistant.

Exhibition Design Team: Ana Rico Rubio, Yohana Ansari-Thomas, Chandler Shan, Rob Williams, Mason Magemeneas, Aonor Washington, Nneoma Onyekwere, Shravan Arun, Tyler Gray, Emilio Olivas, and Michael Adams.

Exhibition Marketing Visual Identity: Pan Przemysław

ABOUT THE DESIGNER

Erin Besler (she/they) is a co-founder of Besler & Sons, a studio that designs buildings, software, objects, exhibitions, and interiors. Erin’s interests focus on architecture as a collective project, exploring the social, pedagogical, and material aspects of construction, social media, and other means of producing and sharing content that rely less on expertise and more on ubiquity. 

Their work has been recognized by the Architectural League of New York, a United States Artists Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Architecture, and the Graham Foundation. They have exhibited internationally, including at The Tallinn Architecture Biennial, MODEL Barcelona Architecture Festival, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism as part of the group exhibition “Now, There,” which was awarded the UABB Bronze Award. Erin’s collaborative design work and writing have been published widely in e-flux, Future Anterior, Perspecta, Log, PLOT. Alongside practice, Erin teaches at Princeton University in the School of Architecture.

SUPPORT

Art Omi’s programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Additional support provided by the Princeton University School of Architecture.