150 South Cottage Hill Ave
2019
A 2-month experimental stay in Mies van der Rohe's McCormick House, which is now part of the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, IL, but was originally built as a prototype for affordable prefab housing.
The exhibition featured my card game Exquisite Corpse as well as a series of events including presentations by art historians Leili Adibfar (PhD candidate), Nicoletta Rousseva, Chris Reeves, and designer Norman Teague, as well as a performative text piece by artist Julietta Cheung, textile works by designer Kate Park, and site-related sound works by media artist and composer Olivia Block.
The McCormick House's current lack of a kitchen and functioning bathroom required an expansion of the floorplan to its surroundings to create a livable situation
House on its original property, 299 Prospect Ave, Elmhurst, IL, in the 1950s (Source: Hedrich Blessing Archive / Chicago Historical Society)
Relocated house (turned by 90 degrees) at the Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 South Cottage Hill Ave
Installation view; objects and furniture were provided by the artist except for the loaned MR chair; photograph: Jim Prinz
The roles of objects were fluid, moving between furnishing and art, accommodation and improvisation
Former kitchen area; Untitled (Stainless Steel), 2019, 30 in. x 60 in x 2 in., rare earth magnets, wire, wood dowel
Card from the Exquisite Corpse card set, posted on the Untitled piece. See all cards.
Exquisite Corpse, a 260-piece card set specifically created for the house. It consists of four categories: House, Social Contexts, Ephemerals, and Discourse; the photograph shows the Discourse cards laid-out in a grid
A small publication, McCormick House Exquisite Corpse, which documented visitors' engagement with the cards, was released on the closing weekend of the exhibition.
Museum visitor engages with the cards
Card arrangement left behind by visitors
A checklist provided visitors with information on all elements that I had installed in the house (the checklist was updated with every re-arrangement)
The McCormick House at night with the Children's Wing illuminated
Commissioned by Robert Hall McCormick III, Mies van der Rohe designed and built the McCormick House as a prototype for affordable prefab housing in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 1952. Three families lived in the house before it was acquired in 1994 by the friends of the Elmhurst Art Museum and relocated to its grounds. The relocation required that the two wings of the prototype were separated, put on trucks and moved. When the house was placed on its new site and reconstructed, original and new materials were mixed, floorplans changed, and the structure turned 90 degrees. In its new role at the museum, the house first served as an office and only later was turned into an exhibition space for projects across contemporary art, design, and architecture.
150 South Cottage Hill Ave is the current address of the McCormick House. It is also the title of my exhibition, for which I temporary moved into the space to collapse the role of the museum with that of a home, complicating the relation between art, architecture, and the status quo, as well as between art and life.
Ahead of the exhibition I created the oversized card game Exquisite Corpse, which would be available to visitors. The game consists of 260 cards and is organized into five categories: "House" (archival and current photo documentation of the building, its interiors and former residents), "Discourse" (keywords collected from seminal texts addressing modernist architecture), "Contexts" (materials that serve as social commentary), "Ephemerals" (a selection of words that carry a fugitive nature), and "Action Cards" (cards with special rules when used with one of the proposed game structures).
Parallel to this exhibition, an installation by artist Assaf Evron was on view in the second wing of the McCormick House. Both exhibitions were part of the Year of German-American Friendship initiated by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut, and supported by the Federation of German Industries (BDI). Generous support for the exhibitions had also been provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
For a more detailed documentation visit: