Exhibition of Kathy Cottong photographs opens in the GRC

The College of Architecture’s Graham Resource Center has opened a new exhibit by Kathy Cottong, “Alfred Caldwell’s Farm in Bristol”. Over the course of two years (2014-2016), Cottong visited the Caldwell Farm weekly, documenting it through the seasons. As she writes in her exhibition statement: “Caldwell felt that architecture was the great symbol of society, of civilization. He was an ardent advocate of Mies’s principle that we should have an ‘architecture for our time, truthful to our time’...The farm is the ultimate synthesis of his extraordinary position in 20th century architecture, a community where he collaborated with some of its greatest minds - Jens Jensen, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe.”

The exhibition is free and open to the public, offering visitors a visual record of Caldwell’s personal which Phyllis Lambert proclaims “is a miracle … a model for America (that) deserves the highest attention.” Cottong’s photographs accompany the current series  Alfred Caldwell and the Performance of Democracy: Archives and Events. 

Supported by a generous grant from the Graham Foundation, the series excavates previously unavailable archival resources, including those at the Caldwell Farm and Illinois Institute of Technology, to inspire a series of public events and archival workshops. These scattered-site sequential programs touch on a diverse range of geographies and constituencies to amplify access, interpretations, and scholarship on Caldwell. Read more about the series and its events here.