SCI-Arc Partners with the University of Michigan Museum of Art to Showcase Emerging Architects

SCI-Arc announced a year-long partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), to showcase the work of emerging architects. Ellie Abrons, a faculty member at University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, was selected to exhibit in the SCI-Arc Library Gallery. SCI-Arc design faculty Mira Henry will exhibit at the UMMA this summer.

“SCI-Arc is thrilled to partner with the museum,” SCI-Arc Director Hernan Diaz Alonso said. “Joe Rosa has been a long-time champion of innovative architecture. We’re excited to feature Ellie Abrons in our gallery and are eager to see what Mira Henry has in store for the museum later this year.”

“Abrons work is emblematic of an emerging generation of makers that provide a window into the future of architecture,” Joseph Rosa, Director, University of Michigan Museum of Art said. “UMMA is happy to be partnering with SCI-Arc on a year-long collaboration to showcase talented faculty at SCI-Arc and the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning. UMMA looks forward to showcasing the emerging talent of SCI-Arc design faculty Mira Henry this summer."

Abrons' exhibition Inside Things will explore architectural interiority borne from agglomeration and exaggeration. Parts seem too big for their wholes, forms don’t quite fit together, and proto-figures combine to produce objects whose outsides don’t quite reveal their insides. A loose association between inside and out supersedes the more typical, clear correspondence of the two. The parts allude to something familiar—figures imbued with vitality that walk the line between living things and not living things. Here, the ambiguity of formal resemblance mixes with obscure, heterogeneous materiality to produce architectural things that invite misreading and are open to interpretation but never land on intended meaning. The exhibition opens on March 18 and runs through May 1.

Ellie Abrons is an architectural designer, educator, and the principal of EADO. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan where she was the A. Alfred Taubman Fellow in 2009-2010. EADO works across scales and mediums, often in collaborative contexts, and focuses on materiality, formal experimentation, and the agency of architectural things. Abrons received her Masters of Architecture from the University of California Los Angeles where she graduated with distinction and received the AIA Certificate of Merit. She received her BA in art history and gender studies from New York University. Abrons' work has been exhibited at the 2012 Venice Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, A+D Gallery, and the Architectural Association. Abrons was recently selected, as part of T+E+A+M, to exhibit work in the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.