The Richard H. Driehaus Museum is characterized by a rich history and an impressive wealth of architectural styles. The site of the Museum, the Gilded Age-era Samuel Nickerson Mansion, offers a rare opportunity to map important and often overlooked histories and genealogies. While the unique design and architecture of the Mansion have been documented and studied, A Tale of Today: Materialities proposes to investigate more deeply the materials that comprise the very fabric of the building.
The materialities of objects and architectural features can link past to present histories in original and compelling ways. They connect different cultures and define cultural boundaries. Never inert, materials are inherently political. They are active participants in the ongoing negotiations that build our present and define our futures. There is a new prominence of materiality in art and it is a clear manifestation of our growing awareness that humans no longer are the undisputed centers of everything and that our world is the result of collaborative processes with other living and non-living, human and more-than-human agents.
Materialities invites artists to select a specific material from The Richard H. Driehaus Museum to engage in a new materialist dialogue with it. In conversation with curator Giovanni Aloi, the artists will research the histories of their chosen material to produce an engaged, critically aware, integrated response designed to uncover hidden cultural, historical, and ecological networks that bind the very fabric of the house to distant shores, peoples, skill sets, traditions, ideologies, and economic forces.
The Richard H. Driehaus Museum engages and inspires the global community through exploration and ongoing conversations in art, architecture, and design of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its permanent collection and temporary exhibitions are presented in an immersive experience within the restored Samuel Mayo Nickerson Mansion, completed in 1883, at the height of the Gilded Age. The Museum’s collection reflects and is inspired by the collecting interests, vision, and focus of its founder, the late Richard H. Driehaus.
In 2019, the Driehaus Museum launched a pilot project under the title A Tale of Today. The project is comprised of two new initiatives. The first is a series of exhibitions that present work by leading contemporary artists to expand the immersive experience in art, architecture, design, and history of the Nickerson Mansion, the Museum’s home. The second offers allied programs tied to these contemporary exhibitions including a six-month Fellowship opportunity that creates an artistic community of established and emerging artists as well as museum and art professionals.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, and educator specializing in the histories of art and the representation of nature in art. Aloi gained his PhD in natural history and contemporary art from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries. His essays on art and nature and other subjects have appeared in The Guardian, Apollo, Esse, Flash Art, Whitehotmagazine, and many academic journals.
He has published with Columbia University Press, Phaidon, MIT, and Prestel and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series 'Art after Nature'. Since 2006, Aloi has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Aloi is the author of several books including Art & Animals (2011) and Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019) and Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019). Since 2021, Aloi is US Correspondent for the international publication Esse Magazine – Art + Opinion. He has contributed to BBC radio programs and curated exhibitions in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.
Aloi currently teaches modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York and London.