Figure: Courtyard 2020: Veil Craft

Materials & Applications (M&A) and Craft Contemporary are proud to announce a five-year partnership between the two organizations, titled M&A x Craft Contemporary, which explores contemporary issues in craft, design, and architecture. Every summer from 2020-2024, Craft Contemporary will host a new major architectural project curated by M&A to be installed in the museum’s urban courtyard. In addition, M&A will develop a calendar of programs accompanying the installation, including a series of workshops, performances, lectures, and conversations. In line with the organization’s history of transforming underutilized spaces into pocket parks, M&A will take over the urban courtyard of Craft Contemporary as a site of architectural experimentation and dialogue.

Jia Yi Gu, the Executive Director and Curator of Materials & Applications, states, “This new partnership is an exciting chapter in Materials & Applications history. The M&A X Craft Contemporary bridges both institutions’ interests in process and materiality, as well as experimentation, through a five-year curatorial project. In this way, the courtyard is envisioned as both an architectural exhibition space and a collaborative site for public engagement, with architecture serving as a setting for experiential and experimental encounters.”

Each year, M&A will explore a new curatorial topic, commissioning new work by under-recognized architects, designers, and artists to take place in the Craft Contemporary courtyard. The 2020 topic Staging Construction focuses on architecture’s entanglement with construction, highlighting the aesthetic language, material, and process that surrounds the act of building. The summer program features the new architectural installation Veil Craft by Figure. 

Through this institutional partnership, both Craft Contemporary and M&A will share expertise in their respective fields and collaborate in programming across a range of curatorial topics and interests, in order to cultivate public conversation centering on contemporary issues in craft, design, and architecture.

Courtyard 2020: Veil Craft
Veil Craft is the inaugural installation presented by Materials & Applications (M&A), featuring new work by emerging San Francisco-based architectural studio Figure. The installation investigates the cultural resonance of industrial ready-mades seen throughout Los Angeles, using construction materials such as scaffolding textiles to call attention to the temporary architecture ubiquitous around the city. The project begins with a simple observation: all of Los Angeles is under construction. For every building that comes down, a new temporary architecture goes up: opaque, shimmering veils of green, white, orange and black construction textiles that wrap themselves around an unknown future. Their presence signals many things: a new building, an influx of capital, and perhaps most contentiously, the possibility of new neighbors. Often referred to as construction tarps or scaffolding netting, these robust, porous, and colorful textiles have inadvertently become a near-permanent facade aesthetic through the ubiquity of construction in the city of Los Angeles.

In Veil Craft, the public is invited to inhabit the interior of an unfinished site, where construction fabric becomes the canvas—not upon which, but through which—one can perceive and contemplate the material history of the site. In the courtyard, brickwork meets glass and steel meets painted patterns in a playful cacophony, in which one may find delightful and truly strange juxtapositions. The project aims to activate the public’s interest in the overlooked materiality of the built environment, bringing together expert and non-expert audiences in conversation about Los Angeles’ material culture, bridging industry, craft, artistic, and architectural audiences together. 

M&A’s 2020 calendar of programs is supported, in part, by: Graham Foundation for the Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, Pasadena Art Alliance, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Department of Cultural Affairs, and our generous supporters: [Featured] Brooks + Scarpa, Deegan Day Design, Knowhow Shop, Integrated Development, Riley Architects, Swinerton Builders; Summit Western LLC, Warren Techentin Architecture [Honorary] Ball-Nogues Studio, Barbara Bestor Architecture, Dake Wilson Architecture, Gensler, Kevin Daly Architects, Koning Eizenberg Architecture; [Special Mention] DOSU, Jeff Beall, Johnson Fain, John Frane, Hadrian Predock Architecture, Hilary Roebuck, Neil M Denari Architects, RADAR, and Rewilder.