re-formation examines the intersection between the ideologies of SITE Architecture and the intentions of other content, as a newly formed, self organized student collective. SITE Architecture (Sculpture in the Environment) formed from the 1969 NYU “Environment Design Seminar” taught by James Wines. Judith Schwartz, longtime and recently retired professor in the NYU Art Department was among the students in Wine’s course and one of the original members of SITE. The seminar developed SITE’s underlying assumptions of architecture and daily life through site specific projects that engage with their environment.
Nearly 50 years after Wines’ seminar and the commencement of SITE, other content grew from the “Exhibition Design and Curatorial Practice” workshop led by artist and curator, Giles Round. re-formation compares the origin of SITE with the origin of this new collective. other content, influenced by the founding premise of SITE, is established to commit to the activities of curating through foundation, formation, and reformation.
This Broadway Windows installation references a group portrait used to present the members of SITE in 1970, other content spatially explores and complicates a similar format for their debut. The image used to announce the formation of SITE included former NYU students Nancy Goldring, Judith Schwartz, Cynthia Eardley, Marc Mannheimer, and Dana Draper. Material from Judith Schwartz's original proposal for the "Environmental Design Seminar" serves as the background image in other content's window space, in which she created a new environment for the seal pool at the Central Park Zoo. Parallel to the group portrait, other content has used SITE’s 1978 Madison Avenue Project at Camera Barnes as inspiration for the current installation, in which SITE worked to forge a new relationship between the neglected ‘low horizon’ section of a high-rise building and its surrounding street activity by creating a series of life-sized photos of people appearing in various stages of mingling, conversing, and window shopping. The members of other contenthave posed in similar fashion as the people in the Madison Avenue Project, which was produced around the same time as SITE’s infamous Best Products Inc. projects
