Sarah Hearne (PhD '20) curates MAK Center's "Print Ready Drawings" exhibition, featuring AUD student work
Nov 6, 2023
Sarah Hearne (PhD '20) has curated upcoming MAK Center for Art and Architecture exhibition “Print Ready Drawings: Composites, layers, and paste-ups" presenting 12 case studies of graphic media–drawings, collages, and “miniature paper landscapes”–that notable architects produced between 1950 and 1989. The show opens this Saturday, November 11 and is on view through February 4, 2024.
In “Print Ready Drawings,” Hearne takes up the architectural drawing as the site of some conceptual heavy lifting, as well as both personal and public expression–“the mundane, the repetitive, and the documents that convey how architects navigate the borders between private work and what is destined to be public,” as Hearne observes in the exhibition’s curatorial statement. Among other curiosities, the exhibition features commissioned replicas and associated films by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt that translate historical materials and reanimate production processes.
Hearne drew inspiration for the exhibition, in part, from her Fall 2022 critical studies seminar at UCLA AUD, “The Material Landscapes of Pulp, Graphite, and Ink.” The seminar focused on drawings as material artifacts, assembled from supplies and prepared for duplication, attending to the drawings closely in order to pull threads of research that open larger contexts of production.
Additionally, the seminar encouraged students to consider aspects of curatorial modes of representation and questions related to drawing conservation and display, exploring methods of displaying and communicating the narratives that are not self-evident in the documents themselves. The class centered around three workshops held at the Getty Research Institute–including a discussion with GRI Assistant Curator, Gary Fox (PhD '23)–where students explored case studies from the Architecture & Design collection.
“Print Ready Drawings” is on view at the MAK Center’s Schindler House in Los Angeles from November 11, 2023 through February 4, 2024 (835 North Kings Road, West Hollywood, CA 90069). The show kicks off with an opening reception on Saturday, November 11, 6:00 to 8:00 pm. Learn more via the MAK Center.
Hearne is an architectural historian, educator, and curator, and led AUD's Fall 2022 critical studies seminar "The Material Landscapes of Pulp, Graphite, and Ink." She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, where she is developing exhibitions programming for the College of Architecture and Planning. Her background includes training as an architect in Australia and several years practicing in offices including Ateliers Jean Nouvel in Copenhagen and Paris. She received her PhD in Architectural History at UCLA AUD in 2020 with her dissertation “Other Things Visible on Paper: Architectural Writing and Imaging Craftsmanship 1960-87.” Her independent work includes an exhibition and symposium on information management and display in contemporary architectural research, titled "Fieldwork" (2015) at the University of Technology Gallery in Sydney.
More recently Hearne was a co-curator on "Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making" (MAK Center for Art and Architecture, 2022), was Assistant Curator on "Architecture Itself and Other Myths of Postmodernism" (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2018), and collaborated on the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial with Johnston Marklee, for which she co-edited the corresponding catalog, Make New History, published by Lars Müller.
“Print Ready Drawings” is curated by Sarah Hearne, with curatorial assistance by Arianna Borromeo and support from the MAK Center exhibitions team Seymour Polatin, Exhibitions and Programs Manager and Brian Taylor, Curatorial Assistant. The exhibition features commissioned films by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt. Exhibition design is by Current Interests with conservation support from Paradise Framing. Graphic design is by Christina Huang. "Print Ready Drawings" was made possible, in part, with generous support from the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project Series. Additional support was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the University of Colorado Denver, College of Architecture and Planning.