Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

Wells

The planned installation of a permanent public sculpture in Chicago, a well drawing potable water in a publicly accessible location, forms the basis for this collaboration between Susan Gzesh (Director, Pozen Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago), Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Professor Art, Theory, and Practice, Northwestern University) and Abigail Winograd (MacArthur Curator, Smart Museum of Art). The latest in Manglano-Ovalle’s Well series, the sculpture will become a site for gathering, for conversation, and for reflection on water. 

The planned installation of a permanent public sculpture in Chicago, a well drawing potable water in a publicly accessible location, forms the basis for this collaboration between Susan Gzesh (Director, Pozen Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago), Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (Professor Art, Theory, and Practice, Northwestern University), and Abigail Winograd (MacArthur Curator, Smart Museum of Art). The latest in Manglano-Ovalle’s Well series, the sculpture will become a site for gathering, for conversation, and for reflection on water. Water is a vital and elemental resource hidden just beneath our feet, yet the process of raising it reveals a hornet’s nest of social, political, and environmental quandaries. 

During the course of the Fellowship, Gray Center will serve as a platform for conversations that seek to understand the implications of the well: What is the relationship of art to science and the law? How does environmental racism manifest itself in the city and the region? How will climate change and the demand for potable water impact the Great Lakes, the states and communities that surround it? Is access to water a human right? What does it mean for something to be a “human right”?  Do people have “rights” to what those of us in water-abundant regions (like the Great Lakes) think of as the “common”? What happens to the notion of “rights” in water-scarce regions, where water has been commodified by commercial or criminal entities and sold on the market? Does the source of water matter in these questions – who “owns” the rain, surface water like lakes, underground water in aquifers?  

The Fellows bring individual strengths and interests to bear on the development of this project. Susan’s expertise in matters pertaining to human rights and climate change as a driver of social inequality is helping to tackle the question of whether art can serve as a kind of Trojan horse in circumventing legal barriers to addressing social and environmental crises? Iñigo’s philosophical and aesthetic approach to the project continues to push Susan and Abigail beyond practical or logical considerations, always returning to questions of aesthetics and the importance of metaphor. It is, after all, his vision that drives this whole adventure forward and we are indebted to the elegant ways his brain frames these impossibly difficult queries. Abigail’s tirelessness and tenacity as both art critic and independent curator as well as her persistent unearthing of the social, the political and the environmental in contemporary art practice is the fuel behind our interdisciplinary mashup. And yet her interest in local histories and current conditions keeps the project grounded in the Midwest while Iñigo and Susan widen the lens to national and international horizons. 

Portable Gray interview with Susan Gzesh, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Abigail Winograd HERE

“Genius at Work: 29 MacArthur Fellows Show Their Art in Chicago,” New York Times, 7.13.21 

Course

Water, Water Everywhere?
Fall 2021  

This interdisciplinary course explores aesthetics, environmental racism, and the legal framework of the Commons as they pertain to the politics and aesthetics of water. Centering around a newly commissioned artwork artist, and MacArthur Genius Fellow Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, the course will look at issues of scarcity and abundance through the lens of art. In addition to works by Manglano-Ovalle, students will consider works by Allan Kaprow, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Fazal Sheikh, and others to consider how art can serve as a trojan horse in confronting the 21st centuries environmental challenges. Readings will include Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons. The course will include visits to exhibitions curated by Abigail Winograd as part of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows at 40 including a site-specific installation by Manglano-Ovalle. 

Fellows

Susan Gzesh

Susan Gzesh is the Executive Director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and a Senior Lecturer in the College, appointed in 2001 after two decades practicing law and teaching as a part-time Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School beginning in 1992. She directs Pozen Center activities including the Human Rights Internship program, support for research, teaching, and events, as well as Center fundraising and outreach. 

Gzesh teaches courses on contemporary issues in human rights, the human rights of aliens and citizens, human rights in Mexico, and the use of international human rights norms in the United States. She coordinates the Pozen Center’s Human Rights Study Abroad program in Vienna, Austria. She supervises students on B.A. and M.A. theses and advises on PhD dissertation projects. 

Her research interests include the inter-relationship between human rights and migration policy, the domestic application of international human rights norms, and Mexico-U.S. relations. In addition to teaching, she directs a broad range of activities in the PFCHR including an internship program, public events, and faculty initiatives on topics including Migration and Human Rights and Health and Human Rights. She serves on the faculty committee of the Center for Latin American Studies. 

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961, Madrid, Spain) received a B.A. from Williams College in Williamstown, MA, and an M.F.A. from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. His noted film trilogy Le Baiser/The Kiss (1999), Climate (2000), and In Ordinary Time (2001) focuses on the architecture of Mies van der Rohe and the implications of Modernism. Solo exhibitions include: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Krefeld Suite, Museum Haus Esters and Haus Lange, Krefend, Germany; El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey and Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City; Barcelona Pavilion, Fundación Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. 

Group exhibitions include: Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; InSITE, San Diego; Tempo, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moving Pictures, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain; The Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, England, and Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Media Arts Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is Professor at Northwestern University’s Department of Art, Theory, Practice. 

Abigail Winograd

Abigail Winograd is the MacArthur Fellows Program 40th Anniversary Exhibition Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Her scholarly research has focused on the emergence of aberrant abstractions in post-war South America as well as museological approaches to expanding canonical narratives. 

Prior to her appointment at the Smart Museum, Abigail consulted with the MacArthur Foundation on development of an exhibition of art by MacArthur Fellows to coincide with the Fellows Program’s 40th anniversary in 2021. She organized The Other Transatlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America for the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (traveled to Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, and SESC Piñheros, São Paulo, 2017–2018) as well as Abstract Experiments: Latin American art on paper after 1950 (2017) for the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2016–2017, she was the Transhistorical Curatorial Fellow at the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, where she organized A Global Table: Still Life, Colonialism, and Contemporary Art (2017). Abigail was the Research Associate for Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) where she also organized Unbound: Contemporary Art after Frida Kahlo (2014) and Zachary Cahill: Snow (2014) as the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow. She completed curatorial fellowships at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Winograd earned a Masters and PhD in art history at the University of Texas at Austin. She has additional degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Northwestern University. She is the recipient of several fellowships, has contributed to museum catalogues, published academic articles, presented papers in the US, Europe, and South America, and contributed to publications such as Bomb, Mousse Magazine, Frieze, and Artforum.