Mimi Zeiger: Pushing New Edges
“Zeiger is emphatic and serious, as if the issue weighs on her. She explains the importance of everyone, not just architects, coming forward to question and engage in criticism.”
by Sarah Oh
As a critic who writes about structural inequity, Mimi Zeiger acknowledges it is odd for her to be excited about a white man in architecture.
Over Zoom, Zeiger, who wears brassy glasses that read retro, shares that she feels like a “proud mama” to see her recent interview of the architect Frank Gehry on the June cover of PIN UP magazine, a biannual architecture and design publication. It took six months for her to pin Gehry down for an interview during the pandemic, she says, as she calms down her Yorkshire terrier barking in the background.
Zeiger’s joy about her Gehry piece is, perhaps, not in contradiction to her persona as a socially conscious provocateur in view of her 20-year career, which is marked by her regularly maneuvering between traditional architecture and its fringes.
Pushing boundaries appears to come naturally to the mouthy Los Angeles-based writer. Raised in Berkeley, California in the 1970s and 1980s, and once the founder of a zine called LOUD PAPER, Zeiger says she has often found herself pushing at the edges, whatever the institution. “By the time I got to Cornell for undergrad, I was pretty shocked what I had thought was a pretty moderate view of the world … was suddenly seen as something very left,” Zeiger says. Her self-publishing streak, established in graduate school, has carried over into a successful independent practice of criticism, teaching, curation, editing and writing. As a freelancer, she is discerning, interested in work that promotes an open and inclusive vision for art.
Her voice picks up when she talks about bringing new voices into traditional architecture. Voices she seems to take just as seriously as Frank Gehry’s. “I don’t think anyone is an amateur right now.” Zeiger is emphatic and serious, as if the issue weighs on her. She explains the importance of everyone, not just architects, coming forward to question and engage in criticism. Zeiger, who often references afro-futurism and indigenous futures literature in public talks, wants to see people offer their own context to what may be created and said by architects.
Her curation of an exhibit on citizenship in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, a major commission, reflects this. Zeiger, interested in the role speculation plays in proposing alternative futures characterized by liberation and joy, included projects that posed questions such as: What does black women’s space look like? In talking about the exhibit, she quotes literature about rival geographies, spaces that slaves would make in order to find protection in their daily routines. “How do you make … space simultaneously protected, understanding that you need a space of security, but also a space that is transformative? That might free you from some of the binds?” she says.
Today, her mind is focused not on the edges, but on the middle of America. In August, her exhibition “Exhibit Columbus” will open in Columbus, Indiana, highlighting 13 large-scale public installations by contemporary architects, designers and artists. The exhibit is an exploration of architecture, art and design speculating on the heartland of America. Through the exhibit, she wants to “re-center” the middle of the United States, and, somewhat surreptitiously, decolonize modernist Columbus. “It’s a complicated project,” but “an exciting project,” she says. Exactly what you would expect from Mimi Zeiger.
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Still Processing is a collection of work from the participants of the two-week 2021 Design Writing & Research Summer Intensive at the School of Visual Arts. For more information about our Summer Intensive as well as our two-semester Master’s program, please visit our website or email us at designresearch@sva.edu
