Maria Park

A distinguished jury has selected the winning design in the seventh-annual City of Dreams Pavilion Competition: Oculi by Austin+Mergold in collaboration with Maria Park (Cornell) and consulting engineers Chris Earls (Cornell) and Scott Hughes (Silman). Pending approvals and fundraising, this temporary art structure will be assembled on Governors Island and open to the public for the summer 2018 season.

The annual competition is hosted by FIGMENT, the Emerging New York Architects Committee (ENYA) of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY), and the Structural Engineers Association of New York (SEAoNY). The City of Dreams Pavilion, so named for its focus on the future of a world that faces strains on both economic and natural resources, aims to promote sustainability-oriented thinking amidst the architecture and design communities, requiring designers to consider the environmental impact of their designs from materials sourcing to disposal (or ideally reuse) of waste at the end of the season.

Oculi
The winning proposal will reuse old metal grain bins (silos), vestiges of the American agro-industrial age, hearkening back to how the medieval inhabitants of Rome reoccupied the remains of the Ancient Empire—with a bizarre combination of pragmatism and poetry. The grain bin is our contemporary spolia; as such these structures can be both useful and fanciful.

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Congratulations to Maria Park and Branden Hookway for their collaborative exhibition on view through November 17, 2017.

Training Setting investigates social and control protocols using a diagrammatic language of flight cockpits and table settings. To train within a technologized environment is to mediate both formal and informal instruction — where a formal understanding of information and procedure coexists with a tacit knowledge of embodied action. In this sense, training is inherently an orientation toward both the actual and the virtual, as performance draws upon informal knowledge according to formalized protocols. The exhibition explores this hybrid state of training through a series of paintings, sculptures, and drawings.

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Maria Park has been appointed the new AAP (Architecture, Art, Planning) Director of Exhibitions and Events at Cornell University. The director is responsible for all major events hosted by the college and especially for overseeing and curating all college-wide exhibitions. For more information click here.

Maria Park generously donates a painting to the The CUE Art Foundation's 2016 Benefit Auction. The CUE Foundation creates essential career and educational opportunities for emerging and unrecognized artists through exhibitions, public programing, fellowships, mentorship, and publication opportunities. 

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On view for one year, Sight Plan is a 150-foot mural by Maria Park for the construction fence in front of the new Chinatown Central Subway Station on Stockton Street at Washington. The mural is an attempt to create a window of sky at this site. It refers to the experience of traveling through San Francisco, whose typography often brings surprising vistas of sky into the city as though one's focus were elevated above the horizon line.

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We are pleased to announce Cathy Choi and Maria Park's participation in 50 Shades of Red at the Herter Art Gallery at UMass Amherst in Amherst, MA.

50 Shades of Red is an exhibition curated collaboratively by Anne LaPrade Seuthe, director of Hampden Gallery, Kathleen Jacobs, Director of Blueway Art Alliance, and Trevor Richardson, Director of Herter Gallery. Together, they have selected a broad range of works (both abstract and figurative) from 50 artists, in which the color red - or some variant thereof - plays a dominant role in the creation of the finished image.

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Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce the inclusion of two gallery artists - William Betts and Maria Park, in That’s Where You Need to Be a group exhibition at Richard Levy Gallery, on view August 1 - September 19, 2014. Other artists in the exhibition include Xuan Chen and Willy Bo Richardson. Each of these artists expand the conventions of painting by executing their own unique styles and methods of application.

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Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to announce that works by Maria Park will be included in "Beyond Earth Art" at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Cornell University. Following in the footsteps of the legendary 1969 Earth Art exhibition took place at Cornell University (curated by Willoughby Sharp), the exhibition is comprised of separate installations and exhibitions that address issues related to the representation of landscape, water supply, food justice, recycling, fair distribution of natural resources, and the nature/culture divide. 

Read press release and view full list of artists...