Permanent Collection Gallery Scaife 4 
Carnegie Museum of Art, 2025

This gallery focuses on the history of the Carnegie International. 

“Since its inaugural edition in 1896, the International has showcased works by nearly 5,000 artists from approximately 60 countries. Although the frequency, format, and focus have changed over time, the series continues to reach across geographies to bring together art, people, and ideas.” - Carnegie Museum of Art

The exhibition design grounds itself on the history of Carnegie International. The traditional salon hang follows the traditional art hanging style of early Carnegie International. Similarly, the red title wall echoes a title wall from the 1980 Carnegie International. 
This gallery invites visitors to review the Carnegie International collectios in a chronological order from 1896-present. 

Curatorial team: Stephanie Delamaire, Liz Park, Emily Na
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Aligned in Exchange: Fairgrounds of Sovereignty 
Presented at Nieuwe Instituut & Jaap Bakema Study Centre, 2025

Read the proceeding here
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after school Heinz Architectural Center 
Carnegie Museum of Art, 2025

“Situated within an increasingly uncertain educational landscape in the US—the culmination of decades of disinvestment and erosion of civic and democratic institutions—after school turns toward Pittsburgh. Here recent proposals for school closures and consolidations carry on existing processes of displacement, segregation, and restructuring. In dialogue with contemporary works, the exhibition presents case studies that trace the layered histories of public education in the region—from the city’s first public high school and New Deal-era programs to cooperative school gardens and Black-led Street Academies of the 1970s. These fragments document cycles of learning, unlearning, and collective praxis across shifting policies, built infrastructures, and forms of refusal and community care.” - Carnegie Museum of Art

after school turns toward traditional classroom elements such as tables, boards, and shelves retrofitted to accomodate architectural prints, exhibition texts, and photographs.   

Curatorial team: Theodossis Issaias, curator at Heinz Architectural Center, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator, with McKenzie Stupica, curatorial fellow. 
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Neapolitan Presepio 
Carnegie Museum of Art, 2025

“Since 1957, Carnegie Museum of Art has marked the holiday season with the Neapolitan presepio. A centuries-old tradition in Naples and southern Italy, the presepio is an elaborate nativity scene recreated with miniature figures arranged in a detailed panorama of 18th-century life in Naples. Handmade by artists in the Royal Court of Naples between 1700 and 1830, the presepio includes superbly modeled humans, animals, angelic figures, and architectural elements.” - Carnegie Museum of Art
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Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers
Guggenheim Museum New York, 2025

“For nearly 30 years, artist Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, Chicago) has cultivated a diverse body of work that draws upon an array of disciplines such as history, philosophy, literature, and music. This major solo exhibition highlights Johnson’s role as a scholar of art history, a mediator of Black popular culture, and as a creative force in contemporary art.

Almost 90 works—from black-soap paintings and spray-painted text works to large-scale sculptures, film, and video—fill the museum’s rotunda, including Sanguine, a monumental site-specific work on the building’s top ramp with an embedded piano for musical performances. Additionally, a dynamic program of events, developed in collaboration with community partners across New York City, activate a sculptural stage on the rotunda floor.” - Guggenheim Museum

Curatorial team: Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim’s Deputy Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator, and Andrea Karnes, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas, with additional support from Faith Hunter, Guggenheim Curatorial Assistant.

Role: Exhibition Designer (contract) along with Senior Exhibition Designer Kelly Cullinan
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The End
Related Works, 2024

The End is an installation proposal for Storefront for Art and Architecture which seeks to expose
the connections of urban pasts and its current toxic realities. Traversing the entire length of the
Storefront’s North wall, the pipe runs floor to ceiling, transmuting Storefronts gallery space to the
end of urban hydrological pathways. The End unveils the unseen, the underside, and the forgotten of urban swamplands covering past geology, current ecology and future climates. 
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Projecting Chinatown - A Proposal for a Reverse Stoop III for Citygroup
Related Works, 2025

A drawing that reassembles disaggregated fragments of Chinatown—ornamental gateways, stylized rooflines, decorative facades—into overlapping projections that suspend its double identity as sanctuary and spectacle.
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Spaces of Performance
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning& Preservation, 2024

The genesis of the community garden at 6th Street and Avenue B in the Lower East Side of NYC can be traced back to the urban landscape of the 1970s, characterized by widespread neglect and disinvestment leading to the proliferation of vacant lots. This green enclave emerged as a response to the blight of urban decay, symbolizing the community's resilience and agency in reclaiming and repurposing neglected spaces for collective benefit.

While the garden serves as a focal point for communal engagement and social cohesion, its semi-public nature raises pertinent questions regarding the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within urban communities. The adjacency of the garden to Tompkins Square Park and its proximity to other community gardens further underscores its significance as a spatial node within the neighborhood's socio-cultural fabric.

Amidst threats of development encroaching upon the neighborhood's green spaces in the 1990s, the community mobilized creatively, utilizing art performances as a form of resistance and celebration. These performances, while aesthetically enriching, served a dual purpose of advocating for the preservation of grassroots initiatives and highlighting the intrinsic value of community gardening as a socio-cultural practice.

This performative dimension extends beyond mere spectacle, permeating the everyday practices within the garden space. From the mundane tasks of cultivation to the communal rituals of shared meals, each act of engagement embodies a performative enactment of communal values and aspirations, reaffirming the garden's role as a site of collective identity and solidarity.
   
The garden's operational logic challenges conventional economic paradigms, prioritizing principles of communal stewardship and ecological sustainability over profit-driven imperatives. In this sense, the garden becomes a microcosm of alternative economic practices, grounded in principles of mutual aid and cooperative exchange, thereby transcending the boundaries of conventional urban space to embody a vision of community resilience and solidarity.
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Grotto
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning& Preservation, 2023

In an urban setting, the constant struggle between humanity's architectural control and nature's persistent intrusion shapes our environment. Despite our efforts to confine and curate nature within defined spaces, it inevitably infiltrates, inosculates, and expands through time. We selectively allow nature's entry, embracing curated and appropriated forms within our constructed landscapes. This tension between our desire to control and nature's inherent drive to propagate is evident in the permeability of museums, both socially and physically. Architectural envelopes become sites of tension as we negotiate the boundary between interior and exterior spaces, deciding what elements of nature to incorporate within.

Our relationship with nature in urban settings oscillates between conflict and collaboration, as evidenced by practices of curating, appropriating, and confining nature within English gardens, birdhouses, and botanical gardens. Yet, amidst these tensions, there's a recognition of the need to create spaces where nature can flourish, where birds can sing and trees can grow freely. Playwright Jacques Deval's words resonate, reminding us of the delicate balance between human intervention and the innate beauty of the natural world. “God loved the birds and made trees. Man loved the birds and made cages”. Thus, the challenge lies in designing buildings that not only accommodate but also harmonize with nature, allowing it to perform and create habitats within defined spaces while respecting its autonomy and intrinsic value.

A grotto is a man-made cave-like structure often found in gardens or estates, designed to mimic the appearance of natural caves. It typically features rock formations, water elements like fountains or pools, and is crafted to evoke a sense of natural wonder and beauty. Grottoes are an ironic attempt at providing faux nature within man-made controlled settings.

This project has been featured on KooZarch
Havana: houses, apartments, schools, a movie theater, a hotel, and ice cream
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning& Preservation, 2023

A collection of photographs investigating Havana’s modern tropical architecture. This work was done as part of GSAPP’s Summer Workshop led by Belmont Freeman. Titled ‘Houses, Apartments, Schools, A movie theatre, A Hotel, and Ice cream’ the work highlights modern architecture throughout Havana from before and during the Cuban revolution.

Some of the architecture highlighted includes:
- Hotel Habana Libre (1958)
- Yara movie theatre (1947)
- Coppelia Ice Cream Parlor (1966)
- Solimar apartment building, Manuel Copado (1944) 
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Extract, Excavate, Create
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning& Preservation, 2023

Located 73 miles north from New York City, Ashokan Reservoir supplies constant freshwater to New York City. Ashokan Reservoir is one of six reservoirs owned by New York City in the Catskills/ Delaware watershed system which also includes: Cannonsville, Pepacton, Neversink, Roundout, and Schoharie. The Catskills/ Delaware watershed covers 1597 square miles of upstate New York. Additionally, New York City also owns the area that covers the Croton watershed (375 square miles). Today the Catskills/ Delaware watershed provides ninety percent of drinking water to the 8.46 million residents of New York City. Through water, the residents of New York City are physically linked to the community of Ulster County. However, this is a relationship of imbalanced extraction. Starting from the construction of the first reservoir in the Catskills (Ashokan) a dispute over resources was already in place. Before water, the land on which to construct the reservoir was the matter in question. After land, the resources including the physical material and labor were in question. The creation of the reservoir is bound to a multitude of extractions of the natural resources around Ulster county, specifically the stone surrounding the reservoir. Furthermore, the construction of the reservoir requires excavation not only on the site of the Ashokan but also the site where the resources are extracted.

This project is a reaction to the extensive claiming of resources in creation of the reservoir, the impacts socially and environmentally, and reparations for the community surrounding the reservoir. 
Natural Materials Lab
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning& Preservation, 2022-24

“The Natural Materials Lab, founded and directed by Assistant Professor Lola Ben-Alon, investigates raw, earth- and fiber-based building materials, their life cycle, supply chains, fabrication techniques, policy, and upscaled possibilities. Our research and teaching craft new ways to imagine and build socially equitable and ecologically sustainable futures by converging material science, geology and geography, architecture, engineering, art, and design.” - Columbia GSAPP

This line of research seeks to develop clay-fiber mixtures for 3D Printing applicability for
architectural building materials. This research has been exhibited at 1014 Space for Ideas, Architecture League NY, published paper- Developing 3D-Printed Natural Fiber-Based Mixtures, presented at ICBBM 2023-Austria, Vienna.
Off-the-Wall
Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning& Preservation
Developed with Emilie Kern

Located at a busy intersection in Mott Haven, Bronx, Off-the-Wall is a housing projects that looks into designing for rapid changes within an urban context. Starting from the land, the site has been through significant growth since the early occupation days of NYC. The site was once a marsh land that has been filled to accommodate population and industrial growth. Additionally, the site is on a flood risk zone. On a social scale, the Bronx is known for its racially and economically diverse population. Specifically around the South Bronx, many of the early population has been pushed out since the 1980s due to the lucrative housing needs and gentrification.

This housing project challenges the social and physical changes of the site. The project prioritizes the use of shared public spaces on different scales intended for future needs. On the smallest scale, the unit, a wall system is created to accommodate family growth. The wall which typically houses the HVAC system connects units. The unit in this case is a growing cell. On a residential scale, the shared spaces of the residents are equal to the size of their private units. The shared residential spaces is intended to accommodate the minimally sized private units. On a public scale, this projects looks
into creating access for the waterfront that is currently heavily privatized.

The ground floor is open for all public uses,
primarily for research on the marshes to
rehabilitate the ecological damage from the last
few decades on the area.The structure intends to
push past the current waterfront that is marked
by the train tracks carrying trash from NYC. This
project draws a connection between the growth of
an individual to the growth of the city.