SHELTER | Courtesy of the Artist
Open Labs: Corey Smith: SHELTER
Saturday, November 19, 7:00 pm-8:30pm
A work In-Process Performance by HCL Residency Artist Corey Smith
Presented by High Concept Labs and the Monira Foundation in Joint Residency at Mana Contemporary
SHELTER is a new performance from HCL Residency Artist Corey Smith that looks to the Architect Roger Margerum. Margerum was a pioneering figure — an African American working in a field that, to this day, is predominantly white. Born in Chicago in 1931, he attended the University of Illinois and worked at the legendary Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, before moving to Detroit in 1968. His architectural work, largely composed of residential buildings in Chicago and Detroit, displays an elegance of form and a characteristic sense of play. He died in 2016 at the age of 85.
SHELTER is a study of Margerum’s life and work, the impermanence of buildings, and the frailty of memory. The performance includes a new composition for trumpet and electronics — an attempted portrait of Margerum’s E. J. Ingram House in Woodlawn. This is an experiment in architectural interpretation that moves away from the didactic or analytical and toward the lyrical, the musical, and the phenomenological.
About the Artist
Corey Smith is a Michigan native and has compiled a body of work in the past seven years of performances, books, video pieces, essays — all thinking through Midwestern identity. He has toured his original work widely, including to Links Hall, the Detroit Fringe Festival, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House. He has performed and contributed sound design and composition in work by Every House Has a Door, Rough House Puppet Theater Company, the Suburban Piano Quartet, director Lindsey Barlag-Thornton and many others that has toured to Bath Fringe Festival, Steppenwolf Theater, Co-Prosperity, galleries and other sites. Corey has received an artist in residency at Light Box Detroit, the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, and Grin City and was twice awarded the City of Chicago Individual Artist Program grant. His longstanding project, The New Prairie School, has been featured by Architectural Digest. He holds an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He completed his undergraduate degree in Music Composition at the University of Michigan, where he studied under Kristin Kuster, Bright Sheng, Evan Chambers, and Holly Hughes.