FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 2008

MEDIA CONTACTS
Erin Baldwin 312.397.3828 ebaldwin@mcachicago.org
Karla Loring 312.397.3834 kloring@mcachicago.org
Sarah Wambold 312.397.3832 swambold@mcachicago.org
Images: www.mcachicago.org/media


BUCKMINSTER FULLER: STARTING WITH THE UNIVERSE
March 14 - June 21, 2009




MEDIA PREVIEW ON FRIDAY, MARCH 13, AT 10 AM

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it. -- R. Buckminster Fuller, "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (1969)

This spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, the first major American exhibition in decades devoted to the visionary mind and work of Buckminster Fuller, and the most inclusive show to date of Fuller’s work. On view from March 14 to June 21, 2009, the show is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art with the cooperation of the Fuller family.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the great American creative thinkers of the 20th century. Philosopher, forecaster, designer, poet, inventor, and advocate of alternative energy, Fuller is probably best known as the originator of the geodesic dome, but his theories and innovations engaged fields ranging from mathematics, engineering, and environmental science to literature, architecture, and visual art. Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers and made no distinction between these spheres as discrete areas of investigation. He devoted much of his life to closing the gap between the sciences and the humanities, a schism he felt prevented a comprehensive view of the world. He believed in the significant interconnectedness of all things and concluded that certain basic structures and systems underlie everything in our world.

Today, his prophetic concepts are a touchstone for discussions of issues including environmental conservation, the manufacture and distribution of housing, and global organization of information. Fuller’s concepts are ripe for reexamination by artists, architects, designers, scientists, and poets among others. As Whitney curators Michael Hays and Dana Miller write in their catalogue introduction, “Fuller sought to produce comprehensive anticipatory design solutions that would benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the fewest resources…Starting as he did from the universe and ending up with visual-spatial models with which to ponder universal philosophical problems in the here and now, it is not surprising that Fuller has had a tremendous impact on the visual arts and architecture. His sensibilities and modes of working were deeply aesthetic and many of his closest friends and supporters were artists." Fuller’s concepts are ripe for reexamination by artists, architects, designers, scientists, and poets among others.

This exhibition offers an opportunity to study the pioneering thinking of an intensely passionate, prolific, and idiosyncratic individual. It includes original examples of Fuller’s important works from both private and public collections, among them the models of the Wichita House; the Tetrascroll portfolio; several geodesic study models from the Special Collections Research Center of the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale; as well as numerous sketches, notebooks, and other artifacts. Many of the artifacts and documents in the show are from the R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at the Stanford University Libraries.

Elizabeth Smith, the MCA's James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, and Tricia Van Eck, Curatorial Coordinator and Curator of Artist's Books, organized the Chicago presentation of the exhibition which includes numerous additional photographs, documents, and archival materials that relate to Fuller's presence in Chicago and downstate Illinois where he lived and worked for many years. These materials are from the collections of the Chicago History Museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), the Special Collections Research Center of the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, the Graham Foundation, the Union Tank Car Company, the Missouri History Museum, and Allegra Fuller Snyder, Fuller's daughter.

About Buckminster Fuller:

Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. was born on July 12, 1895, in Massachusetts, to an old New England family. His great-aunt was the transcendentalist feminist writer Margaret Fuller, co-founder, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the magazine The Dial. Spending summers on Bear Island, off the coast of Maine, Fuller experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. He entered Harvard in 1913, but was expelled, returned to the university the following year, and left again, without ever graduating. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917. Fuller served in the U.S. Naval Reserves and the U.S. Navy in World War I as a shipboard radio operator, an editor for a Navy publication, and a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he worked in meat-packing, where he acquired management experience. In the early 1920s he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing lightweight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing.

In 1922, Fuller lost his first child, Alexandra, shortly before her fourth birthday, to complications from polio and spinal meningitis. A few years later, he was ousted as president of the Chicago franchise of the Stockade Midwest Corporation by new owners and took a job as a flooring salesman. In 1927, jobless and destitute, Fuller considered taking his own life by drowning in Lake Michigan, but later said that he decided at the last moment to embark on his "Guinea Pig B" experiment -- "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity." In 1929 he displayed his 4D house at Marshall Fields, where the word “Dymaxion” was invented.

Dymaxion -- derived from the words dynamic, maximum, and tension (corrected by C. Crane, there is much proof that the word "ION" was not the derivitive of the ION ending of the word Dymaxion. The ION ending came from the the last 3 letters of the word TENS-ION, a word that Fuller used VERY often) -- was his new form of housing that was inexpensive, efficient, and portable which he used throughout his career. During the 1930s and 40s, Fuller designed his Dymaxion cars and houses using similar technology and materials. He collaborated with the copper company Phelps Dodge Corporation on prototypes of the Dymaxion Bathroom, an easily installed, lightweight, four-part unit Fuller envisioned incorporating into Dymaxion Houses. In 1933 and 1934 the Dymaxion car was displayed at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago.

Fuller developed friendships with a number of artists including Isamu Noguchi. After he took a teaching position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught for two summers in 1948 and 1949, he encountered Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Richard Lippold, and Kenneth Snelson. The first summer, Fuller played the lead in Erik Satie’s play The Ruse of Medusa, organized by Cage and directed by Arthur Penn. It featured Cunningham and Elaine de Kooning, and employed props and sets by Ruth Asawa and the de Koonings.

In 1948, he taught at Chicago’s Institute of Design where he worked with students to develop a sustainable home. At Black Mountain College, with the support of a group of professors and students, Fuller continued his work on the autonomous dwelling unit, which developed into the project at IIT that would make him famous -- the geodesic dome. In 1949, he erected the world’s first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years, there were thousands of domes around the world.

The growing recognition that Fuller enjoyed in the 1950s reached a crescendo in the mid-1960s. Throughout this period and for the rest of his life, he contributed a wide range of ideas, designs, and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. Fuller wrote several books in short succession and was the subject of extensive press coverage, including a 1964 Time cover story and a profile by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker, in 1966.

Fuller taught and lectured at hundreds of universities, primarily at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where much of his research about the global allocation of resources used in The World Game took place. He contributed writings to numerous publications and had his work exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the world. In 1967, Fuller and Shoji Sadao created his most complicated and largest dome for the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. He was awarded 28 U.S. patents and many honorary doctorates and received the Medal of Freedom, as well as the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects, among numerous other awards. Fuller died on July 1, 1983, at the age of 87.

Publication
Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe
A comprehensive, fully illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition. The curators, Michael Hays and Dana Miller, in addition to writing the introduction together, have each contributed an essay. Antoine Picon and Elizabeth Smith offer two essays on Fuller’s impact, the former placing him within the history of utopian thought and the emergence of a society of information and communication, and the latter illuminating several of the important ways in which Fuller’s impact is manifested in today’s contemporary art. Calvin Tomkins’s seminal 1966 New Yorker profile of Fuller is reprinted, which perhaps more than any other article from Fuller’s lifetime captures the international figure at the height of his creative powers, while also drawing an intimate portrait. The catalogue is rounded out by a contextual chronology by Jennie Goldstein, which reminds us that although Fuller was a singular individual, he was always part of the historical fabric of his time. The catalogue is co-published and distributed by Yale University Press.

Lectures
Growing Up: Buckminster Fuller
Saturday, March 14, 2 pm, MCA Theater; $10 ($8 MCA members)
Born in Chicago the year her father Buckminster Fuller transformed his whole life, Allegra Fuller Snyder reflects on his formative years and her own experience growing up with him, the people who seeded so much of his work, and his lasting legacy as a visionary and a great teacher. Her talk will be followed by a discussion with exhibition cocurators K. Michael Hays and Dana A. Miller about Fuller’s significance for today’s world and his impact on the fields of art and architecture. Allegra Fuller Snyder is Professor Emerita of Dance and former Director of the Graduate Program in Dance Ethnology at UCLA. K. Michael Hays is Adjunct Curator of Architecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor of Architectural Theory at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Dana A. Miller is Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Tickets available from the MCA Box Office at 312.397.4010 or online at www.mcachicago.org

Kate Stohr on Architecture for Humanity
Tuesday, March 31, 6 pm, MCA Theater; $10 ($8 MCA and Chicago Women in Architecture members)
Co-presented by Chicago Women in Architecture
Kate Stohr is the Managing Director and co-founder of Architecture for Humanity (AFH), a non-profit volunteer organization that promotes solutions to global social and humanitarian crises through architecture and design. She co-edited the book Design Like You Give a Damn (Metropolis Books, 2006). Stohr describes how AFH encourages locally-inspired designs and enables these solutions to be shared and freely adapted by all through an international network of professionals and innovative uses of open-source technology. Call MCA Box Office at 312.397.4010 or order online at www.mcachicago.org
This program has been made possible by the generous contributors to the Allen M. Turner Tribute Fund, honoring his past leadership as Chairman of the MCA Board of Trustees.

Gallery Talks
Saturdays, 11 am - 12:15 pm, fourth-floor lobby, free with suggested general admission
Artists, filmmakers, designers, architects, ecologists, anthropologists, and educators consider Fuller’s legend­ary work and enduring influence in thematic explorations of the exhibition.
April 4 - Artist Iñigo Manglano Ovalle and architect Doug Garofalo on the post-Fuller effect
April 25 - Filmmaker Deborah Stratman and landscape architect Eric Ellingsen on geometry
May 30 - Artist Michael Rakowitz and design anthropologist Elizabeth Tunstall on success and failure
June 6 - Artist Christine Tarkowski and bioinsti­gator/ ecologist Nance Klehm on unwavering principles
June 13 - Industrial designer Steve Belletire on the life cycle of products
These talks are made possible through a generous gift to the Chicago Contemporary Campaign by the Marshall Frankel Education Fund and The Barr Fund.

Tour
Tricia Van Eck, MCA Curatorial Coordinator and Curator of Artist's Books, leads a tour of the exhibition on Tuesday, April 7, at noon in the galleries.

Family Program
Dymaxion Family Day
Sunday, March 15, 11 am - 3 pm; Free for families with children ages 12 and under
This month only, Family Day moves to Sunday. Take part in these fun experiments inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller. Kids can create three-dimensional play environments, re-create the artist’s famous dome with their favorite shapes, and mix and match to invent new combinations of words and images.

Target Family Days are supported by Target. Support for Family Programs is provided in part through the Women’s Board Family Education Initiative. Additional sup­port is generously provided by Seyfarth Shaw LLP.


Related Chicago Program
Sailing Spaceship Earth: Buckminster Fuller’s Environmentalism
April 22, 2008, 12:15 pm, Free and open to the public
Chicago Architecture Foundation (John Buck Company Lecture Hall Gallery, 224 S. Michigan Ave)
In connection with the Buckminster Fuller exhibition, Sean Keller, Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Illinois Institute of Technology, considers Buckminster Fuller’s contradictory vision of the environment, technology, and politics. For more information please call 312.922.3432 x 224 or visit www.architecture.org

# # #


Images (top to bottom): Buckminster Fuller, Model of Dymaxion Dwelling Machines community, ca. 1946, refabricated 2008. Photograph by Patrick Hobgood, Iannis Kandyliaris, and Ilias Papageorgiou.

R. Buckminster Fuller, 4d Dymaxion House, project, ca. 1927, recreated 1987. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of the Smithsonian Institute Traveling Exhibition Services and Champion International Corp., 1988. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller with models of Standard of Living Package and Skybreak Dome, 1949.Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminster Fuller, U.S. Pavilion Montreal Expo 67, 1967. Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.

This exhibition is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in association with the Department of Special Collections of the Stanford University Libraries. Major support is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art in honor of Linda Pace, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Atwater Kent Foundation, and The Solow Art and Architecture Foundation. Support for the Chicago presentation is generously provided by Richard A. Lenon, Sylvia Neil and Daniel Fischel, The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Brian Herbstritt, and Judith Neisser. Air transportation is provided by American Airlines, the Official Airline of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA) is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization accredited by the American Association of Museums. The MCA is generously supported by its Board of Trustees, individual and corporate members, private and corporate foundations, and government agencies including the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. The Chicago Park District generously supports MCA programs. Air transportation is provided by American Airlines, the Official Airline of the Museum of Contemporary Art. The MCA is located at 220 E. Chicago Avenue, one block east of Michigan Avenue. The museum and sculpture garden are open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm and Tuesday from 10 am to 8 pm. The museum is closed on Monday. Enjoy free admission every Tuesday generously sponsored by Target. Suggested general admission is $10 for adults and $6 for students and seniors. Children 12 years of age and under, MCA members, and members of the military are admitted free. Information about MCA exhibitions, programs, and special events is available on the MCA website at www.mcachicago.org or by telephone at 312.280.2660.