The Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) has announced the art collective Floating Museum as the leading artistic team of CAB’s fifth edition, opening in September 2023. For this edition, titled “This is a Rehearsal”, the Biennial explores environmental, political, and economic issues present in today’s society, yet addressed differently around the world through art, architecture, infrastructure, and civic participation. The Floating Museum, a collective of artists, designers, poets, and educators, aims to push the CAB 5 exhibition and program model to prioritize presenting innovative ideas that could shape the future of architecture and design.
Floating Museum is organized to work at the intersection of disciplines, where civic participation inspires and shapes our process. We view this as a tremendous chance to coordinate exchanges between Chicago networks and practitioners around the world. We see this as a platform where work happening in Chicago can inform work happening elsewhere, and reciprocally, where work happening around the world can inspire work happening here.
- the Floating Museum
Co-directed by Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, Faheem Majeed, Andrew Schachman, and avery r. young, Floating Museum is focused on building connections between art, community, architecture, and public institutions. The collective’s ongoing work includes site-responsive art, design projects, and public programs. They aim to bring attention to divergent interpretations of history, infrastructure, and the role of aesthetics as a way of expanding our understanding of the environment and ourselves.
CAB was founded in 2015, and since then, it has become a platform designed to highlight and explore innovations in the fields of architecture, design, and visual arts. The non-profit organization is dedicated to producing year-round programs and a biennial exhibition of city-wide activations for a diverse audience of designers, educators, advocates, students, and local communities.
Programs for CAB 5 launch in November 2022, with a new event: the Chicago Design Summit. Led by the Floating Museum, the Summit will serve as a forum for research and the development of the CAB 5 program. This opportunity is a catalyst for collaboration and partnership, and it offers a platform for participants to share and respond to ideas related to the theme, “This is a Rehearsal”. A schedule of in-person and virtual programming—youth workshops, conversations, and community events—will continue throughout the coming year and will be available on CAB’s website.