The CORA Foundation Community Conversation with Rick Shaefer
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From left: Rick Shaefer, Rick Bell + Robin Jaffee Frank
Join MoCA/CT for an evening of conversation moderated by the Museum’s Executive Director, Robin Jaffee Frank, featuring artist Rick Shaefer; architect, educator, and urban-policy leader Rick Bell; and a select group of panelists. Bell heads the Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space at Columbia University and previously served as Assistant Commissioner at the New York City Department of Design and Construction. Together, the panel will explore the ideas behind Shaefer’s monumental charcoal drawings, including history, ambition, preservation, infrastructure, and the human impulse to build boundaries.
Shaefer’s drawings imagine the American landscape as a place altered by barriers, abandoned machinery, and signs of human control. Through his Colossi series, he places enormous walls in open landscapes, where they appear both ancient and strangely futuristic. These structures evoke familiar debates around borders, land use, and security, while also suggesting the failure of walls to resolve the larger fears that lead people to build them. His Baroque-inspired imagery and historical references link present-day concerns to older patterns of empire, territorial expansion, and the desire to control the natural world.
Drawing on Bell’s experience in architecture, public space, sustainable urbanization, and the changing urban landscape, the conversation will connect Shaefer’s work to questions of migration, environmental change, national identity, and exclusion. It will also consider preservation: What are we trying to protect when we preserve a landscape, a historical story, or an idea of national identity? Who may be left out in that process? The group will discuss the difference between caring for places and histories and using preservation as a reason to divide people.
Itinerary:
3:30pm — Doors open
3:50pm — Opening remarks from Robin Jaffee Frank
4:00pm — Program begins
4:50pm — Audience Q&A
5:00pm — Program concludes
The CORA Foundation sponsors this event, granting visitors free entry upon registration.
More Information
About Rick Bell
Rick Bell heads the Center for Buildings, Infrastructure and Public Space at Columbia
University. He previously served as Assistant Commissioner at the New York City Department
of Design and Construction. Rick also worked as Executive Director of the New York Chapter of
the American Institute of Architects where he was instrumental in the creation and animation of
the Center for Architecture on LaGuardia Place. He has been a practicing architect in New York,
France and Switzerland.
He has a Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of
Architecture, Preservation & Planning and a Bachelor’s degree in architecture and art history
from Yale. A Fellow of the AIA, he is a board member and past president of the
Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization. He is currently working on Green Cities Revisited:
2021-2026, about how ten cities, including New York, emerged from the COVID pandemic
through changes in the urban landscape.
About Rick Shaefer
“I tend to always come back to the line work,” says artist Rick Shaefer. “I find what I respond to and admire in other artists’
work, past or present, is usually the integrity of the line – whether it’s a single stroke or a mass of
scribble in the shadows. If the marks are put down with validity and assurance they will resonate
and the piece will vibrate. False or uneasy notes stand out and unsettle and even demoralize. A
confident fluidity of movement and gesture is what is consciously and unconsciously felt and
appreciated by the viewer. At least that is how I respond to a work.”
Shaefer is a two time recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, several Connecticut
Office of the Arts grant and fellowship awards, and has works in public and private collection
About Robin Jaffee Frank
Robin Jaffee Frank, PhD, is an art historian specializing in American visual culture whose career spans senior curatorial leadership, academic teaching, and museum administration. She formerly served as chief curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, and curator in American paintings and sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven. Robin has organized exhibitions that toured museums nationally, lectured extensively, published widely, and secured significant public and private funding. She brings strategic vision and institutional stewardship to advancing MoCA\CT’s mission and is excited to have the opportunity to deepen the museum’s engagement with artists, audiences, and the community. She earned her doctorate at Yale University.
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