April 19, Art Historian and Professor at the University College Dublin, Kathleen James-Chakraborty spoke to SCAD students about Denise Scott-Brown and Zaha Hadid, two prominent female architects.
James-Chakraborty’s presentation was part of the School of Building Arts’ current lecture series entitled “Global Practice: Shift your Perspective.” She discussed migration as a common theme in these two very different artists’ lives and how it enabled them to create the work they did.
James-Chakraborty explained that her interest in this topic began with her local studies in Ireland. She said, “most of the experiments with abstractions in Ireland early on were done by women – in fact, all of them, in architecture or in painting. In that sense, the women were out in front, because they had been to Paris. So I started thinking about that and became interested in this theme of migration.”
During her lecture, James-Chakraborty explained how women had often been denied this ability to travel, which hindered them as artists throughout history because they were not able to view or learn from other art pieces or cultures. She said that as this restriction was lifted, female artists made improvements in style and technique and gained renown that can be tied directly to their travels. She said, “a disproportionate number of the most successful women in the visual arts – at least since the 18th century – have been migrants.”
She links migration directly to modern architecture, especially in the cases of Hadid and Scott-Brown. James-Chakraborty said, “Moving from South Africa to London to Philadelphia in Scott-Brown’s case, and from Baghdad to London in Hadid’s, was crucial to their careers. It took them from places that were central to the practices of modern architecture in their girlhood, to places that fostered the theoretical discourse about it when they were young women.”
Hardships and alienation often accompany immigration and James-Chakraborty believes these elements were crucial in stimulating the women’s art, as well as their characters. She said, “[migration] also wrenched them away from the gender conventions of the cultures into which they were born while leaving them relatively independent of those of their adopted homelands. In which they remained always slightly alien and left them unusually adept at working in cultural context aside those typical for the artists who had remained behind.”
Discussing this theme in the light of Zaha Hadid is extremely relevant, as the renowned architect died on March 31. James-Chakraborty said that Hadid pushed modern architecture, and the tools of the modern world, to their limits. “Lead industrialists repeatedly turned to her for her vision of the new,” she said during the lecture.
In a private interview, James-Chakraborty said that migration was not the only interest that brought this lecture into being. “Years ago I decided that, when I wasn’t invited to speak about a specific topic that I would aggressively figure out ways to speak about women,” she said. “There were lots of good stories out there and they aren’t told often enough, and they aren’t central enough to the narrative.”
She used Scott-Brown’s major work, Learning from Las Vegas, as an example of this issue. She said, “I can’t tell you how many times – thousands of times, at this point in my life – I’ve seen the book that she co-authored, that’s really more her ideas than his, described as [Robert] Venturi’s, without the fact that there were three authors on it, and she was certainly the dominant author.” James-Chakraborty then reiterated her point, saying, “I think until it’s really clear that the work of women is labeled as theirs – and when they’re collaborations, as often as its labeled as the men’s with whom they’re collaborating – that we still have to make sure the story gets told.”
James-Chakraborty also cited the decline in female architects as an element that inspired this new realm of study. She said, “to be honest, in the 1970s, there was so much change happening so fast that I thought it was going to continue that way for the rest of my life. And it’s been somewhat disconcerting to have women students facing some of the same obstacles, with less of that sense of optimism sometimes.”
James-Chakraborty said because of this gradual change, and the mindset accompanying it, it’s important to talk about inspirational artists like Denise Scott-Brown and Zaha Hadid. Finally, she added, “And, in an ideal world, you wouldn’t need them to be inspirational because of their gender, but we haven’t really gotten to that point yet.”
Written by Shelby Loebker.
