Reimagining Beauty: Creating Living Public Space, a conversation with Michael Singer

The University of Oregon’s John Yeon Center with executive director, Randy Gragg present 2015 Spring Lecture Series A New City Beautiful:  Landscape + Infrastructure = Public Space.  Join Gragg on May 18 for a conversation with artist and principal designer of Michael Singer Studio at the Portland Art Museum.

Free and open to the public.  No advance tickets.  Seating is first come, first served.

From exquisitely intimate garden pavilions to major waste facilities for cities including Phoenix and large-scale parks like the West Palm Beach Waterfront, Michael Singer has applied his skills and ability to innovate space to scale of landscape and urban planning.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Singer’s work opened new possibilities for outdoor and indoor sculpture and contributed to the definition of site-specific art and the reimagining of public places. From the 1990s to the present, his work has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape, and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological renewal. Singer has also been engaged in the rethinking of infrastructure facilities and systems in the United States and Europe; he is coauthor of Infrastructure and Community, published by the Environmental Defense Fund.

Singer has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His works are part of public collections in the United States and abroad, including, in New York alone, the Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has had several one-person shows, notably at the Guggenheim Museum and most recently in 2011-2012 at the Utzon Center in Aalborg and the Danish Architectural Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The University of Oregon’s John Yeon Center is devoted to inspiring rigorous thinking and public dialogue about design and conservation through public discussions and with the preservation and programming of the Watzek House, The Shire, and the Cottrell House.