We are pleased to present "Constructed Visions," an online survey of the influence and use of architecture in painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking. Works by eleven artists which span the years 1966-2019 exemplify the diverse representations and inspirations stemming from constructed designs.

Whether creating works with a formal focus, or one rooted in underlying societal implications, each artist presents a unique vision through the incorporation of built environments, either existing or imagined.

“I like to react instantaneously, If you spend too much time thinking, spontaneity goes out the window. Your first response to a painting is spontaneous. I thought mine should be too.”

— John Beech

"I am interested and saddened how ruins are being freshly born constantly. The idea of death and monument is the ultimate raw material in art."

— Huma Bhabha

“When film can create for the viewer feelings and intuitions, associations and discoveries, things that cannot be directly said, then it has poetic qualities. Not the false poetry of sentimental narrative, but the sharp present alert quality of light and the screen.”

— Nathaniel Dorsky

"More than half of Mandela's sentence was spent on Robben Island, a windswept rock surrounded by the treacherous seas of the Cape of Good Hope. Only seven miles off Cape Town, the island had been used as a maximum security prison for 'non-white' men since 1959...Mandela later said that Robben Island was 'intended to cripple us so that we should never again have the strength and courage to pursue our ideals.'"

— David Levi Strauss on Alfredo Jaar's The Sound of Silence

"I was doing so many empirical studies at the time, and the night paintings were one of a kind. There are so many different kinds of daylight and nightlight. I thought they should get equal attention."

— Alex Katz

"The bedcover is a symbolic site. It is where we are born, where we rest and love, where we dream and suffer and finally die. It keeps memories of the body alive, which result in another dimension."

— Kimsooja

"I started to look for a new model of humanity, one that would be linked to tradition, not out of a nostalgic desire for a return to the past, but to find something essential, archaic, original—and so close to humanity at any time."

— Adrian Paci

"Architecture is the embodiment of the contradiction of contemporary life. It illustrates the beauty of possibility and the crudeness of reality."

— Enoc Perez

"I am aiming not for a wholeness, but the continuous regeneration of perception with respect to one thing."

— David Rabinowitch

“I’m playing with the basic shape of the classic line drawing of a house; these are variations on distortions of a cube. Thin and simple threads gather the frail sticks of the cube and moments of fragile instability become translated into geometric forms of delicate beauty.”

— Su-Mei Tse

"I like to give the viewer different view points, I think it is not interesting when things have only one way of understanding. This in-between and oppositions allow the works different levels of reading and so to exist in time."

— Su-Mei Tse

"The print Fumarole is a spectacular black-and-white re-creation of storm-like cosmic activity occurring in the sky above the dark silhouette of the top of Roden Crater. Turrell believes his ideas about mapping relate to set theory. He likens what he did this group of prints to putting thought on a place."

— Phyllis Tuchman on James Turrell's series, Mapping Spaces