Join us at Intuit Art Museum for a talk with Gabrielle Christiansen as we explore artist-built environments — spaces transformed by self-taught artists to reflect their personal stories, surroundings and cultures — as key architectural experiments in private property landscapes. Focusing on art environment builders such as Aldo Piacenza, whose work is currently on view in the Museum’s Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-taught Art exhibition, Christiansen will explore what we can learn from the creative reuse and building strategies these artists use in response to mass migration, the housing crisis and environmental collapse. Together, we’ll consider what these deeply personal spaces reveal about resilience, imagination and the meaning of place.

Gabrielle Christiansen is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University and the Douglass Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she studies 20th century artist-built environments of the United States. Her dissertation project, titled ​“Salvage Reworlding Along the Renewal Frontier,” considers conflicting theories of land use, material value, and public art aesthetics which have emerged through decisions to preserve or demolish uncommissioned artist-built environments on private property. 

Artist-Built Environments: Reimagining Placemaking in Times of Crisis is presented as part of the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Opening September 19, 2025 and on view through February 28, 2026 at locations across Chicago, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change engages timely global issues through the lens of architecture and design.

Learn more at chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org.