Occupancy

Organized around five themes – Ongoing Relations | Footprints | Labor and Trades | Migratory Desires | Polymaths – the exhibition celebrates the opening of the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the MET) and considers occupancy as a condition: how do we inhabit, shape, and form relationships with the places and people around us, and how do our stories intertwine with those who came before?

Occupancy presents key questions for our moment, asking how we inhabit the planet, inquiring into the many occupations that go into making a building habitable, charting human desires to migrate to better sites, and exploring ongoing relationships with communities. It draws inspiration from Rooms, the inaugural 1976 exhibition at MoMA PS1, in which artists filled the spaces of a former public school with installations, transforming the building into a new center for contemporary art. Here, the MET's public spaces become Commons: shared sites for exploring the transition from arrival to homecoming. Occupancy aims to highlight the unique possibilities that come with sharing a new home where scholars, architects, planners, artists, students, and designers can call and respond to intertwined questions about laying down roots. Whether looking to the past, casting a future, or both at once, the works in the exhibition invite viewers to reflect on what it means to make a space one's own.

This exhibition was produced collaboratively through an open call to the SA+P community, led by the MET Commons Committee, with curatorial stewardship by Caroline A. Jones, SA+P Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives, and Mehveş Lelic, Head of Exhibitions and Programs for the MET Commons, with Selby Nimrod developing the early framework for the exhibition.   Polymaths was produced by the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) and curated by Roi Salgueiro Barrio.