Beth Weinstein
States of Exception (2018). Photo: Anna McGrath
Beth M. Weinstein (BFA Syracuse, MArch Columbia GSAPP, PhD UTasmania) is an architect, artist, educator and researcher. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions of her work include Performing Spatial Labour (2019, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart), Palimpsest (2019, Un Lieu pour Réspirer, Les Lilas-Paris), States of Exception (2018, Cité Internationale des Arts/Jeu de Paume, 2018) and the 2015 and 2018 Arizona Biennials. She received the NY Architectural League’s Young Architect’s Award and has been awarded artist residencies through the Académie d'Architecture, the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Bundanon Trust (New South Wales), and the Casa de Velazquez (Madrid).
Beth has lectured internationally and published extensively on performativity in and of public space, theater architecture, and scenography, including essays in the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Places, Performance Research (PRJ), Journal of Artistic Research (JAR), the Architect’s Newspaper, Metropolis and Dance Ink. She has contributed chapters to Performing Architectures: Contemporary Projects, Practices and Pedagogies; The Routledge Companion to Scenography; Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Prague Quadrennial; and Architecture as a Performing Art. She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Routledge Journal of Theater + Performance Design, and previously served on the editorial board of the JAE. She co-chairs Performance Studies international's Performance+Design working group. She co-edited Ground|Water: the Art, Design and Science of a Dry River (2012), and is currently working on a book titled Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2022-3), building upon her research that resulted in the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition (2011-14).
She began teaching in the 1997 and has taught undergraduate and graduate design studios; history, theory and techniques of representation; building technologies; and workshops/seminars exploring performance, politics and public space. Recent pedagogical projects explored how urban spaces invisible-ize, how states of exception curtail rights of assembly, and to critically question architecture through the lens of the anthropocene. She has taught at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA), Confluence Institute and Columbia University in Paris, as well as Columbia’s GSAPP, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and Parsons/The New School for Design. She is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Arizona as well as faculty affiliate with UA’s Arizona Institutes for Resilience, the School of Art and Social Cultural and Critical Theory Graduate Interdisciplinary Program.
Practice Statement
In her practice and research, Beth Weinstein (RA, PhD) moves between the architectural and performative and works across scales from drawing and installation to landscape and urban interventions. Her performance-installations invite publics to make sense of critical issues such as climate catastrophe and species die-off, invisible labor and spaces that invisibl-ize, protest and public space. Her practice-based doctoral research explored how architecture’s instruments (text, drawings and models) can operate forensically and how performances of spatial labor employing these instruments can render ‘sensible’ (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. She continues to ask what forms of architecture, and associated invisibilities, are produced through executive order and under states of exception. Beth is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Arizona, and Faculty Affiliate with the UA’s Arizona Institutes for Resilience, School of Art, and Social Cultural and Critical Theory Graduate Interdisciplinary Program.