Richard Buckminster Fuller’s retrospective, “Inventions and Models” is currently on view at the Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Los Angeles, through November 3, 2018. The exhibition gives a peek into Fuller’s perspective on the world and humanity.

Fuller (1895-1983) is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century and his ability to think across disciplines, connecting the worlds of science, engineering, architecture, design, and art was one of his most important and lasting contributions....

Famed for inventing the geodesic dome, R. Buckminster Fuller also re-imagined housing, transportation, mapping, engineering, and construction systems. Thirty-five years after his passing in Los Angeles, Edward Cella Art & Architecture presents R. Buckminster Fuller: Inventions and Models, an exhibition of original prints, models, and objects by the 20th-century visionary, affectionately known as Bucky Fuller.

On Saturday, Sept. 22 at 3 pm, Thomas T.K. Zung, partner of Buckminster Fuller, Sadao & Zung Architects will give illustrated talk on Fuller’s life and work. And coming up on Saturday, Oct. 13, his daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder, longtime dancer as well as founder of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, will discuss its current projects with Board President David McConville.

Often called the “Leonardo da Vinci of our time,” Buckminster Fuller wasn’t just an architect. As an inventor, artist and engineer, his futuristic, revolutionary designs are perhaps more relevant today than ever before. A new exhibition and the first of its kind in the Los Angeles area, Richard Buckminster Fuller: Inventions and Models at Edward Cella Art & Architecture gallery, examines some of his most important inventions and cultural contributions, including his prefabricated housing designs and Dymaxion maps.

American artist David Horvitz, whose works often juxtapose man-made systems and natural phenomena, has created Señalamiento del cielo (Signaling the Sky), a series of performances that encourage public participation – especially by children – as the work is realized by the release of 200 helium balloons in each of three locations. The spontaneous route of each balloon string as it disappears into the air is an homage to the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who spent a little-known sojourn in Buenos Aires from 1918 to 1919. During this period, the godfather of conceptual art sent his sister instructions for a work he titled Unhappy Readymade: hang a geometry book on a clothesline and subject it to fluctuating weather conditions. Similarly pairing arithmetic (each balloon string is exactly one mile long) with unpredictable forces, Señalamiento del cielo (Signaling the Sky) illustrates man’s sublime futility in the face of nature. The aerial landscape produced by the balloons is a celebration of collective ritual and at the same time a rejection of the industrial city, as our eyes are drawn irresistibly toward the sky. The title is a reference to Argentinian conceptual artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo‘s Señalamientos series, which invites the public to perceive everyday objects as readymades.

This artwork has been realized with assistance from the Ministry of Ambient and Public Space of the City of Buenos Aires. Special thanks to Indura.

Known for his vast installations and sculptures about signs, symbols, and the way they produce meaning in a world saturated with images, Matt Mullican is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Pirelli HangarBicocca museum in Milan. With that show in mind, republished below is Peter Clothier’s profile of Mullican, which first ran in the Summer 1989 issue of ARTnews. The article focuses on the artist as he readies a large-scale project that involved using computers to create networks of symbols. “I like that idea—an engine generating meaning,” Mullican told Clother. The article, reprinted with the permission of the author, follows in full below. —Alex Greenberger

Drawings and maquettes by Buckminster Fuller prove that he predicted current global issues, and demonstrate how he proposed to solve them, according to the curator of an upcoming exhibition about the late inventor.

The projects to be displayed in the Richard Buckminster Fuller, Inventions and Models exhibition – which opens at Edward Cella Art + Architecture in Los Angeles next month – present forward-thinking solutions for affordable housing and transport that make "the most with the least".

An exhibit celebrating the work of late American architect-inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller opens in Los Angeles next week. Here's eight of his futuristic designs, including "autonomous" prefab houses with bulging windows, an underwater island and a pared-back rowing boat.

This September, Edward Cella Art & Architecture will present R. Buckminster Fuller: Inventions and Models, an exhibition highlighting original prints, models, and other objects created by 20th century architect, engineer, inventor, and artist R. Buckminster Fuller.  

An upcoming exhibition at the Edward Cella Art & Architecture in Los Angeles will display a rarely seen selection of original drawings, screen-prints, models, and objects by late American architect R. Buckminster Fuller. The exhibition, which will be accompanied by two public programs—organized and presented in collaboration with the Buckminster Fuller Institute—will be the first of its kind to be displayed in LA. The show will open Sept. 8 and will end Nov. 3.

In his installation, From There to Here, Stephen Berens draws viewers to the center of the gallery. In the middle of the space, on a large two-foot high white rectangular plinth sit four round cast bronze cannonballs and three cast bronze frisbees. Entitled Projectiles (2018) they reference relics from the 1860s and 1960s. To think of frisbees as projectiles is a bit unusual, yet when viewed in the context of Stephen Berens' exhibition, it makes perfect sense. A frisbee is a flying disk that became an iconic symbol of fun and freedom for the American Counter Culture movement of the late 1960s. When the frisbees are juxtaposed with Civil War era cannonballs, they become the yin and yang of relics. One is a symbol of peace and frivolity, the other a symbol of the fight for civil rights and fraternal war.