Marion Mahony Griffin: Discuss 

Born in Chicago in 1871, Marion Lucy Mahony was the daughter of Jeremiah Mahony, an emigrant from Cork, and Clara Hamilton from New Hampshire. She was the second woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture. Early in her professional life she worked in Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Oak Park studio, developing the drawing style through which many of Wright‘s Prairie Houses were presented. 

With her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, she entered and won the international town planning competition for Canberra in 1911. The couple moved to Australia and later to India, designing and constructing important buildings and urban landscapes until Griffin‘s death in 1937. Returning to Chicago, Mahony Griffin wrote and compiled a four–volume memoir entitled ‘The Magic of America‘. A rich collage of published texts, diary entries, memories of discussions, newspaper clippings, drawings, and photographs, it was never published. Mahony Griffin died in 1961. 

Organised around a large table, this exhibition seeks to spatialise ‘The Magic of America‘ as an open-ended discursive environment that blurs the boundaries between the realms of domesticity, work, art and nature. During a curatorial residency in the IAF that began in January, Sarah Sheridan and Brian Ward opened a conversation about Mahony Griffin by inviting experts from various disciplines to a series of book-clubs to discuss ‘The Magic of America’ and selected writings about her. 

Come & join the discussion on Thursday 18 July for an open chat about the impact and legacy of her work and life.

Bring the lil’ ones to join in the fun with drawing and collage on Saturday 27 July for a free kid’s workshop