July 28, 2026 12:00pm EDT
American architect Bruce Goff (1904–1982) is best known for his independent vision, embracing organic forms and unconventional materials in his work spanning architecture, painting, and music. An autodidact who began as a teenage architectural apprentice in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he designed over 500 projects in his over six-decade long career. The range and depth of his varied artistic influences and output, anchored by key objects that he owned, are on display in the recent exhibition “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds” at the Art Institute of Chicago. In this talk, Craig Lee unpacks the dynamic interplay between curatorial and archival collections, as they are marshalled together to mount a major retrospective about a creative life—an approach informed by his previous time at Fallingwater.
About the Presenters
Craig Lee
Craig Lee is an assistant curator in Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a co-curator and co-editor of the exhibition and catalogue “Bruce Goff: Material Worlds.” Other past projects have included work on architects Charles Moore and Helmut Jahn, in addition to writings on Denise Scott Brown, Edgar Miller, and histories of outdoor advertising and commercial signage. Previously he has held fellowships at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville Arkansas, and Museum of the City of New York. In the summer of 2012, he was the Judy Cheteyan Collections Intern at Fallingwater.