McHale Fellow a Master of Stunning Collaborations

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- James Cathcart, the 2005 John and Magda McHale Fellow at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, is an architect, artist, designer and planner of national and international museums, public institutions and events. He is known as well for his exhibition design and intriguing interactive installations.

Cathcart will present a free public lecture on Nov. 9 at 5:30 p.m. in 301 Crosby on the UB South (Main Street) Campus.

He will spend his fall residency term teaching in the school's Graduate Program in Architecture, and his work will be exhibited in the James Dyett Gallery in Hayes Hall on the South Campus from Nov. 7 to Dec. 2. The gallery is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Cathcart is a member of Ralph Applebaum Associates, the largest interpretive museum design firm in the world. While best known by the public for his work on the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., his projects are widely published and have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States.

He has spent time at the UB School of Architecture and Planning as a visiting critic, and for more than 15 years has collaborated with Frank Fantauzzi, associate professor of architecture at UB, and Toronto architect Terence van Elslander in creating innovative installations and other art works relative to the "act" of building.

Their projects have included the installation of portable toilets in the facade of New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture, the arresting and beautiful "giant solid" and "giant void" constructed from 4,600 shipping palettes and exhibited at Buffalo's Big Orbit Gallery, and Slump (Building Code) in which 20,000 discarded shoes were used as building material.

The group's Web site says its work "dissects the projection of space and reveals the root relations of building," they write, "We work in specific situation and material. Our work is performative. The process of doing, the social, empirical, conceptual framework of the project, is the meaning of our work."

Cathcart, like Fantauzzi and Van Elslander, is an alumnus of both the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Capp Street Project, a nationally recognized artist-in-residence program dedicated to the production of site-specific installations.

Although strongly conceptual, their work engages the public, a primary function of architecture. A cross-section of their many projects was published in 2003 in "Gravity" in Pamphlet Architect 25, one of a series of illustrated books published by the Princeton Architectural Press.

"Iceberg Project," an online archive of their collaborations, includes the majestic "Big Bronze Book" Project devoted to the preservation and explication of Buffalo's architectural past, which can be "read" online at the project Web site at http://www.icebergproject.org/.

Cathcart also has worked for several years with American installation artist Grahame Weinbren, who was among the first artists to work with interactive moving image technologies.

Their collaborative projects include the interactive installation "March II" at http://www.grahameweinbren.net/March/march.html; "Tunnel," an environmental cinema installation in a 90-foot tunnel suspended 20 feet above the ground in the machine room of the Zollern coal mine in Dortmund, Germany, and the interactive installation "Frames" for the NTT-ICC Biennial in Tokyo.

Cathcart received a fellowship in architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Emerging New York Young Sculptor Fellowship from the Greenwall Foundation. He has lectured and exhibited at numerous venues nationally and internationally, including the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the Industriemuseum in Dortmund, Germany.