Bemis Center for Contemporary Art

Collapsing sites of production and sites of consumption of art.

Working with FACT (Fabrication And Construction Team), our student-staffed design-build lab at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Min Day designed a framework plan and multiple interventions for the Bemis Center, a contemporary art gallery with an artist-in-residence program. Our approach to this series of projects imagines the center not as a static container for art objects, but as a dynamic, transmutable landscape within which art and public discourse occurs. The Bemis is a social condenser. Following the institution’s goal to promote open dialog about art and civic engagement, we focus the diverse program around a series of public galleries, artist-designed rain gardens, vegetable gardens, and public outdoor spaces in the center of the former warehouse district. Offices and artists’ live-work studios have the requisite privacy and control, but also easy access to the public realm both indoors and outdoors.