Happenings

Welcome to Stone Quarry’s Happenings. Here, you will find a variety of activities and practices we call Happenings*, such as events, interviews, exhibitions, and artist-led workshops. We believe that every experience at Stone Quarry, in-person and virtually, is a happening. From viewing the current works on-site, attending an artist-led experience, reading an interview with a visiting artist, watching an organic farmer hay the fields in late summer, to walking a trail resplendent with mosses and wildlife, every day is an event.

We believe that everyone deserves access to art and the outdoors and we invite you to engage one’s senses, encounter a different perspective, and reveal a multiplicity of voices.

Enjoy and visit again soon for future happenings.

* We borrow the term “happening” from artist Allan Kaprow. Happenings in their original context comprised “works from the 1950 and 1960s that were unique, unrehearsed events, often combining elements of theater, music, and the visual arts. Usually nonverbal, they may incorporate visual, tactile, and olfactory responses, chance, and audience participation.” (Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Getty Research Institute: https://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/)

Join us on Thursday, August 12, from 6-8pm for Rooms for Birth: Designing Spaces for Reproduction, a presentation and panel discussion by architect and scholar Lori Brown.

Architect and scholar Lori Brown will present her work Birthing in Alabama: Designing Spaces for Reproduction, an invited installation with Dr. Yashica Robinson and Patricia Cafferky, is a part of the current “Making Home— Design Triennial” at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. The project explores the history of birth in Alabama as a means to make visible the various systems that affect doctors, nurses, midwives ability to provide access to safe and affordable reproductive healthcare across the state. This work reveals ongoing inequities in Alabama born from economics, race, public policy, and geographies of access.

The footprints of three birthing rooms in Alabama and New York are demarcated by mowed grass on Stone Quarry's grounds. This installation builds upon Lori's earlier work and focuses solely on the rooms for birth in birthing facilities and hospitals. Walking within the space of mowed grass, the participant experiences the scale and scope of a birthing facility birth room. Although not that different dimensionally, the Alabama Department of Health codes required birthing facilities to be like hospitals. These restrictions made it virtually impossible to meet the needs of rural communities across the state.

Lori Brown’s creative practice examines the relationships between architecture and social justice with particular emphasis on gender and its impact upon spatial relationships. She is the author of Contested Spaces: Abortion Clinics, Women’s Shelters and Hospitals, the editor of Feminist Practices: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Women in Architecture and the forthcoming Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960-2020 co-edited with Dr. Karen Burns, and most recently an invited participant in this year’s Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum’s Design Triennial "Making Home.” Brown is co-founder and leads ArchiteXX, a gender equity in architecture organization in New York City. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a 2021 Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices recipient, a Distinguished Professor at the School of Architecture Syracuse University, and a registered architect in New York state.

2023 Happenings

2022 Happenings

2021 Happenings

2020 Happenings