School of Architecture Professor’s Cultural Laboratory Invited to 61st Venice Biennale

Denniston Hill a not-for-profit arts residency and creative laboratory in the Catskills co-founded by Associate Professor Lawrence Chua.

The exhibition’s focus on “Schools,” including Denniston Hill, underscores a significant aspect of the selection. Within Kouoh’s curatorial framework, these entities are understood not as formal institutions, but as ecosystems of learning and regeneration—spaces grounded in local contexts while operating transnationally, and sustained by shared knowledge, collective practice and autonomy from market-driven models of art production. As described by the Biennale, the schools “reflect a shared ethic and a collaborative practice that intertwines art and social responsibility.”

As the only “School” from North America invited to participate in the 2026 Biennale, Denniston Hill is presented not as a representative of a nation or state, but as a collective practice rooted in land, long-term relationships and experimental modes of learning—an alternative formation within an exhibition historically organized around national pavilions.

Left to Right: Artists Byron Kim, Paul Pfeiffer, Julie Mehretu, and Associate Professor Lawrence Chua.Founded in 2004 by Chua alongside artists Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer, Denniston Hill is located on 220 acres of forested land in the southern Catskill Mountains, on the ancestral territory of the Esopus people of Lenapehoking. Conceived as a cultural laboratory rather than a conventional residency, it was established to reimagine the conditions under which art is produced—outside the logic of the marketplace and attentive to the ethical, sensory and political dimensions of creativity. Over the past two decades, more than 250 artists from around the world have participated in its programs.

One of the artists studios at Denniston Hill a not-for-profit arts residency and creative laboratory in the Catskills co-founded by Associate Professor Lawrence Chua.For the Venice Biennale, Denniston Hill is installing a collective project in the historic Giardini, engaging approximately 150 alumni artists in a reactivation of the Surrealist practice of the Exquisite Corpse. The installation emphasizes the game’s anti-imperialist origins, assembling fragmented contributions into composite forms that reflect histories of migration, displacement, ecological entanglement and sustained artistic friendship across borders.

Installed within the Giardini—where orderly paths and national pavilions reflect the Biennale’s origins in 19th-century imperial culture—the project offers a critical counterpoint to national representation. In this sense, Denniston Hill’s participation operates as an alternative to the U.S. national pavilion model, foregrounding collective authorship, shared responsibility and transnational solidarity rather than sovereign identity.

Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born's Poor People's TV Room, performance at Denniston Hill, 2017. Okpokwasili was the inaugural recipient of Denniston Hill's Distinguished Performance Artis.Chua’s role in the Biennale reflects his broader scholarly and creative work, which examines architecture, culture and aesthetics through questions of decolonization, collective practice and alternative institutional forms. His co-founding of Denniston Hill represents a long-term commitment to building spaces of learning that resist enclosure—intellectual, territorial and disciplinary.

“It is very meaningful for the work that we’ve done at Denniston Hill to be recognized at an international level. Most importantly, it honors the over two-decade-long collaboration between myself and my study partners, Julie Mehretu and Paul Pfeiffer,” says Chua. “Our collaboration, like life at Denniston Hill, unfolds as a kind of living Exquisite Corpse—it is a collaborative act in which forms emerge from the alignment of disparate hands, voices and worlds.”

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia will run from May 9 to November 22, 2026 at the Giardini and the Arsenale venues, and in various locations around Venice.