IUNO and the American Academy in Rome are proud to present CONTINUITY MUTABILITY GENERATION, a collaborative exhibition by Zachary Fabri and Emily B. Frank (2024 Fellows), which considers the generative interplay of art making and art conservation.

Fabri and Frank present an exhibition that displays the collaborative relay in their iterative process and challenges the boundaries of their respective disciplines. They are concerned with how ideas move (and have continuity) and change (and are mutable) through (a generative process of) art making and conservation. A vital element of their collaboration is exploring the way that these two practices bleed into each other as modes of telling stories and conveying ideas.

Organized chronologically by iteration, the exhibition reveals the processual continuity and mutability of their ideas in materials. From the initial seed artwork to the final installation, visitors will experience how conservation and art making are intertwined and blur traditionally conceived boundaries, shaping and reshaping the narrative along the way.

About the Artists

Emily B. Frank is the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth Rome Prize in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. She is an objects and sculpture conservator interested in the ways that conservation can contribute to our understanding of the ancient and contemporary world. Based in New York, Frank founded Emily B. Frank Conservation in 2017 and also works for Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. CONTINUITY MUTABILITY GENERATION builds on themes and questions at the core of her work, which include:

• Creative approaches to the documentation of works of art

• Working with artists and fabricators prior to the completion of artworks

• The role of conservation in defining/articulating the narratives that objects represent and help construct (which are neither uniform nor stable)

• Parallels between conservation and translation practices

Zachary Fabri is the 2024 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize in Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome. He is an interdisciplinary artist working across video, drawing, and installation, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and performance. He has received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace FUND for Performance Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship, and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri has shown his work at Art in General, the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Performa, and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Collaborative projects include the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions were held at CUE Art Foundation in New York, the Nicholson Project in Washington, DC, and the Recovery Plan in Florence.

IUNO is a research center for contemporary art that wishes to leave space and time for encounters between people, spaces, and languages. Interested in processes rather than in projects, IUNO disorganizes knowledge and fosters a nonsystematic and convivial approach to artistic production and its theoretical debate through exhibitions, seminars, performances, educational programs, and editorial formats.