2024-25 Year-End Exhibition: "Cabinets of Curiosities"

Exhibition 2025

Jared Abraham, Heather Bizon

visitors in the great hall admire the exchange exhibition

2024-25 Year-End Exhibition: "Cabinets of Curiosities"

Monday, August 25 — Friday, September 5, 2025, College of Fine Arts Great Hall

Building on the Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 Public Program Series on Artificial (and Othered) Intelligences, Jared Abraham and Heather Bizon approached Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s Year-End Exhibition as an active archive; one that reflects the school’s multi-world, plural intelligences.

Cabinets of Curiosities presents the work of the School as collections of artifacts organized into ‘species of classes,’ to surface the distinct logics, methods, beliefs, and tools that shape each body of work.

Historically, cabinets of curiosities as a practice was a colonial instrument of meaning-making. Through it, aristocratic collectors codified geography, architecture, and people into systems that reinforced hierarchies of ownership, objectification, and exoticism. Today, technologies like artificial intelligence continue this legacy, acting as new agents of classification that shape how space, place, and subjectivity are constructed.

The exhibition reimagines the cabinet not as a site of extraction, but as a site of inquiry, foregrounding the school’s layered and co-existing frameworks of thought. In doing so, it reflects the various ways that intelligence gets defined in the School, and how acts of classification shape the way such varying knowledges, and hence worlds, are made legible.

explore the exhibition virtually on matterport (modelled by Vernelle A. A. Noel)