Tower Window by Carmen Ribaudo on view October 17-December 4th at STNDRD (Granite City Art and Design District, Granite City, Illinois). A reception will be held on Saturday, August 17th from 5pm-7pm.
Tower Window is a drawing-in-space of the electric tower that can be seen from STNDRD.
In a region often characterized by its flatness, steel towers assert their strange geometries toward the clouds. Electric lines string across the sky. This infrastructure creates vertical interest on the Midwest horizon and, like the STNDRD flagpole, invites the upward glance. Carmen Ribaudo is interested in pushing the material conditions of drawing from life. Line is the building block of drawing. For Tower Window, the line drawing method is paper clay sculpture. The lines trace through space and are framing devices for the surrounding landscape. In the translation from the tower’s line configurations to the sculptural reconstruction, the machined geometry of the original tower becomes warped and asymmetrical. Its material softens as it moves from steel to colored paper clay. The sculptural flag is not a rendering, but a re-interpretation through the artist’s hand.
Carmen Ribaudo makes site-responsive drawings and sculptures-as-drawings in collaboration with urban peripheries. She is an artist, educator, and organizer of arts programming. In 2025-26, she was the Post-MFA Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, where she was awarded the St. Louis Partnership Award and is presently a lecturer. She has organized programming and workshops independently and for Counterpublic 2023. Her programming initiatives have been supported by The Luminary’s Futures Fund and WashU’s Engaged City grant program. She has been a resident artist at Ellis-Beauregard in Rockland, Maine, a Creative Fellow at the Providence Public Library, a member-artist at Queer.Archive.Work in Providence, Rhode Island, and a participant in the Trojan Horse Summer School in Finland. In 2025, she traveled on the Mississippi River as a visiting artist for Augsburg University’s River Semester.
Also Currently on view at NON STNDRD (National Building Arts Center in Sauget, IL) for the 2026 Counterpublic Triennial, Coyote Time: solo exhibitions by M12 Studio and Rachel Youn (curated by Raphael Fonseca), alongside Chris Carl’s Slag Garden (curated by Steffi Hessler).
Slag Garden is supported by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, The Hearthland Foundation, and HOK and was initiated alongside ongoing ecological efforts in collaboration with NON STNDRD, NBAC, and Counterpublic.
Open Fri–Sat, 10am – 5pm, by appointment only on other days. To book an appointment, email staff@nationalbuildingartscenter.org.
