top of page
Adrian Piper in costume on a city bus, part of "Catalysis IV" from 1970
A scene from the film Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
A man pushes a large block of ice outside on a city sidewalk; a still image from Francis Alÿs's "Paradox of Praxis" short film (1997)

1. Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV (1970, photo: Rosemary Mayer); 2. Everything Everywhere All at Once, film still (2022); 3. Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis (1997)

Cities of Glass: Athens

The Initiative

Cities of Glass is a ten-year curatorial initiative that departs radically from institutional, academic, or commercial models. Each year, curator Meg Shiffler travels to a major global city, meets with artists across disciplines, and together with one artist, agrees to embark on a year-long process of collaboration. This process is grounded in trust and reciprocity: the curator and artist become accountable only to each other, not to institutions, funders or the commercial marketplace. They research, build a relationship, shape the project’s themes, and bring the work to life in public. Every commission is first shared locally in the city of origin, then represented online through a dedicated archive of text, sound, images, and interviews.
​
The conceptual frame of Cities of Glass draws on a wide network of literary, artistic, and musical influences. Shiffler first encountered Paul Auster’s short story City of Glass (1985) in 2004 while living in New York, and its exploration of urban fragility, language, and identity has informed her curatorial work ever since. Other texts foundational to Cities of Glass include Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, and Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Visual artists such as Adrian Piper, Francis Alÿs, Sophie Calle, Yoko Ono, and Janet Cardiff provide further touchstones, alongside films like After Hours (Scorsese, 1985), The Double Life of Véronique (Kieślowski, 1991), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (Kwan & Scheinert, 2022). Musical influences range from John Cage’s experimental sound practices to PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and the dark, narrative ballads of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.​

"These wide-ranging influences set the stage for ten years of exploring urban environments, where each artist’s project will uncover a unique intersection of memory, myth, history, and lived experience. Cities themselves are layered, fragmented, and fragile, and I see the works in Cities of Glass mirroring that — reflections of place, time, and human experience, carried into the world through the perspectives of artists rooted in their own cities." -Meg Shiffler

Launching this initiative in 2025, a moment when government and institutional controls increasingly restrict freedom of thought and expression across the globe, Cities of Glass insists on creating an environment of artistic freedom. The project operates on a humanist level, prioritizing one-on-one dialogue across cultures and the exchange of lived experiences. For Shiffler, this commitment is also personal: the project is self-funded through modest savings from her role directing a grassroots artist housing nonprofit. While created independently, the project will be illuminated after its launch through public programs in partnerships with arts and academic institutions.

bottom of page