Aleksandra Kasuba Shelters for the Senses

I am working with a silent partner – that is simply the laws of nature
Aleksandra Kasuba, 1976

This exhibition presents seven decades of work by Lithuanian-American artist Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019), from her early paintings and mosaics to her later public artworks, architectural designs and innovative spatial environments.

Kasuba left occupied Lithuania during the Second World War, emigrating to the United States where she settled in New York, and later New Mexico. The trauma of fleeing her home country influenced Kasuba’s pursuit of harmonious spaces for body and soul; a search for refuge.

Having studied applied arts in Lithuania, Kasuba’s work evolved from small-scale ceramics and paintings to monumental public installations. In parallel, she conceived futuristic architectural shelters to engage the senses, often using stretched fabrics to create environments without right angles.

Kasuba was driven by a desire to forge a deeper connection between humanity and nature. She took inspiration from prehistoric monuments and the shapes of shells, rocks and other natural forms. Equally, she turned to developments in science and technology, incorporating new materials and studying the visible spectrum of colour. She also collaborated with Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), a collective of artists, engineers and scientists.

Kasuba was a visionary thinker whose artwork and ideas helped shape the currents of twentieth-century art and continue to inspire artists and architects today. Her unique vision of a future built on social unity, technological innovation and harmony with nature remains ever relevant in the contemporary world. Kasuba’s story also gains new resonance here in St Ives, which like New York became both a refuge and a creative stimulus for artists during the Second World War.

After fleeing Europe with her family in 1947, Kasuba spent her early years in New Jersey and New York developing her ceramic and painting practice. She made decorated clay tiles for a furniture company and featured in various group exhibitions from the early 1950s. She was commissioned to make ceramic mosaics for Lithuanian Catholic churches across the Northeastern United States.

Many of Kasuba’s early drawings, paintings and mosaics feature the symbolic character of the ‘Walker’, which recurred in her practice over the following decades. A kind of alter ego, or dreamer, she described this lone figure as ‘a PERSON in the worldly sense – not a wanderer, but one who walks through life’.

Through the 1960s, Kasuba’s work shifted from figuration towards abstraction. Her growing reputation led to a 1963 commission for a large abstract mosaic in the New York Hilton at Rockefeller Center. In 1966, she had her first major solo exhibition at the Grippi & Waddell Gallery, New York, showing patterned black mosaics.

Her 1966 exhibition at the Grippi & Waddell Gallery gave Kasuba wide exposure and led to multiple public-space commissions.

After seeing the exhibition, architect Edward Larrabee Barnes asked Kasuba if she could translate her stone mosaics into brick. She replied: ‘That’s great, sure, I’ll work in brick.’ Barnes commissioned Kasuba to make several brick murals for the new campus he was designing for the Rochester Institute of Technology. In 1973, now established in the field of ‘architectural art’, she made a large, patterned brick wall for the exterior of the new Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, New York. In 1979, she designed a mural ‘that would echo, unify and soften’ a new arcade at 560 Lexington Avenue.

Kasuba became expert at navigating the complexities of working with architects, corporations and public bodies. This culminated in her final major public space commission, an acid-engraved granite wall for the exterior of 7 World Trade Center. After the terrorist attack on 11 September 2001, debris from the collapsing Twin Towers nearby ignited fires in this 47-storey building, which led to its collapse.

As her public realm work bloomed in the late 1960s and 1970s, Kasuba also developed a parallel practice making immersive interior environments.

Kasuba joined the international group Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), made up of artists, engineers and scientists. She was the only woman of 137 participants in their 1968 exhibition Some More Beginnings at the Brooklyn Museum. There she showed a clear acrylic sculpture with moving lights that cast changing shadows. In 1970, she made her first work using stretched synthetic fabric for the exhibition Contemplation Environments at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York.

Kasuba became fascinated with the visible spectrum of colour and its relation to the other senses. She conceived The Spectrum Environment in 1970 (realised in 1971 and 1973), a colourful acrylic structure designed to create a bodily experience. These ideas of colour were combined with her use of stretched fabric in Spectral Passage, built in San Francisco in 1975. She refined this concept later that year with Spectrum, An Afterthought.

Kasuba created this immersive work after years of research into stretched fabric, the spectrum of colours, and sensory experiences. You are invited to travel through it.

Her Spectral Passage, created at the de Young Museum, San Francisco in 1975, combined seven separate and differently shaped spaces lit by coloured neon tubes. Disappointed with the colour contrasts these divided forms created, Kasuba returned to New York and devised a new version, Spectrum, An Afterthought. Here, seven almost identical shapes are fused, allowing gradual spectrum shifts. Kasuba imagined the work as a space for contemplation and sensory immersion.

Though Kasuba made a model for Spectrum, An Afterthought in 1975, the environment was only fully realised in 2014 for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Lithuania, her country of birth. Recreated here, it is accompanied by six scents corresponding with the spectral colours created by Lithuanian-American perfumer Danutė Pajaujis-Anonis.

Kasuba built this ‘shelter for senses’ over an entire floor of her house on W 90th Street, New York in 1971. She lived in it for over a year and opened it to almost 2,000 visitors.

The work was inspired by a trip to Ireland, where she explored stone circles in Counties Cork and Limerick. Kasuba wrote: ‘Upon entering a circle I would stand in its centre, lean into the angle of light and extend my senses peripherally – at once listen to the near and far sounds, inhale all the smells and wrap myself in the surrounding hazy colours.’ Delayed at the airport on her return to New York, she drew plans for Live-In Environment.

Kasuba used translucent fabric to divide two rooms into eight separate pods for writing, gathering, dining, sleeping and more. She collaborated with other artists to design a multi-sensory experience: Urban Jupena hand-knotted a soft 3D rug for the group space; Silvia Heyden knitted the yak hair sleeping pod; Emanuel Ghent created computer-generated sounds; and Danutė Pajaujis-Anonis conceived artificial scents for the colours of the spectrum.

A turning point for Kasuba came with Live-In Environment, 1971, a multi-sensory living and working space she built in her New York home.

After the success of Live-In Environment, Kasuba tested similar concepts through multiple projects across the 1970s and 80s. In 1972, she conceived The Cocoon, a large environment built as part of the Whiz Bang Quick City 2 event in Woodstock, New York. The brief was to build a shelter in 24 hours that could be lived in for 10 days. She worked with 14 of her students from the School of Visual Arts in New York to create a fabric structure suspended from tree branches.

Over the next decade, she was commissioned to create many more stretched-fabric environments. These took the form of museum display spaces, environments for learning, divides to soften open-plan offices, and shades for public gathering areas. Kasuba wanted to create environments that could positively impact how people feel, act and interact. She observed: ‘Nobody ever argues in these places...There are no restrictions, our modes of taboos simply go.’

In 2001, a few years after the death of her husband, Kasuba moved to New Mexico having lived in New York for over 50 years. She bought a rocky 70-acre plot in the Mission Hills near Albuquerque and created a residential house.

Working with local craftspeople, she proceeded to build two ‘shell dwellings’ nearby, which would become a studio and guest house for visiting artists. Based around timber frames, the curving roofs were formed using what she termed ‘the K-Method’, with shaped wire mesh sprayed with foam and coated in render. She later added roof panels and hand-shaped spouts made of sheet metal to further protect against occasional rain.

Though she considered herself an artist rather than an architect, the complex at Rock Hill is one of the most complete examples of Kasuba’s creative ideas. It blends experimental construction processes with organic forms, creating spaces to live and work in harmony with nature.

While Kasuba realised some of her architectural ideas with her stretched-fabric spaces and Rock Hill House, she also designed many unrealised prototypes for futuristic, utopian and nature-inspired buildings.

Kasuba’s 1969 model Cloud Room responded to the gridded and closed urban environment of New York with a curving structure open to the sky. In her 1970 text Utility for the Soul, she designed a retreat in the desert that ‘enlightened corporations’ might offer their employees to escape the rigours of ‘mechanised society’. In 1971, she conceived Global Village, a speculative communal residence in a transparent sphere designed to float on water. Her proposal included multiple levels for different functions and rooms divided by fabric. Kasuba aimed to ‘integrate private and public spaces to keep a sense of freedom in places designed to deprive individuals of it’.

Many of Kasuba’s architectural concepts emphasise collective living as an alternative to a more individualistic modern society. They also propose a greater connection between people and nature. More recent models refer to the shapes of shells and other natural forms, or show structures integrated into cliff faces, trees and standing stones.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, while continuing to create architectural reliefs and environments, Kasuba also made many works closer to human scale. Ranging from material experiments to finished sculptures, these combine new technologies and synthetic fabrics with references to nature.

In 1977, Kasuba undertook a residency at Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science. This was part of the Art in Science programme, which invited artists to investigate the use of industrial fabrics in art and architecture. Kasuba explored methods of hardening stretched material into self-supporting shells. She also experimented with soft structures that could redirect rain and wind rather than resisting them. Kasuba continued these ideas in 1983 with a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

This research led to her 1990 exhibition Shaping the Future at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, Philadelphia. Many of the tensile sculptures in this room were shown in that exhibition, along with architectural models and images of her environments. Together, they represented a culmination of Kasuba’s artistic vision for a more harmonious future in tune with nature.