Jason Campbell

Weekly tending…stitching and hanging new pieces. Bedspreads, quilts, playful conversations, uncovered memories, ordinary things that carry the weight of extraordinary lives. Hung within a cedar frame, comforters soften light, sound, and the boundaries of the room, acknowledging material stewardship and the quiet labor of maintenance. This archive considers the characteristics of home that have shaped us, asking how care, repair, and preservation might serve as spatial and cultural foundations. — SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the sixth edition of the @chicagoarchitecturebiennial — 🎥: @travisfrangie | @eveningcue

A house made for dear friends who approached every step of the process with an intense curiosity, trust, ambition, and kindness. Their generosity shaped the work in ways that can’t be drawn or photographed. I love it here—everyone deserves this kind of comfort. . 📷 : @libbyleahy @quizkhalifa @out_there_in_here @ell.projects

Public-Facing 2026, Shattered Tempered Glass When I was collecting glass outside, it was as though people were less interested in what I was doing and more in whether it looked like I was supposed to be doing it. Once it appeared solicited, it seemed to settle things. I could keep going without much interruption. In the storefront, that same fiction carries through, but shifts. The role, tools, and gestures are still there. What changes is the context. The work no longer has to pass as believable, it’s already accepted. And that makes it clearer what the fiction was doing, not tricking anyone, but making space for care to exist. I also notice that I’m more conscious of how I’m moving. There’s less ambiguity in the space. There’s awareness of being watched, and with it, the familiar pressure to act right, to be careful, calm, responsible, controlled. (from Feb.’26 exhibition ‘the Society for Care And Maintenance’ at the @designmuseumchi )

Assembly continues . Sunday 12-5pm the Society for Care And Maintenance This exhibition is supported by the @grahamfoundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the @designmuseumchi

Join us through the end of February at the @designmuseumchi for a month-long viewing of the Society for Care And Maintenance, works by Jason Campbell. The project began as a daily ritual of collecting shattered tempered glass from city streets. Through acts of sorting, mapping, transferring, embedding, and restraint, SCAM reframes care as a form of labor that is both calming and controlling, visible yet unacknowledged. Over the exhibition’s duration, thousands of glass fragments are laid by hand in an ordered, reflective field. The exhibition concludes with a closing event in which the assembled field is swept away. Schedule: January 25 | Open Sundays, 12:00 – 5:00 pm | Viewing (glass assembly) February 26, 5:00 – 8:00 pm | Closing event — This exhibition is supported by the @grahamfoundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Art

The Chicago Architecture Biennial, under the theme SHIFT, explores how spaces can carry memory, provoke thought, and inspire new ways of living together. It asks us to consider not just what structures are, but what they mean - to communities, to history, and to the future. Architecture becomes a mirror of our times, reflecting uncertainty and possibility, and inviting us to imagine how the spaces we inhabit can shape the way we connect, care, and live collectively. Read more: Link in Bio - Image: Courtesy of Chicago Architecture Biennial - @chicagoarchitecturebiennial @flor_ness @kommerswender @chicagoculturalcenter @msichicago @waithinktank @ladallmanarchitects @ell.projects @kwongvonglinow @paradigmaariadne @balsa.crosetto.piazzi @spacepopular @i.fayyad @objects_of_common_interest @Kiyooooooooomi @studiostanallen @apparata_studio @bboarq @oshinowo.studio @ten_studio @maxdelv noreenkahmad @almacommunications - #chicagoarchitecturebiennial #architecturebiennale #architectureexhibition #STIR #STIRworld #staySTIRred @sunena_maju

Untitled [The Beginning or Something Else] 2025 . 12x18in. tempered glass beneath kozo paper and unbleached cheesecloth — the Society for Care And Maintenance

Taking tonight to slow down and hold the weight of what’s about to begin. I’m looking forward to sitting inside the work, and even more, to sitting with those who trusted me enough to let me steward a part of their story. I hope you’ll join me. The Linen Closet — Yates Gallery @chicagoarchitecturebiennial . @chicagoculturalcenter

A contribution to SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. September 19th, 2025 - February 28th, 2026 @chicagoarchitecturebiennial We’ve been working with and wire brushing this wood for a while now. The slowness has meant a lot… it’s intimate work. I needed the time to watch it take shape. I’m leaving it unfinished so you can feel the texture, smell the cedar, see the care. The structure holds the comforters and blankets, their weight lining the frame like a new kind of insulation. In turn, the cedar protects them, with its natural oils and aromatic compounds, a repellent to those that will do harm, an absorbent to damaging climate and a steward to what’s stored within. At the center, a bench offers a place to sit with these layers, to be protected. The verticals rise like markers or supports, enclosing a space to come to terms with memories of home.

A contribution to SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. 09.19.25 - 02.28.26 The Linen Closet holds ordinary things: comforters, quilts, playful conversations, uncovered memories. They carry the weight of extraordinary lives. They represent care, embodied in the act of folding, storing, passing on. A blanket that once warmed a body becomes evidence of private endurance, a record of the unseen labor that sustains us. This work sits inside a long history of people making home where the world said they couldn’t. My mother was the first builder I knew. She taught me that homemaking isn’t decoration, it’s defiance. The closet becomes a monument to that practice, a place where private rituals of care turn into public memory. It also holds the rituals we rarely share, the improvisations, the hand-me-downs, the moments of making do, practices often hidden because they don’t align with the standards of what home is “supposed” to look like. In the tension between pride and shame, another story of belonging takes shape. I’ve been gathering the stories that come with each piece, asking why this one, what it has carried you through. Each answer becomes a new kind of care instruction, stitched into the fabric. Not directions for how to wash or fold, but reminders of how it once held, comforted, endured. These transcriptions extend the life of the object, charting the ways it has already cared and been cared for, and the ways it might continue to provide respite and resilience. . And a special thanks to @aman_n_sf @rogue_planemo @judiielynn @hana__ceramics @tcmahtin @johnpreus . @chicagoarchitecturebiennial

untitled [I Love the Transparency, but it’s Fragile] 2025 . 9x12in. tempered glass beneath kozo paper — the Society for Care And Maintenance

untitled [Between Care and Control] 2025 . 18x24in . tempered glass beneath kozo paper — to slowly part ways with the collection. the Society for Care And Maintenance