Art Institute of Chicago announces Irene Sunwoo as Chair of Architecture and Design Sunwoo joins the Art Institute from the Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Photo: Benjamin Mistak. CHICAGO, IL .-The Art Institute announced today that the museum has appointed architectural historian and curator Irene Sunwoo to be the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator, Architecture and Design. Sunwoo joins the Art Institute from the Columbia Universitys Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation , where she has been Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and Director of Exhibitions since 2016. At Columbia, Sunwoo established a distinctive vision, overseeing an experimental and interdisciplinary exhibition program that fused a scholarly approach to content with innovative exhibition design. In her ongoing collaborations with architects and artists, Sunwoo has supported and advanced new architectural practices, research, and ideas. She has consistently demonstrated a rigorous commitment to how architecture and design intersects with urban legacies as well as equity and environmental concerns. As curator of the Ross Gallery, Sunwoo organized numerous revelatory exhibitions, including Eternal Gradient: Arakawa and Madeline Gins (2018), Cooking Sections: Offsetted (2019); Torkwase Dyson: 1919: Black Water (2019), and most recently, A Wildness Distant (2020), a program of films and essays that confront the duality of landscape as sites of memory and political imagination.