Marisa Morán Jahn (SMVisS ’07) was recently selected as the 2022 Artist as Instigator Residence at the National Public Housing Museum (NPHM), the country’s first cultural institution dedicated to interpreting public housing in America.

For Jahn, this opportunity is particularly exciting because of public housing’s centrality to the lives of the low-wage workers and immigrant families with whom she works. This past summer, the Seattle Public Library invited her to envision and create a newspaper with teenagers living in a Seattle Housing Authority neighborhood redevelopment project with a branch library on its grounds. 

And on a personal level, her experience living in a low to moderate-income publicly subsidized housing in NYC from 2008-2010 (during the Great Recession) influenced her work in co-founding Carehaus, the U.S.’s first, intergenerational care-based co-housing project. Jahn is the Museum’s fourth artist in residence, joining artists Jen Delos Reyes, William Estrada, and Tonika Lewis Johnson.

Designed by architect Rafi Segal and artist Marisa Morán Jahn with Maria Rius Ruiz

On view in September and sited in La Alameda Central, the first public park in the Americas, Sueños con Fibra/Madera is a pavilion created from wood recycled from Mexico City’s first rollercoaster and an Aztec, Mayan, Olmec, and Chinese papercraft (papel picado) whose holes are said to invite the past into the present. The colorful pavilion engaged thousands of local passersby and millions more through media coverage in Architect, Time Out Mexico, El Diario, Telediario live TV broadcast, rollercoaster superfan blogs, and more. After its overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception at Mextrópoli Architecture Festival, the pavilion was taken down and stored while the City of Mexico secures a more permanent home.