Ben Nicholson: Ex Materia Ex Nihilo

Oct. 2, 2026 - Feb. 14, 2027 | Tube Gallery | CAMi

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What if the secrets of the universe were hiding in plain sight — in a bean, a spiral, a labyrinth drawn in sand? For 25 years, architect and artist Ben Nicholson filled a single sketchbook with hand-drawn investigations into that question, tracing the geometry hidden inside Pythagorean mathematics, medieval labyrinths, Islamic calligraphy, the Hebrew alphabet, and Dante's Divine Comedy, page by careful page, in pencil, by hand.

The exhibit brings together two bodies of work together for the public to experience for the first time. At the center of the gallery, Nicholson's wooden Kufic labyrinth cubes — hand-built geometric forms that are themselves labyrinthine objects — hold the sketchbook pages alongside artifacts he associates with specific drawings: physical things that anchor ideas to the world. Select pages are enlarged on the south wall for full immersion in the work's density and detail. Surrounding you on the east, west, and north walls are 200 of Nicholson's hand-drawn labyrinth variations — a taxonomy of one of architecture's most ancient and persistent forms.

Inside Ben Nicholson: Ex Materia Ex Nihilo, somewhere between a fava bean and the name of God, number becomes meaning. 

About the Artist

Ben Nicholson is an architectural designer, artist, and writer whose practice moves fluidly between drawing, scholarship, and making. Educated at the Architectural Association in London, the Cooper Union in New York, and Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, he taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology for sixteen years before joining the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was professor until his retirement in 2021. He has served as guest faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the universities of Edinburgh, London, Michigan, Houston, and Cornell.

Nicholson's work ranges across visionary architecture, warfare, vernacular culture, primitive geometry, and the deep history of labyrinths. His publications include Appliance House (MIT Press, 1990), Thinking the Unthinkable House (Renaissance Society, 1997), Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and Clockwork Basilisk: The Early Revolvers of Elisha Collier & Artemas Wheeler (Headstamp 2022). He has exhibited at Fondation Cartier, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Renaissance Society, and the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Nicholson lives and works in New Harmony, Indiana — one of America's oldest utopian communities — where he has spent the past 20 years writing and drawing while completing Ex Materia, a hand-drawn sketchbook investigation into the geometry and number underlying the great texts, cosmologies, and sacred architectures of Mediterranean civilization.

Image: Ben Nicholson, Stagger Meander, page 36, pencil on paper, 2023.

Curator: Shauta Marsh

Made possible by The Efroymson Family Fund