Orli Hakanoglu: The Mills

This show interprets several American post-industrial mill buildings that I have visited and been inspired by. The history, aesthetics, and potential for architectural reuse of these mills represent an intersection of my academic and professional interests. Over the last century, these structures have housed myriad uses from textile factories to electric component manufacturing to contemporary art museums. What has rarely changed across the years are the walls themselves. Their patched surfaces hold layers upon layers of paint; ghostlike traces of once booming industrial economies. Through layering, patching, peeling, and transparency, the process behind each painting is meant to echo that of time leaving its mark on the mills’ walls.

About the Artist:

Orli Hakanoglu is an architect and visual artist living and working in New York City. She holds degrees in architecture from Yale University and Wellesley College, where her coursework centered around design, studio art, as well as architectural and urban history. Orli has taken painting coursework at New York State Summer School of the Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Rhode Island School of Design.

She was the recipient of the Schiff Fellowship and the Eliza Newkirk Rogers Prize in Architecture at Wellesley College. She was also the 2018 winner of the Payette Sho-Ping Chin Memorial Academic Scholarship for Women in Architecture. Orli has assisted in teaching courses at Yale University and served as a guest critic at College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University, the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State, and New Jersey Institute of Technology.