Cliff Garten
Cliff Garten is creative director and founder of Cliff Garten Studio in Venice, California. The studio’s landscape sculptures form urban spaces, plazas, infrastructure, and memorials throughout the U.S. and internationally. Focusing on sculpture that integrates into engineering, architecture and landscape, Garten has been an important voice in advocating for what he calls landscape sculpture and “the expressive potential of public infrastructure”, insisting on using sculpture to forge strong social and aesthetic identities for civic places as well as the large civic infrastructure systems that run our cities. His sculptures are built with careful attention to how sculpture integrates with landscape, creates public space, and fosters social interaction between our private and public experiences during our everyday activities in public places.
Garten holds master’s degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, in ceramic art, and Harvard Graduate School of Design, with distinction, in landscape architecture. He is the recipient of two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation Fellowship for Individual Artists, the Bush Foundation Leadership Fellowship, the Jerome Foundation Travelling Artist Grant, and the American Architecture Prize. His civic sculptures have consistently been selected as best in the nation by The Americans for the Arts and have been cited for design excellence by the American Society of Landscape Architects and CODAworx Awards. Cliff Garten Studio’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Public Art Review, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and the Architect’s Newspaper. He was H.W.S. Cleveland Visiting Critic and Lecturer, UMN Landscape Architecture Program and tenured, Professor of Art at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN., before leaving teaching to establish his studio practice in California. He has served as a visiting critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, Southern California Institute of Architecture, Otis Art Institute and Rhode Island School of Design. He is an avid fly fisherman and alpine skier and he and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Big Sky, Montana.
Molly Reid
A licensed architect in the state of California, as well as a LEED accredited professional, Molly Reid brings over 26 years of professional experience to Cliff Garten Studio. Prior to opening her practice in 1994 and before joining CGS, Reid worked in the offices of Lorcan O'Herlihy in Santa Monica, CA and Naomi Leff and Associates in New York, NY.
Reid holds a Masters of Architecture Degree from SCI-Arc, Southern California Institute of Architects, and a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College.
Sixto Cordero Maisonet
Sixto Cordero Maisonet is an architect, designer, and artist. Born in Puerto Rico, he obtained his M.Arch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked for Zaha Hadid Architects, Matter Design, CPArchitects, ODB Engineering, the Norman Foster Foundation, and Selgascano.
Previously, his collaborative practice helloeverything (co-founded with two partners, Austin Smith, and Julian Ocampo) has exhibited work in the first Chicago Architecture Biennial and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Helloeverything also has produced built work, two educational facilities in Kenya and a prototype house which will be fabricated and sold by Revolution Pre-Crafted Properties.
Sixto’s work both in architecture and design employs digital technologies and attempts to coalesce these with social, environmental and cultural parameters. His work explores methods of geometric discretization as well as critical approaches to the social function of architecture.
Esther Sing-Yu Ho
Esther is an interdisciplinary designer with over five years of experience working at the intersection of architecture and art. Prior to joining Cliff Garten Studio, she was trained as an architect, leading research and design efforts for architectural facade systems through product design and in public art. She has designed, fabricated and installed several sustainable facade systems and poetic art pieces. At CGS, Esther is providing design support and leading marketing efforts.
She received a B.Arch from the University of Southern California and is working toward her Master's in Integrated Design, Business and Technology at the University of Southern California.
