Portraits of a Practice: The Life and Work of MJ Long
Design and Research Project | 2021 - ongoing
MJ Long built Sal’s doll’s house on the floor of the living room in the home she shared with her husband and business partner Colin St John Wilson. Together they codesigned the British Library in London and, during a particularly fraught stage in the process, she chose to devote her limited free time to the painstaking construction of this structure, incorporating aspects of her childhood, academic interests and personal life to create this large timber object whose style is distinct from anything she made in practice.
Here, we use the doll’s house and its contents as a portal through which to examine Long’s different spaces of work and leisure. The exhibition presents photography, the voices of friends, family and colleagues, and contemporary reconstructions of lost work alongside original material from the RIBA Archives. This allows us to delve into the context, references and influences that shaped Long’s practice. Perhaps the doll’s House, and the gendered complexities of family life and domesticity that it represents, can be read as an invitation to reconsider what constitutes work.
MJ Long (1930–2018)
Mary Jane Long was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1939. She studied architecture at Yale School of Architecture, where she met Colin St John (Sandy) Wilson. She moved to the UK in 1965 to join his architecture practice and was principal architect partner during the 30-year creation of the British Library. She married Wilson in 1972. Long independently designed studios for artists including Peter Blake, RB Kitaj and Frank Auerbach, and published a book called Artists’ Studios in 2009 about the 14 studios she designed. She also worked on museums and galleries including the Jewish Museum in London and the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, in partnership with Rolfe Kentish, and created an extension to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester with Wilson. MJ Long was a lecturer at Yale for over 40 years. She died in September 2018.
Credits
Curated by Elena Palacios Carral
Exhibition Design: Forms of Living (Elena Palacios Carral with Isabella Synek Herd)
Doll’s House Photography: Yushi Li
Doll’s House Fabrication and Restoration: Isabella Synek Herd
Graphic Design: AA Communications Studio
Exhibition Realisation: AA Public Programme (Manijeh Verghese and Harriet Jennings)
Exhibition Build: Commissioned by You and AA Facilities
Video and Sound: AA Audio Visual
Special Thanks to: AA Archives, British Library, Juliet Babinsky, Barbara Campbell-Lange, María Elena Carral, Michael Franke, Rolfe Kentish, Jon Lopez, Mario Palacios, RIBA (Lauren Alderton, Catriona Cornelius, Charles Hind, Lisa Nash, Alix Robinson), Josie Sommer, Sal Wilson.
Photographs of the exhibition by Thomas Adank