Analogue Sites BY Jorge Otero-Pailos
On view September 13 – November 1, 2025
Thursdays: 10 AM – 2 PM
Sundays: 10 AM – 5 PM
Jay Heritage Center | 210 Boston Post Rd, Rye, NY 10580
“It is deeply meaningful to share these sculptures at the Jay Heritage Center, a place rooted in the history of American diplomacy. Here, they connect the story of our modern embassies abroad with John Jay’s legacy as a statesman at home and diplomat abroad. ”
About the Exhibition
Analogue Sites is a series of steel sculptures by Spanish-American artist and preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos, created in 2019 from fencing salvaged during the preservation of the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, designed by Finnish-American modernist master Eero Saarinen. Otero-Pailos transformed this material as a way of preserving its layered history and drawing attention to the U.S. Embassy Program—an unprecedented Cold War–era initiative by the State Department that made modernist architecture and the arts central to American diplomacy abroad. These sculptures raise awareness of these embassies at a time when they are being decommissioned and left with little to no preservation protection.
At the Jay Heritage Center, two works are placed symmetrically in the restored garden parterres, framing the central path. Their mirrored placement reflects themes of balance and reciprocity central to diplomacy and honors John Jay’s historic missions to Spain, France, and England, and his role as a founding figure in American diplomacy.
Sculptures from this series have been exhibited in New York on Park Avenue; in London at Regent’s Park and at Winfield House, the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom; and in Washington, D.C., at the National Museum of American Diplomacy.
From October 1, 2025, through March 28, 2026, a solo presentation of sculptures, prints, and drawings will be on view at the Onera Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut.
About the Artist
Jorge Otero-Pailos is an American-Spanish artist, preservation architect, scholar, and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. He employs artistic methods, informed by advanced technologies, materials research, and interdisciplinary collaborations to expand the range of objects that are valued as cultural heritage, and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials like airborne atmospheric dusts, smells, sounds, and architectural fragments.
His series "The Ethics of Dust" turned experimental preservation cleaning techniques into a signature aesthetic, creating large scale latex casts from the dust and pollution residues found on landmarked monuments. His practice highlights how the dusts sedimented on buildings function as repositories of previously unexamined environmental histories and collective memories.
His works have been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament, the Chicago Architecture Biennale (2017), Venice Art Biennale (2009), V&A Museum, Louis Vuitton Galerie Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, SFMoMA, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Frieze London, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts among others. He is the recipient of a 2021-22 American Academy in Rome Residency in the visual arts.
As a preservation architect, Otero-Pailos collaborates on the creative restoration and interpretation of landmark sites. Notably, Otero-Pailos achieved an award-winning restoration of New Holland Island in St. Petersburg, Russia, in partnership with WorkAC, and most recently, the restoration of the Eero Saarinen designed U.S. Embassy in Oslo (1959) in collaboration with Erik Langdalen as preservation architects, and Lund Hagem/Atelier Oslo as lead architects.
Alongside his art and preservation practices, he is Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), where he also directs the Columbia Preservation Technology Lab, and where he founded the US’s first PhD program in Historic Preservation (2017).
He is the founder (2004) and editor-in-chief of Future Anterior, editor of Historic Preservation Theory: An Anthology (2023), co-editor of Experimental Preservation (2016), co-author with Rem Koolhaas of Preservation is Overtaking US (2014), and author of Architecture’s Historical Turn (2010).
Otero-Pailos is a licensed architect who studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture at M.I.T.
About the Jay Heritage Center
Aerial view of the 23-acre Jay Estate in Rye is one of two family homes of American founding father John Jay (1745-1829) located in Westchester.
The non-profit Jay Heritage Center (JHC) is dedicated to transforming the 23-acre Jay Estate into a vibrant educational campus, hosting innovative and inclusive programs about American History, Historic Preservation, Social Justice, and Environmental Stewardship. Their mission is to encourage people of all ages to understand, preserve and protect our shared heritage and to inspire future historians, civic advocates and stewards of our fragile cultural and natural resources. Learn more at www.jayheritagecenter.org