About Cities of Glass
THE FRAME
Cities of Glass is a ten-year curatorial initiative that departs radically from institutional, academic, and commercial models. Each year, California-based curator Meg Shiffler travels to a major global city, meets with artists across disciplines, and, together with one artist, commits to a year-long process of collaboration. Grounded in trust and reciprocity, the relationship operates independently of institutional oversight or market pressures, allowing space for sustained inquiry, experimentation, and exchange. Through an ongoing process of research, dialogue, and shared thinking, curator and artist shape a new work rooted in the artist’s experience of their city.Each commission premieres locally, embedded within the urban fabric from which it emerges, and is later presented on this platform for broader access. Over the course of the initiative, the projects of ten artists working across disciplines will produce a networked reflection of the fragility, chaos, joy, ephemerality and complexity of human existence within contemporary cities—places where histories persist, presents unfold unevenly, and possible futures can be sketched.
THE POSITION
Cities of Glass launched to a global public in July 2026, at a time when governmental and institutional pressures increasingly shape the conditions under which art is produced, presented, and understood. Rather than responding to a single moment, the initiative extends across a decade, creating space for a catalog of artistic inquiry independent of shifting political, economic, and cultural constraints. Operating outside institutional frameworks, the project is grounded in dialogue, trust, and long-term engagement between curator and artist, allowing each collaboration to unfold on its own terms.Self-funded through Shiffler’s savings from her modest salary directing a grassroots artist housing nonprofit, this independence is central to the project’s ethos, enabling a form of exchange rooted in direct human connection rather than institutional mediation. While each work is created in this context of autonomy, audience development and critical dialogue for the final projects are ignited locally through public programs, possibly in partnerships with arts and academic organizations, opening the project to broader visibility while maintaining the integrity of its origin as independent.
THE INSPIRATION
The conceptual foundation of Cities of Glass draws on a wide network of literary, artistic, and musical influences. Shiffler first encountered Paul Auster’s short story City of Glass (1985) in 2004 while living in New York, and its exploration of urban mysteries, language and pattern development, and identity-shifting has informed her curatorial work ever since. Other texts foundational to Cities of Glass include Invisible Cities (Calvino, 1972), Labyrinths (Borges, 1962), Don Quixote (Cervantes, 1605/1615), The Sheltering Sky (Bowles, 1949), and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Murakami, 1985). Visual artists such as Adrian Piper, Francis Alÿs, Sophie Calle, Yoko Ono, and Janet Cardiff provide further touchstones, alongside films like After Hours (Scorsese, 1985), The Double Life of Véronique (Kieślowski, 1991), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry, 2004), and Everything Everywhere All at Once (Kwan & Scheinert, 2022). Musical influences range from John Cage’s experimental sound practices to PJ Harvey’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and the dark, narrative ballads of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds."These wide-ranging influences set the stage for ten years of exploring urban environments, where each artist’s project will uncover a unique intersection of memory, myth, history, and lived experience. Cities themselves are layered, fragmented, and fragile, and I see the works in Cities of Glass mirroring that — reflections of place, time, and human experience, carried into the world through the perspectives of artists rooted in their own cities." Meg Shiffler
MEG SHIFFLER
Megshifflerprojects.com
Contact: meg.shiffler@citiesofglass.com
Meg Shiffler is a curator, writer, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her current initiative, Cities of Glass is a ten-year independent curatorial platform featuring commissioned site-specific works by global artists working across performance, sound, social practice, photography, and more.
From 2005 to 2022, she served as Galleries Director and Chief Curator for the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), where she led a contemporary art program rooted in civic engagement, founded the SFAC Artists in Residence initiative, and developed an international Sister Cities traveling exhibition series resulting in partnerships with artists, curators, and arts institutions in Zurich, Sydney, Kiel, and Seoul. Over the course of her tenure, she worked with more than 1,400 artists from the Bay Area and beyond.
Shiffler has held an adjunct faculty role in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute and was a member of Stanford University’s prestigious interdisciplinary Creative Cities Working Group. Her writing includes essays and interviews for various Chronicle Books publications, including Jim Marshall: Show Me The Picture (2019), Jeremy Fish: O Glorious City: Jeremy Fish (2017), and the new retrospective Susan O'Malley: More Beautiful Than You Could Ever Imagine (2026). Her episodic column I don’t drink coffee, so let’s have a beer… ran on SFMOMA’s Open Space blog.
She is currently the inaugural Director of Artist Space Trust (AST), the nation’s first Community Land Trust dedicated to acquiring and stewarding permanently affordable, community-owned housing and live/work spaces for San Francisco Bay Area artists. AST was recently featured in The New York Times (Can Artists Help Shape American Cities Again?, February 11, 2026).
Earlier in her career, she curated and consulted for institutions in New York, including the New Museum and the Andrea Rosen Gallery/Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. In Seattle, she served as Director of Visual Arts and co-founded Consolidated Works, a 40,000-square-foot multidisciplinary art center. She studied at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY.
Paul Ausster, Cities of Glass (New York Trilogy Book 1), 1985
.Adrian Piper, Catalysis IV, 1970. Photo: Rosemary Mayer
John Cage. Photo: Akira Minoshita/John Cage Trust
Everything Everywhere All at Once, film still, 2022
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Vintage Publishing, GB, 1997
Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), video still, 1997
PJ Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories from the Sea, Island Records, 2000
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Modern Library, 1984
Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Vintage, 1983