Graphic Design Guest Speaker Series

Tuesday, April 20, 2021 at 12:30PM EST

Based in Antwerp, Belgium

Imagine the following drawing as a metaphor for the practice of Belgian graphic designer Ines Cox: a crisscross of long and short lines, some crooked and sinuous, others straight, all moving back and forth in an unpredictable way. A chaotic set of lines contouring a body of work, one that breathes autonomous design exercises, research, collaborations with artists and institutions, teaching and clumsy writing ventures.

@ines_cox | http://inescox.com/

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Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 12:30PM EST

Based in London, UK

OK-RM is a London based design studio founded by Oliver Knight & Rory McGrath in 2008, engaged in ongoing partnerships with artists, curators, editors, architects, designers and institutions. With an understanding of visual culture and the historical vernacular of design, the studio engages critically with the cultural context. Approaching design as a tool for contemporary propositions, collaborations and commissions are seen as the context and constraints through which ideas are articulated.

Recent clients, commissioners and collaborators have included 1017-ALYX-9SM, ETH Zurich, JW Anderson, Sadie Coles, CCA Montreal alongside collaborative projects with artists including Jonathan Anderson, Virgil Abloh, Fos, Kirstine Roepstorff and Gabriel Kuri. In 2015 they founded InOtherWords, a publishing imprint that extends from the studio practice creating books in close collaboration with artists, writers, institutions and other cultural protagonists.

http://www.ok-rm.co.uk/

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Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 12:30PM EST

Born in East Palo Alto, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

As a learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished and uncontained. She is invested in Black storytelling technologies that invite us to consider ways of [un]learning that are interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interstellar. Because not all stories are for everyone, Rasheed’s work considers Black storytelling technologies in relation to the surveillance states, or how we tell stories that consider interiority, lenticularity (or varying modes of visibility and legibility), revision, and spiritual syncretism.

Engaging primarily with text, Rasheed works across different substrates and compositional fields. She works on the page, on walls, and in public space to create associative arrangements of letters, words, and shapes that invite an embodied and iterative reading* process. Rasheed creates ecosystems of iterative and provisional projects. These projects include sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” xerox-based collages; large-scale public installations; publications; prints; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; performance scores; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined.

* text as anything that can be read

** reading is a (cognitive, spiritual, socio-political, and somatic) process of decoding symbols to derive meaning

https://kameelahr.com/

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The School of Art’s Graphic Design department is excited to announce the guests in its speaker series for the 2020-2021 academic year. Invited guests represent a multitude of diverse practices and perspectives on the current state of the discipline.

All conversations are open to the public unless otherwise noted, and will take place virtually using Zoom. Attendance is limited to 1,000 participants, so should any event approach that limit, access will be available on a “first come first served” basis. All participants will be placed in a waiting room until the event begins and will be muted upon admittance to the virtual space, with questions limited to School of Art MFA students.

Speakers during the fall 2020 semester include Kristian Henson (MFA ‘12), Yoonjai Choi (MFA ‘06), Ece Canlı, and Nico Wheadon. Closing out the fall semester is the Dean of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University, Dr. Elizabeth (“Dori”) Tunstall, the first black and black female dean of a faculty of design anywhere. In spring 2021, the series will welcome Tauba Auerbach, with potential additional guests that may be announced in the coming weeks.

To join an event, click the link in the schedule below at the talk’s listed time.

Thursday, September 17, 2020 at 12:30PM EST

Filipino American from Los Angeles, currently based in New York and in the process of relocating to Manila.

Kristian Henson, Graphic Design MFA ‘12, is a designer and publisher born and raised in Los Angeles. After an early career of designing for Los Angeles-based music labels and streetwear brands, he moved to New York City and shifted his practice to working with artists and art institutions with a primary focus on The Philippines and the Filipino diaspora. In 2013 he co-founded the publishing imprint Hardworking Goodlooking with Clara Balaguer as a means of researching/circulating concepts such as social-practice art making, decolonization, vernacular typography, hyperstition, diaspora and zine culture. Nearly all of their books are printed in collaboration with independent small-scale printers and bookmakers in Manila. Hardworking Goodlooking has evolved into a wider collective that includes the artist Czar Kristoff and designer Dante Carlos. Kristian Henson has given talks and conducted workshops at The Walker Art Center, Swiss Institute, NY Artbook Fair, Printed Matter, 356 Mission, Ooga Booga, POST Design Copenhagen, Kunsthall Stavanger, Wendy’s Subway, Ulises, Museum of Art and Design and Virginia Commonwealth.

Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 7PM EST

Based in New York, NY.

Yoonjai Choi, Graphic Design MFA ’06, is a graphic designer and partner at Common Name. She founded the East Village-based studio with Ken Meier (Graphic Design MFA ’08) in 2010 and has worked with a range of clients in the field of art, architecture, and education. Some of her clients and collaborators include The Whitney Museum, The Met, Canadian Center for Architecture, Carnegie Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, Hauser & Wirth, 303 Gallery, Artsy, Syracuse Architecture, and Columbia GSAPP. Prior to Common Name, she held a director position at New York design studio 2×4. Currently, she teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and has taught or spoken at Harvard GSD, Yale School of Art, Parsons, Pratt, Syracuse Architecture, Rutgers, Typography Summer School, Triple Canopy, and REDO.

Friday, October 16, 2020 at 12:30PM EST

Born and raised in Turkey, based in Porto, Portugal.

Ece Canlı is a design researcher, artist and musician; born and raised in Turkey and based in Porto, Portugal. She holds a Ph.D. in Design from University of Porto (Portugal) and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (Sweden). Her tools of investigation include text, voice, sound, and artefacts. Her academic work sits at the intersection of decolonial queer feminist epistemologies, material regimes and body politics; more specifically, socio-spatio-material constitutions of gender, sexuality, race and other identity categories. As a researcher and educator, she lectured internationally and published in various journals and anthologies. She is a founding member of the research collective Decolonising Design Group and currently a postdoctoral researcher in University of Minho (Portugal). In her artistic and vocal practice, she explores the liminal states of agonised and demonised bodies, the ways of re-narrating untold stories, and corporal and mental metamorphosis of bodies, through extended vocal techniques. She currently composes and performs in NOOTIO, a duo project with the harpist Angélica V. Salvi (ES), in LIVE LOW, a music collective initiated by Pedro Augusto (PT), in COBRA'CORAL, an experimental vocal trio with artists Cléila Colonna (FR) and Catarina Miranda (PT), and in VOX FLORA, VOX FAUNA, her first solo music project.

Thursday, November 5, 2020 at 12:30PM EST

Based in New Haven, CT.

Nico Wheadon is an arts advisor, curator, educator and writer. Alongside her partner Malik, Nico is founder and principal of bldg fund, an innovation platform for BIPOC artists, entrepreneurs and neighbors. Her extensive background as an arts advocate, creative producer and cultural strategist supports bldg fund in connecting innovators with the necessary capital and collaborators to transform ideas into impact.

Nico is an adjunct assistant professor of Art History and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Professional Practices at Brown University, and Art & Place at Hartford Art School. She has also guest lectured at Yale, Princeton, Brown, MIT NYU, Pratt, The New School and Howard. Beyond the classroom, Nico has lectured internationally on topics including: the future of museums; art and entrepreneurship; arts-led regeneration in the post-industrial city; and building artist-led institutions.

A regular contributor to The Brooklyn Rail, Artnet, and C&, Nico’s first manuscript—On Museum Citizenship: A Toolkit for Radical Art Pedagogy, Practice, and Participation—is slated for publication in Spring 2021. The book brings together over forty pioneering voices from the field to reflect on canon-shifting practice currently taking place within, beyond, and through the museum space.

In recent posts, Wheadon served as Inaugural Executive Director of NXTHVN (2019-2020); Inaugural Director of Public Programs and Community Engagement at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2014-2019); and Curatorial Director of Rush Arts Gallery (2007-2010). Wheadon holds an MA in Creative & Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmith’s College University of London, and a BA in Art-Semiotics from Brown University.

Thursday, November 12, 2020 at 12:30PM EST

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, based in Toronto, Ontario.

Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall is a design anthropologist, public intellectual, and design advocate who works at the intersections of critical theory, culture, and design. As Dean of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University, she is the first black and black female dean of a faculty of design. She leads the Cultures-Based Innovation Initiative focused on using old ways of knowing to drive innovation processes that directly benefit communities.

With a global career, Dori served as Associate Professor of Design Anthropology and Associate Dean at Swinburne University in Australia. She wrote the biweekly column Un-Design for The Conversation Australia. In the U.S., she taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She organized the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative and served as a director of Design for Democracy. Industry positions included UX strategists for Sapient Corporation and Arc Worldwide. Dori holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Stanford University and a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College.

Thursday, March 4, 2021 at 12:30PM EST

Based in New York, NY.

Tauba Auerbach is an artist and publisher working in New York. A life-long student of math and physics, their work contends with structure and connectivity on the microscopic to the universal scale. Auerbach often invents tools and techniques for inducing material behaviors, building on crafts in many traditions. The artist’s hand is recognizable in work across painting, weaving, glass sculpture, photography, video, typography and musical instrument design. In 2013, Auerbach founded Diagonal Press to formalize and challenge their ongoing book design and publishing practice.

Auerbach’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou among others. The artist is represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and STANDARD (Oslo), Norway. Their first museum survey, S v Z, will open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021.

This talk was originally scheduled for Thursday, January 21, 2021 before being postponed to early March.

Graphic Design’s Guest Speaker Series for the 2020-2021 academic year have been curated by the Director of Graduate Studies in Graphic Design, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, alongside alum of the program and longtime Senior Critic in Graphic Design, Forest Young (’06), and in response to requests from the returning MFA class of 2021, comprised of Herdimas Anggara, Milo Bonacci, Bianca Ibarlucea, Furqan Jawed, Harin Jung, Jun Jung, Minhwan Kim, Nick Massarelli, Anezka Minarikova, Luiza Dale, Ana Lobo, Mengyi Qian, Anna Sagström, and Mianwei Wang.

The events are produced by Lindsey Mancini with administrative help from Larissa Hall.