On Saturday, November 14, 2026, there will be an open studio session for the Art & Design MFAs at the Mason Gross School of the Arts.
Current schedule
11:45 AM, MFA INFO SESSIONS
12:30 PM, MFA ALUMNI PANEL
1:30 – 3:30 PM, OPEN STUDIOS
Locations
CSB 33 LIVINGSTON AVE, NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ
LAB 39 ROAD 3, PISCATAWAY, NJ
Text and photos by Miyls Bleu Hill.
On Friday, October 2nd, Carla Yanni, Professor and Rutgers Art History Department Chair, led us across the New Brunswick campus. Gathered at Old Queens, students from visual arts, design, and art history departments began to embark on a tour where some of us got to know our school better geographically, but ultimately where we all learned about the rich architectural history of Rutgers University.
The Observatory is our first stop, and it sets the pace. We gather close, ears tuned to Carla, and begin to see the campus as something built and layered rather than something we simply walk through. Then we make our way to the Geology Museum.
We stood in the geology museum, where my ears hung on every word by Carla. Through the windows, you hear the Rutgers marching band outside, almost in competition. A democratic wonder falls over so many adults in one room as they look through the cases at old specimens.
From there, we carry that wonder to the Gardner A. Sage Library. With multiple departments in one group. As we walked around exploring the beautiful and very quiet room I noticed each student fixated on something different, from the actual books to the space itself. Conversation follows with Carla in a whisper speaking of the architectural and somewhat political significance of the theological library.
When the library tour ends, we keep walking. Outside, Carla points to the tilework on the buildings around us, an ode to Rutgers’ long history with ceramic technology. For a group of artists, designers, and art historians, it feels like the right ending. The history of this campus is not only in the plans and facades, but in the materials themselves.
We’re delighted to announce the full roster of this Fall’s Visiting Visual Artist Lecture Series.
These are free and open to the public!
UI/UX/UN
On April 16, 2026 the MFA Design first year cohort, Qing Zeng, Jung A Huh, and Ali El-Chaer, conducted field research across two distinct institutional spaces in New York City: the United Nations Headquarters and the New Museum. The objective was to investigate the intersection of global governance, architectural systems, and contemporary curation, resulting in a game that maps interactions onto the digital interface.
The morning began at the United Nations Headquarters, delving into the operational architecture of the UN: This track examined the institutional mechanisms and systemic frameworks of the UN, focusing on how global diplomacy is structured, executed, and maintained across international boundaries. The second tour spoke on the physical architecture: This track explained the design of the headquarters, investigating how the physical forms, materials, and spatial layouts reflect or challenge the UN’s foundational mandates of transparency, unity, and international cooperation. In the afternoon, the class visited the New Museum, engaging with current exhibitions, such as New Humans: Memories of the Future, and explored the new extension built to the New Museum.
Throughout the field study, students used their phone cameras to observe and document “interactions”—the unintended or intended visual traces of human presence in spaces. Rather than documenting the monuments themselves. Back in the studio, these photographs served as the material for digital experimentation. Using Figma, the cohort translated the images into a tablet-based, interactive layout.
The game operates on a geometric repetition. At the beginning, the user selects one of three primary shapes: a triangle, a circle, or a rectangle. This choice initiates a path, requiring the player to follow the steps of the selected shape as it reoccurs, morphs, and embeds itself within the documentation of the UN space. By restructuring the field research into a responsive UI/UX system, the project challenges the boundary between passive observation and active navigation, architecture, and complex systems.
Special thanks to Atif Akin for facilitating this research expedition and taking photos.
It was such a great pleasure to see Sue Huang’s Bodies of Flora last Friday evening at MANA Contemporary. It’s a brilliant collage in real time, gracefully put together, moving with ease between scientific inquiry and personal reflection, and also between archive and storytelling, preservation and memory.
Lorraine Daston writes that botanical nomenclature is “an art of transmission that makes a certain kind of science possible.” Daston’s work kept resonating in my mind while watching Sue’s performance. The naming, cataloging, and preservation of plant life are not simply scientific acts; they are also about memory and cultural practice. Bodies of Flora brings scientific record, autobiography, and artistic interpretation into the same live physical A/V space.
Using an electronic overhead projector, a lightbox with an overhead camera (10x zoom industrial camera often used for scientific magnification), layered with a video channel, Sue created a live visual field where analog and digital image-making sat comfortably together. The setup to evoked the conventional classroom teaching tools and also it was a visual and technical reference to the lightbox at the herbarium, that is the main device for digitizing the specimens. Transparencies contained printed and copied content at scales recalling 4×5 negatives, herbarium sheets, and library stack cards. Sue moved and composed through light by hand. Their tactile archival quality blurred the line between specimen and memory, between scientific preservation and personal reflection. Projection wasn’t used as spectacle, but as a working surface—a place where fragments could be handled, layered, narrated, and transformed. The sound design by Lee Tusman set the atmosphere with a restrained ambient drone. Sue’s storytelling voice, paired with her live gestures on the overhead surface, created a calm but deeply engaging rhythm that pulled the audience in.
It was also so nice to see the broader community around the project. There were roughly twenty-five participants, including MFA in Design students from the last three cohorts. Among them was Asem Kiyalova, who also worked on the project as Sue’s assistant, alongside Anukriti Kaushik. Their contributions make visible another important aspect of Bodies of Flora that is transmission through teaching, collaboration, and shared making.
Carl Linnaeus defined the botanist as someone who can give one particular plant the right name, in a language understood around the world. Bodies of Flora gently expands that idea. It reminds us that our relationship to botanical life is shaped not only by naming, but also by image, touch, story, memory, and care.
Sue has created something intellectually rigorous, elegant, and quietly moving.
for more information about the project and the process:
A Botanical Resurrection: Professor to Visualize a Return of Vanished Flora
Ryan Stark Lilienthal, MGSA MFA in Design ‘2023
I recently returned from a two-month German-American Fulbright-funded installation project in Hesse, Germany conducted in collaboration with education science researchers at Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. The installation developed from my MGSA MFA Design thesis and sought to cultivate interconnectedness, empathy, and belonging by employing new thinking about participatory memory practices that bring people from diverse backgrounds together. I designed interactive workshops involving approximately 150 German high school and elementary school students from six different schools. Through the workshops, students created illuminated porcelain bricks that then formed collaborative memory sculptures. The installation Tonwerk (Clay Factory) was exhibited for a month at the Hessisches State Archive in Darmstadt. The project examined forced labor during the Holocaust at the Tonwerk Heppenheim factory, close to the schools. Many of the students, and some of their teachers, had no understanding of what transpired in their communities. Some students also participated in a memorial design competition, while others researched Aryanized property taken from families who were deported to concentration and extermination camps.
As its starting point, the installation drew inspiration from a 1990’s German high school student study into Tonwerk Heppenheim. In the process of extensively researching the abuse of forced laborers in producing ceramics, such as bricks, students cultivated an in-depth historical understanding of the Holocaust. I found the students’ research particularly meaningful, given that my grandmother’s uncle was one of the Tonwerk Heppenheim forced laborers before he was deported to Poland and murdered with his wife and son for being Jewish. With the earlier fact-based history project in mind, my intention in this participatory memory-based art installation sought to illuminate the emotional resonance that diverse communities can draw from the traumatic past of others. I realized during the study that the children of the immigrant and refugee communities in this region seemed particularly responsive to the project.
Memory studies scholars like Michael Rothberg, who explores multidirectional memory, encourage a shift from competing claims of victimhood between communities with traumatic pasts to learning from each other’s heritage of trauma. Similarly, Clint Smith in his 2022 study of Germany’s memory culture observes, “I learned that the way the country [Germany] remembers this genocide [the Holocaust] is the subject of ongoing debate—a debate that is highly relevant to fights about public memory taking place in the U.S.” (Smith, Clint, “Monuments to the Unthinkable: America still can’t figure out how to memorialize the sins of our history. What can we learn from Germany?”, The Atlantic, vol. 330, no. 5, 2022, pp. 22-41.)
The results of this project will further guide my own art and design practice and will hopefully elucidate and advance approaches to participatory memory practices and multidirectional memory used by others. Significant takeaways included the students’ attentive engagement in Holocaust memory work through non-traditional, tactile learning using clay to shape a purposeful remembrance experience. This qualitative observation applied equally across gender and age, from first-grade students to ninth through thirteenth-grade students–including Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium students. What’s more, native-born German students as well as refugee and immigrant students shared positive reflections on the meaning of the project to their own lives.
Gratefully, I am participating in the upcoming Art Against Racism group exhibition, “Freedoms Reframed: Art on the Edge of the Constitution,” at the William Trenton House in Trenton, New Jersey, from June 13 to July 12, 2026. In this exhibit, I hope to bring lessons learned in Germany to help illuminate through art and design the freedom lost in the shadow of our Constitution.
All photographs by Konstanin Weber © HLA. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt.