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Co-Curate Exhibition

Our second year MFA cohort have been busy setting up for the Co-Curate Exhibition in the Mason Gross Gallery. The exhibit, Möbius, is a collective effort and collaboration between Corina Coughlan, Melisa Tekin, Rachel Gill, and Zameria Tennie. A running thread throughout their work is the idea of a Möbius strip, a surface that can be constructed by affixing the ends of a rectangular strip after first having given one of the ends a one-half twist. The artists draw on their highly varied pre-academic backgrounds, which range from coordinating municipal grant programs to handling graphic design for commercial poker sites. Navigating the second half of the first graduate school semester at Rutgers, the cohort, as a collective, explored the idea that their work, the paths they take, and the way they walk through the world might mimic this continuous, twisting loop.

The exhibition will be on view from the 30th September to 17th October with the opening reception on the 12th October from 6-9pm. We welcome all to attend and look forward to viewing the work of our grad students.

Design Lecture Series: Spring 2023

Last spring, we had another very successful Design Seminar Lecture Series, with 11 guest speakers giving our undergraduate and graduate students at the Mason Gross School of Art and Design great insights into their journeys as working practitioners navigating through the design industry. We were also very grateful to have all our speakers give their talks in person after a two-year hiatus due to covid, which restricted us to have these talks via Zoom. Our speakers gave the students a lot to think about as we explored how design is interwoven through many disciplines. Many of the speakers discussed the importance of collaboration in design practice and what this could look like. The speakers all had different interests and points of views which allowed for a wide variety of topics covered throughout the 11 weeks, providing inspiration for the students to expand their design practice.

This year we also introduced breakout sessions which were held after the talks with the students that created a community between the MFA and BFA programs. These breakout sessions allowed the students to discuss the talk and expand on what they took away from the lecture, which allowed a space for further enquiry and thinking to how we could implement certain design practices learned from our speakers. We engaged in debates on current topics surrounding the industry today and what they look like for the future of the design practice.

We would like to thank all our guest speakers for giving up their time to share their work and knowledge with us and we look forward to next spring’s Design Lecture Series with a new group of speakers. Stay tuned. 

Guest Speakers Spring 2023:

Asad Pervaiz, Talia Cotton, Stephanie Schapowal, Orkan Telhan, Nicole Killian, Eric Zimmerman, Joe Marianek, Yasaman Sheri, Anastasiia Raina, Chris Rypkema. 

Design Lecture Series: McKenzie Wark

On January 27, 2021, the Rutgers Design Lecture Series, Spring 2021, kicked off with McKenzie Wark, who introduced “The Cis Gaze (and its others).”

For upcoming talks, please visit spring2021-seminar.designforthe.net.

McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Capital is Dead (Verso Books), Sensoria (Verso Books), Reverse Cowgirl (Semiotexte) and various other things. Her next book is Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, to be published by Duke University Press in fall 2021. She is currently editing a special issue of eflux journal on trans | fem | aesthetics, to be published in Spring 2021. She was awarded the Thoma Prize for digital art writing in 2019. She is professor of culture and media at Eugene Lang College, the undergraduate liberal arts division of The New School, in New York City.

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