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. 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 a Möbius strip.
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.
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.
The book that you see on the shelf, Poetries – Politics: A Celebration of Language, Art, and Learning is recently published by Rutgers Press. It is the outcome of a collaboration between design students at Mason Gross and SAS students. Professor of French Literature Mary Shaw and I co-taught a practicum class in 2017 that then culminated as an exhibition at the Academic Building. The book features posters that display politically charged poems from around the world that are selected by SAS students and designed bilingually by Mason Gross students.
Poetries – Politics is edited by Jenevieve DeLosSantos, Associate Teaching Professor & Director of Special Projects, and designed by Devon Monaghan, a design alum. I have included here a PDF of sample pages from the book along with Devon’s and my articles. All the students and other contributors are listed in the PDF. It is a coffee table book with good reproductions of great collaborative student work. It is available on amazon and at Barnes & Noble next to the train station in New Brunswick, in the faculty author section.
On November 30, we will welcome Tega Brain for a lecture presented as part of the Fall 2021 Rutgers Design Lecture Series, free and open to all. Register at art.rutgers.edu/design-lecture-series
Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems and infrastructure. She has created wireless networks that respond to natural phenomena, systems for obfuscating fitness data, and an online smell-based dating service. Her work has been shown widely including in the Vienna Biennale for Change and the Guangzhou Triennial. Her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is co authored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press.
On November 16, we welcomed Nontsikelelo Mutiti for a lecture presented as part of the Fall 2021 Rutgers Design Lecture Series, free and open to all. Register at art.rutgers.edu/design-lecture-series
Nontsikelelo Mutiti is a Zimbabwean-born visual artist and educator. She is invested in elevating the work and practices of Black peoples past, present, and future through a conceptual approach to design, publishing, archiving practices, and institution building. Mutiti holds a diploma in multimedia from the Zimbabwe Institute of Digital Arts and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, with a concentration in graphic design.
