DENISE GONZALES CRISP Designer/Writer, North Carolina
3/21/19
BEN GAYDOS Designer/Filmmaker/Artist, Detroit
SILAS MUNRO Multi-Modal Designer, Los Angeles
Tiri Kananuruk Sebastián Morales Art-Science Interface, New York
ALL LECTURES TAKE PLACE AT 7:00PM Connelly Auditorium, Eighth Floor
University of the Arts, 211 S. Broad St. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107
215-717-6225 (School of Design)
DENISE GONZALES CRISP Designer/Writer, North Carolina
Prior to arriving at the School of Design at North Carolina State University in fall 2002, Gonzales Crisp was senior designer for Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and principal of the studio SuperStove!, designing projects such as Artext magazine, Southern California Institute of Architecture lecture series and books for independent presses.
Her design and writing have been published internationally, including in KAK (Russia); Graphis, Émigré, Metropolis and Print (U.S.); Eye and Items (UK); and in juried competitions such as ACD 100, Communication Arts, I.D., and Graphis. Her work was featured in the 2002 exhibition East Coast/West Coast Dreams (Paris), the 2005 anthology All Access: The Making of Thirty Extraordinary Graphic Designers and the 2009 exhibition Dimension+Typography (Chicago).
Gonzales Crisp has lectured widely and has been a featured speaker at ATypI 2009 (Mexico City), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), GraficEurope (Berlin), RMIT (Melbourne), ArtCity (Calgary), and numerous colleges and universities. Juried and commissioned essays are included in Design and Culture Journal, Items magazine, and Design Observer (online), plus Design Research, The Design Dictionary and several other anthology volumes. Her research areas include defining the Deco Rational, and defending and writing alternative design discourse. Additionally, she is author of Graphic Design in Context: Typography (Thames & Hudson, 2011).
SILAS MUNRO Multi-Modal Designer, Los Angeles
Silas Munro engages multi-modal practices that inspire people to be the best versions of themselves, in order to effect positive change on society as a whole.
His design studio, Poly-Mode, primarily works with cultural institutions and community-based organizations, including collaborations with the Center for Urban Pedagogy, Housing Works, MoMA, Walker Art Center and Wynwood (Miami). These collaborations have led to everything from information design of New York City Public Schools, graphics for protesting activists at Housing Works, publication design for Jacob Lawrence and the identity of an entire formerly predominately Puerto Rican neighborhood. His community-based projects have been supported by grants and residencies from Designers Talking, Sappi Ideas that Matter, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Munro’s research addresses the relationship between the designer’s personal identity, formal systems and strategies they utilize, and how both interact with the communities they serve. He is particularly interested in the often unaddressed post-colonial relationship between design and marginalized communities. This has taken tangible form in design work and writing that have been published via books, exhibitions and websites in Germany, Japan, Korea, U.S. and UK, such as Chronicle Books, IDEA magazine and Slanted magazine.
Munro is currently on the design faculty of the Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles.
BEN GAYDOS Designer/Filmmaker/Artist, Detroit
Benjamin Gaydos is a Detroit-based designer, filmmaker, artist and educator. He has conducted research in design and anthropology at Virginia Commonwealth University. His experiments in design, sound, film and video have been exhibited internationally. Ben has presented his work at Rhode Island School of Design, Case Western University and MIT’s Media Lab, among other institutions. He is co-founder and principal of goodgood, an interdisciplinary design firm with offices in Detroit and Boston; a producer and designer for Sensate Journal at Harvard University; and co-founder and programmer at Mothlight Microcinema in Detroit.
Tiri Kananuruk &
Sebastián Morale Art-Science Interface, New York
Sebastián Morales is a Mexico-born, New York-based artist, engineer and researcher. He develops interactive works at the intersection of robotics, digital culture and living systems. Morales received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology and a MPS in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. He is currently a new media artist-in-residence at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he creates estuary spaces in which single cells and primitive organisms from the internet evolve into new hybrid forms.
Bangkok-born, New York-based Tiri Kananuruk is a performance and new media artist. She holds a BA in Exhibition Design from Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Her work explores the manipulation of sound in the context of technological consumerism, examining human relationships through the use of transmitted signals, machine learning and bodily movement.
The Graphic Design Program at University of the Arts
The UArts Graphic Design program gives students an opportunity to develop the creative and professional skills they need to work in fields ranging from publication design to motion graphics to branding. In our open studio spaces, classes become close-knit communities supporting well-informed design processes and problem-solving strategies for all forms of visual communication. Our curriculum emphasizes formal aesthetic, theoretical, and analytical knowledge along with intense exploration of today’s rapidly evolving media landscape.
UArts Graphic Design graduates know how to analyze what they see; how to speak about it; how to develop meaningful concepts; and how to craft compelling narratives. They know how to promote themselves and their ideas, and how to produce work that will continue to excite, challenge, and nurture them throughout their careers.
Hello Up North: Confluence
Standing on the palisades of the North overlooking the Straits of Mackinac, one can see the shimmering aquamarine of Lake Michigan interfused with the stoic blue of Lake Huron. On a bright day in the summer it resembles 19th century French marbled papers. This is where two of the great waters of the world meet and brush against each other. Sometimes this meeting feels like an uneasy alliance—or a shove. Sometimes it feels like a furtive invitation. This is life without edges. These lakes were torn out from the earth by a vast and animate ice—a spirit so very alive in deep time. These lakes, with the deadly impulses of an Alpine tarn or the violence of sworn rivals, are ancestors of those frozen waters.
Not far from away is the Gros Cap cemetery. Here the sea of dreams floods this sandy slope. A wide swath of sentinel trees has been cleared so that the dead might look out over the two-lane highway, down the far slope to the beach—down to the meeting of the land and water, and across the rippled surface to the meeting of the water and sky at the smudged curvature of the earth. In the time before the fences, the Anishinaabeg placed wooden spirit houses over family members to shelter them in their waiting time. French Catholics, who built the cemetery fences, erected limestone totems for those who pass. Today, ancestors of both tribes are remembered on granite stones with sand-blasted granite roses. The stone flowers are now also gently sand-blasted by patient winds and beach sand. The same sand sifts over the memories of the low spirit houses, shifting under the power of the same wind. Underfoot is the evidence of lives punctuated by endurance, forbearance, ambition, or neglect. Underfoot is the evidence of silent grievances, carefully handed down like an heirloom. Some of these souls were called by the priest and they raced from here to the private whispered prayer, the fire, the candle light, and the incense of the church. Others heard the shared silent prayers, saw the fleeting wall shadows and flickering faces around a fire in the smudged smoke of a bark lodge. They came running for the drum.
The dark arteries that move across the sand and that serve as the roots of beach grass catch at your feet and attempt to bring you down to the holy ground or try to catch you in place—holding you in this sacred space. They tear, but they repair at night, quietly finding their severances. Hope—hope for something better—overflows this slope, finding its way between the fence posts, inexorably flowing down the far slope, to the beach, and out to the curvature of the earth.
This is history that insists on inhabiting your own shadow.
Some among us dream of bending the Great Designs. To change. To better. To wade into deeper and darker waters. To work at the confluence of Desire and Need. Beauty and Necessity. Hope and Sacrifice. Are these the ones comfortable with doubt—or blind to uncertainty? We are all navigating the surface currents, the deep channels, the daily rituals, the dreamscapes, and our own stray thoughts. Is their gift the vision that can see the edges? Is it a gift?
Or are they just asking for it?
At night, the Great Window opens and the sky races to the edge of your vision. It is punctuated with stars, each one the gift of a fire long dead that sent its last light to you across a vast landscape of galaxies. And from a time so deep that it washes comprehension clean. The Past insisting on living in the Present. Saint Helene’s lighthouse melts its fierce light over the water in its own designated rhythms: a warning, a sailor’s milepost, a ritual to those ashore.
This is a gathering to which we are called and can’t refuse attendance.
