Lectures + Courses
Art History Lectures
Design Theory
Studio Instruction
For over ten years, I have directed and crafted original courses aimed at providing interdisciplinary tools in which students can tap into the their studio-based design practice and activate art historical theory in new ways.
Crafting courses at Rhode Island School or Design (RISD) and Brown University, these classes and seminars aim to bring into dialogue object-based research and methodologies, curatorial investigation, critical writing, and activism in the archive.
Female Forces: Hidden Histories in Art + Design
Theory + History of Art + Design, Liberal Arts Department
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Summer@Brown, Brown University, Providence, RI
Women have contributed to a complex design ecosystem crucial in creating many of the objects we use, what we wear, and where we live. Understanding gender as a system of power, this course addresses the many ways gender constructed identities through design movements and global projects from the late-19th century to today. Expanding the narrative of design history we unearth influential histories of female designers and visual pioneers - not typically included in the foundational art canon - through their contributions to architecture, textiles, graphic design, costume, fashion, and film.
Fashion, Gender + Textiles in the Modern Age
Summer@Brown, Brown University, Providence, RI
Fashion and textiles are multilayered unifying elements in our world that carry our histories, ancestral techniques, and identities within their fibers. This course explores the ways fashion, gender, textiles, and art have come together over the last 150 years through research and discussion to create modern aesthetics and shape the textile and fashion industry. From the radical and innovative to the subversive and the surreal, the intersection of colonialism, industrialization, craftsmanship, multigenerational memory and authorship considers how we view textiles and the body. Within the intersection of artists and designers, these threaded manifestos became powerful vessels of expression for social change, politics and identity.
Narrative Interventions: Hidden Histories in Museums + Archives
Theory + History of Art + Design, Liberal Arts Department
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Museum collections and archives hold innumerable challenges to unknown histories and forgotten voices. A place of both fact and fiction, these spaces have materialized through complex historical relationships of acquisition and possession. The course considers considers these locations of meaning, institutional validity, and the burden of interpretation. We examine work by international artists and designers conducting archival interventions confronting hidden histories at these sites creating a final project which intervenes from a place where the hidden is acknowledged, activating future art and cultural discourses.
MFA Research Methods: Graduate Thesis Seminar
MFA Program, Illustration Department
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
In preparation for the creation of the MFA graduate thesis, this course emphasizes the contextualization and mining of one’s own work as a complex network for growth through the consideration of your own studio practice as a topic of study in itself. Conducted as a seminar, graduate students explore a variety of approaches to thinking about imagination and production by building on research practices through experimental and interdisciplinary approaches. Through individual exploration of texts, objects, and practices, students are expected to push the bounds of their familiarity to enhance their capacity for thinking through lines of inquiry and moving between different perspectives, methods and materialities.
Visual Thinking \ Visual Strategies Studio
BFA Program, Illustration Department
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Communication is at the heart of everything we do; it is the conveyance of ideas and information through visual form. This class emphasizes process over finish, idea over application and significance over style - exploring both ways of seeing and ways of showing. Coursework encourages conceptual invention and application fundamental to an understanding of what the practice of illustration is and can be. The object of the course is to strengthen the students' inventive talents and interpretive skills - and thereby to augment their ability to articulate complex ideas with clarity, eloquence and power. This class broadens the way one thinks and reinvents, how to steer ideas from interpretation to visual form. With a focus on process and individual voice work created cultivates useful ways to think, work and tell stories.
History of Illustration
BFA Program, Illustration Department
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
From prehistory to the present, this course considers the illustrative practice and its continued roles in the development of knowledge, communication of information, the influencing of opinion and culture. An introductory survey to expand the knowledge of illustrative image production, material covered will broaden inspiration for one’s own practice while familiarizing students with critical concepts and debates in narrative production and storytelling effects. Through global visual cultures and histories, examinations of American and European traditions implore critique in their historic centrality in the development of mass media worldwide.
Designer Dialogues: Fashion Illustration of the 1960s-1970s
Brown University, Providence, RI
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
The 1960s and 1970s offered designers opportunities to take chances and break boundaries socially, politically and culturally through fashion. In Seventh Avenue showrooms, designers activated dialogues between textile designers, magazine editors and buyers of major department stores; in the backrooms seamstresses assembled garments and illustrators sketched samples on live models. Fashion illustration became a visual statement for the eye to travel. The composition, color, line and texture delivered the message instantly. Through the vehicle of fashion illustration history, we view multi-phonic approaches to the evolution and craftsmanship of design, performance of identity in the media, and the evolving storytelling of clothing.