Lectures + Courses
Art History
Design Theory
Studio Instruction +
Critique
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 art historical theory in new ways. Working at institutions including Rhode Island School or Design and Brown University, these courses and lecture series aim to bring into dialogue object-based research and methodologies, curatorial investigation, critical writing, and artistic activism in the archive.
Female Forces: Hidden Histories in Art + Design
Theory + History of Art + Design, Liberal Arts
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Summer@Brown, Brown University, Providence, RI
Understanding gender as a system of power, this course addresses the many ways gender constructed identities through art and design movements and global projects from the late-19th century through today. Women have contributed to a complex design ecosystem crucial in creating many of the objects we use, the items we wear, and the spaces we live in. Expanding the narrative of design history we unearth widely influential histories of female designers and visual pioneers - not typically included in the foundational art canon and design teachings - through their contributions to architecture, textile design, graphic design, costume, fashion, and film. If you know where to look, the story of design is saturated with stories of their extraordinary legacies that paved the way for generations and continue to influence us today.
Fashion, Gender + Textiles in the Modern Age
Summer@Brown, Brown University, Providence, RI
Fashion and textiles are multi-layered 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. This intersection of artists and designers and their threaded manifestos became powerful vessels of expression in times of social change, political unrest. From the radical and innovative to the subversive to the surreal, the intersection of colonialism, industrialization, craftsmanship, multigenerational memory and authorship considers how we view textiles and the body.
Narrative Interventions: Hidden Histories in Museums + Archives
Theory + History of Art + Design, Liberal Arts
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 collections and archives materialize through complex historical relationships of acquisition and possession. This course considers these locations of meaning, institutional validity, and the burden of interpretation. Within these spaces, design research between objects and documents becomes an interactive pedagogical approach to question narrative and inform creative research practices. 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.
Designer Dialogues: Fashion Illustration of the 1960s-1970s
The 1960s and 1970s offered designers opportunities to take chances and break boundaries socially, politically and culturally through the vehicle of fashion. Seventh Avenue designers enjoyed active dialogues with textile designers, stylists, magazine editors and buyers of major department stores; while seamstresses assembled garments in the backroom and illustrators sketched samples on live models. Fashion illustration became a visual sentence making the eye travel through composition, color, line and texture to deliver a message instantaneously. The history of fashion illustration provides us with multi-phonic perspectives into the evolution and craftsmanship of design, historical representation in the media, identity shaping, and the visual storytelling of clothes.
Global Modernisms
Critical Introduction to History Of Architecture + Design
Theory + History of Art + Design, Liberal Arts
Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Approaching modern and contemporary art with non-linear cross-cultural dialogues, this introductory course focuses on Modernism as a diverse set of practices, positions and media that unfolded across the world in innumerable ways resulting in a complex network of lived experiences, interdisciplinary global relationships and historical processes. Often emerging from the Euro-American colonial project, this course offers "a series of competing histories from across the world to address what modern art might have meant to different people, in different places, at different times, along with a set of critical terms specific to these shifting cultural contexts."
Two-Dimensional Design History + Practice
Continuing Education, Rhode Island School of Design
Providence Art Club, Providence, RI
The language of visual elements is structured by a grammar of guiding principles that together create content and meaning - not as elusive as you might think. This design course combines the fundamental visual elements and principles of design essential for composition, pattern, value, texture, and color. Through class discussion and assignments students develop both a visual and verbal understanding of design principles, while creating visual problems to push their investigations. Students will explore design issues through weekly written reflections, in addition to class presentations, to better communicate ideas through the integration of concepts, materials, and new techniques.
