Lectures + Courses
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
Women make up over half of designers working today, yet gender bias continues to alter the historical canon of female contribution within art and design. Women have contributed to a design ecosystem creating many of the objects we use, the items we wear, and the spaces we live in. This course reclaims the histories of female designers responsible for pioneering industrial design, architecture, graphics, illustration, fashion, and film. Particular attention is given to the work of female artists marginalized by gender, race, or ethnicity globally throughout the Twentieth century. If you know where to look, the story of design is saturated with stories of women with extraordinary legacies which paved the way for generations in art and design, many of whom continue to influence us today.
Fashion, Gender + Textiles in the Modern Age
Summer@Brown, Brown University, Providence, RI
Modern fashion exists historically within the intersections of artists, designers, and aesthetics impacting culture and society. From the radical and the innovative, this course explores the last 120 years to create the modern aesthetic and shape the clothing industry. How do fashion designers test their ideas and develop their craft? How did new design concepts have the power to change society? How has fashion contributed to the construction of modern gender identities? This course explores artists and designers of fashion at the dawn of the modern age and their work across the disciplines of painting, theater and textile design, performance, and film to view their continued influence today and beyond.
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 unknown histories and 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.
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."
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 a keen perspective into the evolution and craftsmanship of design, historical representation in the media, and the visual storytelling of clothes.
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.