Prominent thinkers in art, design, and creative education will discuss the role of theory in contemporary practice. Jan Tschichold’s 1928 book The New Typography created a concrete methodology for working designers and printers based on avant-garde experiments. What does intellectual discourse look like now? Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, will lead a conversation with Barbara Glauber, principal of design studio Heavy Meta; David Reinfurt, graphic designer and co-founder of Dexter Sinister and The Serving Library; Taeyoon Choi, artist and co-founder of School for Poetic Computation; and Paul Stirton, curator of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography: Graphic Design Between the World Wars.
Taeyoon Choi is an artist, educator, and activist based in New York and Seoul. His art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and installations that form the basis for storytelling in public spaces. He has published artists’ books, including Urban Programming 101 and Anti-Manifesto. Choi’s solo exhibitions include Speakers Corners, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, New York (2012); My friends, there is no friend, Spanien 19C, Aarhus (2011); and When Technology Fails, Reality Reveals, Art Space Hue, Seoul (2007). He teaches at the Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Choi co-founded the School for Poetic Computation where he continues to organize sessions and teach classes on electronics, drawings, and social practice. Recently, he’s been focusing on unlearning the wall of disability and normalcy, and enhancing accessibility and inclusion within art and technology.
Barbara Glauber is the principal of Heavy Meta, a graphic design studio based in New York. Over the past two decades, she has edited, curated, and designed exhibitions; judged competitions; taught classes and workshops; and created a variety of graphic materials for her cultural clients. Her work is in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and has won numerous awards. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Barbara is on the faculty at Yale University and is a founding partner of the Smoking Gun website.
Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002).
David Reinfurt is an independent graphic designer (BA, 1993, University of North Carolina; MFA, 1999, Yale University). He worked at IDEO from 1995–1997. In 2000 he formed O-R-G inc. In 2006 with Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey, he established Dexter Sinister. From 2006–2011 Dexter Sinister published Dot Dot Dot. In 2011 with Bertolotti-Bailey and Angie Keefer, he founded The Serving Library. David teaches at Princeton, was 2010 USA Rockefeller Design Fellow and his work is in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Centres Georges Pompidou, and Whitney Museum. David was 2016–2017 design fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
Paul Stirton is an Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center. He has a particular interest in graphic design, interiors, and print culture, although his recent work has been concerned with public monuments and cultural transfer or emigration. His current research and publications are mostly concentrated in two areas: architecture and design in Britain and in Central Europe (primarily Hungary) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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