The CalArts Graphic Design Programs have a notorious history as a radical site of design pedagogy. A roster of dynamic and risk taking faculty created a tendency to attract students who are upstarts in their own right and often go into teaching in their own radical and influential ways. In this moment of collective educational crisis, Yasmin Khan Gibson, Joe Potts, Lauren Williams moderated by Silas Munro will question the lineages of their own education, discuss pedagogical damage, explore what is critical to teach now, and speak to the legacy of radical education that evolved out of CalArts. 

This is the third of a series of conversations that critically address the exhibition Inside Out & Upside Down: Posters from CalArts 1970-2019 in relation to issues of inclusion and representation in the field of graphic design and graphic design education. Organized by Tasheka Arceneaux-Sutton and Silas Munro, these salons host CalArts alumni, guest designers, artists, and educators in a lively set of virtual conversations. 

This FREE event will be held on Zoom. To register, please click here.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Yasmin Khan Gibson is a graphic designer and design educator based in Los Angeles, CA. She has lectured at conferences large and small and is currently Program Director of the Graphic Design Program at California Institute of The Arts. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has been recognized by ACD, Art Directors Club and :output. Yasmin is a founding partner in Workshop Project, a pedagogical design practice. The practice investigates new platforms and formal outcomes for design education through producing workshops, and critical writing in the form of syllabi and curricula for graphic design educators, students and administrators. On an annual basis, Workshop Project organizes and facilitates FREE, A Design Educators Workshop as a collaborative platform for generative research and discourse around design education. All of the practice’s working and completed projects, syllabi, abstracts and proposals are available for public viewing and download on the WP web site and wiki site. Yasmin is also a former partner in Counterspace, which still lives on and specializes in design for cultural institutions.

Joe Potts is the founding director of the Southland Institute (for critical, durational, and typographic post-studio practices), and is an associate professor and interim assistant chair of the Communication Arts and Graduate Graphic Design programs at Otis College of Art and Design. Past clients and collaborators include Lorraine Wild / Green Dragon Office, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Machine Project, SCIArc, USC School of Architecture, and MoMA PS1. Joe holds a BA in Architectural Studies from Connecticut College and a MFA in Graphic Design, Writing, and Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts.

Lauren Williams is a designer, organizer, researcher, and educator. She works with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power. She teaches full-time in the Communication Design department at the College for Creative Studies and occasionally elsewhere. Lately, her practice and research revolves around Blackness, identity, bodiliness, and social fictions and examines the ways in which racism is felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions. Her work often engages people through collaborations and facilitated experiences in service of imagining and manifesting a more liberated present and future. In the past, she’s managed programs and policy aimed at cultivating economic justice. Going forward, she’s most interested in finding ways to align her capacities with revolutionary movements that build toward a different economy entirely and usher in new dimensions of power and freedom altogether. Her work can be found at williamslaurenm.com. Lauren received her MFA in Media Design Practices from Art Center College of Design and holds a BA in Economics / Global Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

ABOUT THE MODERATOR

Silas Munro is a partner of Polymode, a bi-coastal design studio that creates poetic, and research-informed design with clients in the cultural sphere and community-based organizations including MoMA, The Phillips Collection, The New Museum, Mark Bradford at the Venice Biennale. Munro’s writing appears in the book, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America published by Princeton Architectural Press. The project is featured in articles in Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, Black Perspectives. He has been a visiting critic at MICA, RISD, and Yale University. Munro is an Associate Professor at Otis College of Art and Design and Advisor, and Chair Emeritus at Vermont College of Fine Arts.