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Infodesigner Arlene Birt ’02 inspires action by humanizing data

This spring the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a sobering report, compiling the available knowledge about human-caused, greenhouse gas emissions with predictions about our warming planet. Though it’s written for highlevel scientists and global policymakers, there’s a page that’s instantly comprehensible to any reader. With a chart designed by MCAD Professor Arlene Birt, it depicts the steady rise of global temperature since 1900, with an overlay of human timelines illustrating how those impacts are already being felt by people born in 1950, 1980, and 2020.

“That chart gets at some of my objectives as a designer, which is to communicate clearly while putting the data into context,” Birt says. ‘“When I look at how my daughter’s lifespan looks completely different than my mom’s and my grandparents’, that’s the kind of emotional pull that could help us shift our behavior.”

Making hard data connect to our human experience has become a specialty for Birt, who is building a global reputation for translating complex information about environmental sustainability into memorable visual stories. A founding faculty member of MCAD’s Master of Arts in Sustainable Design and founder of Background Stories, an infodesign consulting firm, Birt recently talked with CUT/PASTE about why creatives need to be involved in solving humankind’s greatest crisis.

It’s not often that graphic designers get called out for their great work, but both the Washington Post and Financial Times have published stories about the impact of the infographics you created for the UN IPCC’s report. What’s that been like?

For the past year and a half, I’ve been working with more than 60 climate scientists from around the world to develop and collaboratively design these figures for the U.N. Synthesis Report, which had to be approved, line by line, by 195 governments. There were so many different rounds of approval that at some point there were more than 30,000 government comments with about 6,000 of them focused on the figures. It’s been exciting to see my name out there, but it’s also been an intensive process. It’s going to take some time to recover.

What’s it like being an artist in a world of scientists?

When I first started working with the team, I would be on Zoom calls with twelve different climate scientists all throwing ideas at me, the only visual person. Even though I knew they were speaking English, I could not follow the conversation! There was so much scientific language that learning how to understand it was a steep learning curve. There’s a moment with any project where I think, “Oh my gosh, I am so lost”—but it’s also exciting, because I know that through the process, I can help these groups find a way to translate this complex material in a way that non-specialists will understand.

Why do we need artists at the table? How do you think visual storytelling can help move the needle on climate change?

There’s more space for artists and creative people in this work as the world realizes that it’s just not enough to throw words and data at people. We need creativity and the humanities, not just to make things pretty, but to make it engaging. Our world today is more focused on visual interfaces, and people are becoming more accustomed to consuming information that comes to them through visuals. Connecting pieces of information in a visual way creates a story that can connect to people more personally. The more you help people see themselves within the data, the more likely you’ll be able to nudge them toward behavior change, and toward a better world for all of us.

This report has been billed as a “final warning,” the last IPCC report to be released while the world still has a chance to keep temperature rise below the tipping point. Where do you find hope?

About the U.N. Synthesis Report itself, I am really impressed by how much science shows where we’re headed, what we know, what we can track, and what we can prove. Scientists are notorious for adding caveats around their phrasing, but the science on climate change has evolved rapidly over the last seven years since the last IPCC Report cycle. We know what needs to be done. So now it’s about how we motivate us humans to take action, and advocate for policy makers to help us get there. I believe that humans have a lot of potential to shift and make change when we want to. I tend to be an optimist.

While he was still a student at MCAD, Wilson Webb got a job as a rigging electrician on the film set for Iron Will, where he began documenting Minnesota’s moment as a favorite 1990s movie location. “I had a very small 35 millimeter Olympus Stylus I’d always have on my belt, and I was sneaking photos all the time,” he says.

That collection of stealth images taken from more than a decade of movie and commercial sets grew into an impressive portfolio which caught the attention of Joel and Ethan Coen, who hired him to be the on-set photographer for A Serious Man in 2009. “That’s when I switched unions, and left the electricians to join the camera department, Local 600, where I’ve been ever since,” says Webb. “I take photos that help sell the film— for posters, publications, and social media. But an equally important part of my job is to document the process of filmmaking and highlight the relationships that happen along the way, all the people working so hard to tell a singular story.”

If you’ve been to the movies in the last decade, you’ve definitely seen Webb’s work, from the marquee posters and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, to current streamers like Causeway and White Noise. Based in Minneapolis, Webb works wherever the movies are, from the New Mexican mesas featured in the Coen brothers’ True Grit, to the Zodiac boat off the coast of Greenland where he covered Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go Bernadette? “I’m usually on set 100 percent of the time they’re shooting because it’s the only way to get the pictures I want,” says Webb, who is often shooting right alongside favorite directors like Noah Baumbach, Ben Stiller, and Paul Thomas Anderson. “My goal is to get great pictures while also being out of the way, and not apparent to the actors.”

While Webb admits he’s got a love/hate relationship with Instagram (where “take fewer selfies” is part of his bio), he’s also inspired by the way digital technology has put good cameras in everyone’s hands. “We’re seeing so many new perspectives, which I love. But ultimately, photos have to speak for themselves,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what the medium, camera, or delivery system is–if the image doesn’t move you, it doesn’t move you.”

SEANCE 5.0 and POST-CALIFORNIA are works from Meyerson, who bridges both abstract and figurative traditions of painting. Meyerson recently lectured at Harvard University, Hongik University, Seoul National University, Bloomberg Quant Seminar, and Seoul Museum of History, where he is the only Korean adoptee to have been invited to present his life and work.

Jin Meyerson believes he just celebrated his 50th birthday, but he can never be sure of the date. As one of the more 200,000 Korean children adopted into families from around the world—the largest adoption exodus from a single country in history—he knows the details of his birth story were likely fabricated by officials.

“The first confirmed date I have of my existence is spring of 1975, when I was abandoned in a public market in Incheon and brought to a police station,” Meyerson says, noting that his May 8 birthday–Parents’ Day in Korea–is one he shares with many adoptees.

“This is a very subverted point of history, and there’s been very little conversation about it inside Korea.”

But across three decades of artistic practice, Meyerson has remained intent on starting that conversation through large-scale paintings that often explore questions of identity, distortion, and displacement. Part of the first generation of young painters to be confronted with the digital revolution, Meyerson often relies on photo-editing software and augmented reality to distend and obscure documents and images, which serve as the underlayment to a painstaking, months-long painting process. “I have never wanted to make simple pieces of art,” Meyerson has said. “I think every artist starts out wanting to find out something about themselves. That’s the difference between making cute drawings and making art.”

A love of drawing was all that Meyerson had to bring from the orphanage to rural Minnesota in 1976, when he was adopted by what he describes as a “Swedish-American mother and a Jewish intellectual father from the Bronx. We were a multicultural family before the term was invented.” Encouraged to pursue his passion for painting, he graduated from MCAD in 1995 and went on to earn an MFA from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 1997. Though he found success early, with international gallery showings in New York, Paris, and Hong Kong, he was burned out after a divorce and gave up painting for nearly two years to concentrate on single-parenting. “Being an artist with a market and an audience is a dream job–but it also has to be your life, because no one else is going to do the work,” he says. “I’d been doing this since my late 20s, and I was exhausted.”

But Meyerson soon found artistic renewal through an invitation to set up a studio in Seoul. “There’s a reverence for art and culture in Korea, and generation after generation of amazing artists here,” he says, adding that contemporary art is tax-free, and many high-end galleries prepay for production from their most revered artists. His renewed commitment to art also led to “meeting and marrying the love of my life. I never imagined I’d have another opportunity, and that I would now have what very few adoptees get, and that is a real Korean family.”

Meyerson admits that being a major player and a cultural ambassador for Seoul’s expanding artistic scene still surprises him–particularly last year, when Max Hollein, Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, stopped by his studio for a visit. “If you had told me back in 2007 that someday the director of The Met would come to Korea, I would never have believed you, but it’s happening because Korea is a phenomenal location right now, and it’s a testament to all of the positive things that are happening in this art community,” he says, adding that Korea has finally begun to feel like home. “I won the lottery in many ways, being able to escape Korea when I did, and being able to be here now. But I think I have gotten to the age where I really don’t believe in coincidences– I believe in these sequences that we as individuals complete within our families, our communities, and our personal histories.’’

What do Target, Prince, and Purple Mattresses have in common?

They’ve all been clients of Dave Peterson, a Minneapolis-based ad man who’s made a long career of building and burnishing some of the world’s most iconic brands. “We like to say we create want,” says Peterson, the owner of Peterson Milla Hooks (PMH), a nationally recognized agency behind retail campaigns for such fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands as Gap, Target, Estée Lauder, Zales and Vera Wang. “And we create want by finding the most desirable, beautiful, and unforgettable way to present a product.”

Peterson, who studied graphic design at MCAD, talked to CUT/PASTE about the ways great art direction and design can drive action, and how to rise above the noise when building a brand.

Style and fashion have been a throughline in your career. Where did that interest start?

The light bulb went on at MCAD when I saw what was happening in the fashion department, and the show they put on. I helped design the promotional posters. I just loved seeing how these fashion students were working their butts off, with this glorious pageantry that was so magical. There’s just so much joy surrounding style and fashion that it was contagious. Sometimes I would go to the studio just to sit on the sidelines and watch it all.

You’re best known for turning Target into a destination for fun fashion and affordable design. How did you get Beyoncé to become a Target shopper?

First, I earned my stripes working at Campbell Mithun on the Dayton Hudson account. After starting my own agency, I was lucky enough to be invited into a contingent of people who were looking at what would make Target unique in the mass merchandising world. That marked a working relationship that would last 22 years.

We invented cheap chic, and over the years, we really stuck to a brand promise that Target was a fun, stylish, upbeat, mass merchandiser, which came to occupy a special place for the consumer. You felt rewarded and smart for shopping at Target because you were saving money, yet you were getting things that excited you. It wasn’t just baby food and toilet paper—it was also Missoni fashion.

What goes into creating a great brand? Where do you start?

It’s a very collaborative process, but at the beginning you want to hear your clients’ hopes and dreams, and also what have been their challenges. We often do strategic work first to learn about the competitive landscape, and see what seems to be working and what seems to not be working so that they can find a space that they can own. I always say it’s like peeling an onion—you peel it and peel it and peel it until you find the DNA of the brand. The DNA of Target is “Cheap Chic”—two words that kind of defined everything we did. If you can really pinpoint what’s good and unique about it, all the creativity flows from that.

This generation is well-schooled in the tools it takes to build their own personal and professional brands, but managing all of those platforms is exhausting. Any advice?

It is a lot of work, no doubt, but it shouldn’t take over your life. Think of building your brand as a great opportunity to really go inside of yourself and figure out what is the thing you really want to do. Use it as an exercise to think ‘what do I really love?’ rather than ‘what am I supposed to put out there?’ Then make sure your brand messaging reflects that. I know my success has come from really loving what I do. If you really focus on the things you love, it gives you clarity, and your portfolio is going to be more appealing than if you’re just a generalist. Crafting your own brand is worth it because it will help you get where you want to go.

Coming to MCAD helped Anh Tran ’21 find her voice and her vision for the future

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As a Vietnamese-American child growing up in Nebraska, Anh Tran spent so much time lost in her illustrations that her parents had to constantly remind her to finish her chores. Still, they were supportive of her talents, telling her “Where there is passion, there is success.” Today she is the Junior Designer in DesignWorks, illustrator, and storyteller.

At the encouragement of her high school art teacher, Tran chose MCAD, where she majored in illustration. From her class in children’s literature to her part-time position in DesignWorks, she honed her illustration style and found her love for graphic design, using colors, patterns, type, and shapes to capture joy and serendipity.

During her third year, Tran wrote and illustrated a very personal children’s book about aging family members and overcoming her grief. During this process she noticed that there are very few books about Asian kids. She found from her research that there are more children’s books about animals than the combined total books featuring children of color. Tran hopes to find a like-minded literary agent who sees the importance of multicultural representation in children’s books.

When Tran was a senior, she was hired as a graphic designer in DesignWorks and assigned her first project–a simple triptych in The Café. “It was challenging to let go of my usual tendencies as an illustrator while working in design. I am so color- and story-driven that focusing on shapes and type made me really stretch myself,” she says.

After receiving her degree, Tran was hired as the first Abeln/Little Design Fellow. “The fellowship came to me at the perfect time,” she says. “ Monica Little ’79 saw my potential, and has been a source of great inspiration.” Now Tran designs postcards, invitations, exhibition catalogs, brochures, CUT/ PASTE , and more.

Last spring Tran received a surprise email from a Target product designer who found her through social media. She hired Tran to develop a collection of electronic accessories, including phone cases and mouse pads, under their Heyday brand. “This assignment gave me the confidence to take on other freelance projects, and I can pay off my student loans!” she says.

MCAD guided her career trajectory and provided her with a supportive network. “It’s hard to imagine what my life would be like if I had stayed in Lincoln,” Tran reflected. “MCAD changed my life.”

Gregory Manchess ’77 leans into the adventure of storytelling through illustration

MCAD graduates have global impact, but award-winning illustrator Gregory Manchess may be the first alum whose artwork has made it all the way to outer space.

A serious science fiction fan who graduated from MCAD the year Star Wars was released, Manchess has been fulfilling a few of his boyhood dreams by designing the mission patches for several recent NASA and SpaceX partner expeditions to the International Space Station. “I love to look at this design and think this baby has been around the world 2,600 times,” he says. “It boggles the mind.”

Manchess’s mission patches are just the latest footnote in a four-decade career that’s included everything from cover images and artwork for and stamps and presidential portraits throughout the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. He’s designed ad campaigns and alcohol labels, authored his own graphic novel, and illustrated lavish collectors’ editions of such classic novels as and painted the artwork at the heart of the Coen brothers’ of Buster Scruggs

It’s a diverse portfolio, but Manchess says the common denominator that always draws him in is a good story. “It’s taken a lot of my career to figure it out, but it’s always about the storytelling,” he says.

“If I can get you curious to know more from the impact of just one image, then I’ve succeeded.”

Illustration wasn’t a major at MCAD when Manchess first arrived in Minneapolis from his hometown in Kentucky. “It was the 1970s and conceptual art was everything at the time, and I was told that painting and drawing were dead. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’m 18 years old and you’re not even giving me the chance to fail,’” he

In fact, Manchess has received multiple honors in his field, including the Hamilton King Award for career achievement from his peers in the Society of Illustrators, and was recently featured in an exhibition of his paintings at the Norman Rockwell Museum alongside the work of Frank Schoonover, the legendary 20thcentury Western adventure painter. Manchess is working on major commissions to illustrate collectors’ editions for both Dune and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, while preparing for a 2024 exhibition at a Paris gallery.

The variety and depth of his CV come as a bit of a surprise to Manchess himself, who says the secret is simply doing the work every day. “Neuroscience is backing me up on something I always tell my students, which is that talent will not get you as far as personal passion and focused training,” he says. “Every time you pick up a pencil, you are in training mode. If you bring that focus with you every time you go to the page or the screen, it will drive your skills so much farther than sitting around waiting for talent to show up.”

“Michelangelo and DaVinci were also illustrators,” Manchess says. “Juggling fine art with commercial work is what it means to be a working artist.”

In the Arctic Circle, Whitley Mike ’20, MA, observes human impact on whales

As part of the three-week expedition in November 2022, Mike and the SWX team documented interactions between snorkelers and orcas during the winter herring run that may help create sustainable management strategies for the future. “It was an incredible immersion into what felt like another planet–a distant planet ruled by mountains, waves, and whales.” Photos by Emma Khan

A life-long nature lover and selfconfessed Free Willy fan, Whitley Mike knows the power of being face to face with one of the world’s great apex predators. “The first time I saw an orca in the wild was like seeing God,” she says. “They touch the soul in a way I can’t even begin to describe.”

But as “swim with the whales” tours and other immersive eco-tourism offerings take off in popularity, Mike can’t help wondering whether these programs are sustainable. To find out, Mike put her graduate degree in sustainable design into action and recently set out to Norway’s Arctic Circle with Sea Women Expeditions, an international, intergenerational, interdisciplinary, and matriarchal team studying the challenges of a warming Arctic.

As the team’s Creative Director and Co-leader of the Norway Orca Behavioural Project, Mike and her partners are studying how these close encounters affect everyone in the ecosystem, from orcas to Indigenous people. “These programs are a huge money maker in Norway, where it’s like the wild west with little regulation,” says Mike, who wrote her MCAD master’s thesis on orca conservation challenges in the Pacific Northwest. “I’m able to bring my sustainable design degree into play through a design-thinking lens, making sure we’re considering all of the stakeholders.”

Not long after arriving as an exchange student from Brighton University, Grace Easton decided to make MCAD her alma mater. “In the UK, we didn’t have much contact time with our professors, whereas at MCAD everyone is at school, in their studios the whole day,” she says. “I thought that was the absolute right way to run an art school. It’s all about showing up and being together as part of a community.”

Now based in London, where she works as a senior illustrator for Smythson of Bond Street, a British luxury leather goods brand, Easton says she still benefits from the close bonds she made with MCAD classmates. “Now that we’re all on social media, I can follow along with what all my peers are doing, and where everyone has landed,” she says. “You will find that the friends you make at art school and the connections you make there are so strong. When you’ve all been told this isn’t going to be an easy ride, it’s a real bonding experience.”

A freelance illustrator with her own children’s book coming out in 2024, Easton says emerging from the pandemic has inspired her to recommit to making a little art every day. “Drawing is the ultimate magic trick,” she says. “Keeping up a daily practice of drawing, whether you’re doing it for a client, or for yourself in a sketchbook, has been a way for me to stay in love with drawing. It’s a relationship with myself that I want to develop.”