Prattfolio Fall/Winter 2018

Pratt folio

Fall/ Winter 2018

The Magazine of Pratt Institute

Em pathy

Features

8 THE WORLD IN YOUNG EYES Pratt Alumni Uncover Harsh Truths and Hope from the Perspective of the Next Generation 16 RECLAIMING JOY For Children Grappling with Pediatric Cancer, Purvi Shah, MS Communications Design ’95, Creates Spaces Where Their Visions Rule 24 WE CONTAIN MULTITUDES Three Questions with This Year’s Alumni Achievement Award Winners, Exemplars of the Many Ways Empathy Helps Us Do Our Best Work Departments

2 PRACTICE A visit to the studio of artist Jean Shin, BFA ’94; MS ’96, Adjunct Professor CCE, Fine Arts

6 SOLVED Nelly Bonilla, BArch ’10, and Oscar Luna, BFA Film ’10, create an installation reflecting the experience of two-sided discourse 34 NEWS Recent updates from campus and beyond 37 NEW AND NOTEWORTHY Items in the marketplace created

by Pratt alumni, faculty, and students 40 SPOTLIGHT Celebrating Carole Sirovich 41 CLASS NOTES Updates from Pratt alumni on work and life 55 NETWORKS Dispatches from the alumni Regional Networks

4 CRIT A conversation with Jenny Lee, Adjunct 57 Professor CCE, Fine Arts, and Connie COMMUNITY Fu, MFA Painting and Drawing ’19 Highlights from @prattalumni Prattfolio is published by the Office of Communications and Marketing in the Division of Institutional Advancement for the alumni and friends of Pratt Institute. ©2018 Pratt Institute 200 Willoughby Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205 prattfolio@pratt.edu www.pratt.edu/alumni Facebook, Instagram, Twitter: @prattalumni; @prattinstitute

Interim Vice President of Institutional Advancement Jim Kempster Executive Director of Alumni Relations Sherri Jones Director of Development Communications Charlotte Savidge Senior Editor Jean Hartig Creative Director Mats Håkansson

Interim Associate Creative Director Erin Cave Graphic Designers Jin Kim Rory King Kyu Lee ’19 Qiong Li Alexandra Portis Dan Romanoski Copy Editor Brandhi Williamson Staff Contributors Holly Graves ’15 Marion Hammon Jolene Travis

Associate Director, Project Management Stephanie Greenberg Assistant Director, Traffic and Production David Dupont Photographer Daniel Terna For address changes and obituary notices, please contact alumni@pratt.edu or call 718.399.4447.

“We have been given a great gift: creativity. But creativity is nothing without empathy.” These sage words come from one of Pratt’s newest alumni, Shaina Garfield, BID ’18, who delivered this potent message to fellow graduates at last spring’s Commencement: “Through our creativity and empathy, we can build common ground. Our power comes from our compassion for one another.”

Indeed, if any of us embarks on our work without understanding the people for whom we are planning, making, building, writing, we lose an extraordinary opportunity to make a true impact in the world.

Our job is to be engaged with the community—and beyond—and that’s what we teach here at Pratt.

During this inaugural year as president, I have been asking, How are we part of a larger ecosystem? How are we functioning as partners?

We only can be part of an ecosystem if we are willing to be malleable, to put ideas forth openly, to receive the context and also be part of it—shift with it and respond, which requires extraordinary listening.

Pratt is a place where students build the intellectual framework and skills to achieve this vital agility, and both practice and experience empathy. It’s palpable in every corner of the Institute: from the ethos of the School of Art’s Creative Arts Therapy programs, to the solutions proposed by architecture and design students at last spring’s Design Show that addressed stresses on humans and the planet, to a project being led by Student Affairs to create classroom and critique environments that foster student well-being.

Meanwhile, as we shape our new strategic plan, all of us are reaffirming our dedication to enhancing both the excellence and the accessibility of a Pratt education, qualities that can only be attained through genuine engagement with one another.

In this issue of Prattfolio, there are many more remarkable stories of empathy in action among alumni, in fields from medicine to performance to investigative journalism.

Empathy at its most profound manifests in a deep, rich, thorough commitment to one another. Because of you—our alumni, students, faculty, and partners—we are poised to create the kind of reciprocal environment where powerful, world-altering change begins.

Frances Bronet President

Letter from the President

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Practice 2

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From the studio of artist Jean Shin, BFA ’94; MS ’96, Adjunct Professor CCE, Fine Arts, Hurley, New York

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1 Jean Shin’s studio stretches across the light-drenched topmost floor of a Hudson Valley barn, a former chicken coop.

Originally, Shin sought out the building as storage for her expansive, object-rich pieces, but it also became an ideal staging area to hang and create work, much of which takes shape out of accumulations of objects cast off or decommissioned by their users.

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2 Pieces from Shin’s early Seams series hang on the southwest wall. For Seams, Shin reduced discarded clothing to its seams and fastenings, drawing out each garment’s continuous framework, with echoes of the human skeleton.

“The transformation happens with the hand,” Shin says, referring to her work in general. Part of her often labor-intensive practice involves entering every project as

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a novice and finding the specific skill or context required for each endeavor—something she explores with her Integrated Practice students at Pratt—as well as collaborating with various communities to actualize a piece. Once a tactile labor is mastered, the repetitive action of practicing that task can become a meditative experience.

Practice

3 “Something about the object calls to me,” Shin says of her criteria for selecting materials to engage with. This is only a fraction of the prescription bottles she has sourced from nursing homes and willing participants’ medicine cabinets for iterations of Chemical Balance. Installed, the stacked bottles jut from ceiling and floor like cave formations.

“Everything is a prototype until it’s completed in a specific

site,” she says, whether it’s these pharmaceutical stalagmites, exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, or her recent work MetaCloud, encompassing thousands of deaccessioned slides from The Metropolitan Museum of Art that explore the fragility of institutional memory, now permanently on view at Facebook headquarters.

4 Shin is attracted to the concept of obsolescence surrounding certain objects—umbrellas, shoes, trophies, keys—and looks for ways to recontextualize them within contemporary conversations. This mass of space bars relates to TEXTile, a tapestry of old computer keys linked to a working keyboard that invited the viewer to interact, participating in the reanimation of outdated materials.

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Jenny Lee Adjunct Professor CCE, Fine Arts

In Jenny Lee’s Welding, Metal Fabthat I registered as anxiety. You were rication, and Forge course, graduate very careful, saying, let’s try not to get painting student Connie Fu explored in the weeds about every little thing the material world beyond the canvas when you’re still at the concept level. to create a structure for a living sculp- JL: It’s a holistic development that I’m ture, presented in the performance interested in, being able to visualize and exhibition Lust for Life: A Wedding, something and then breaking it down put on last spring with fellow Fine Arts intellectually and coming up with MFA students. a strategy that is suitable for you to get there. There are many ways to JENNY LEE: Can you start by telling us get there. why you took the course?

CF: The process is very slow, especially CONNIE FU: I had a lot of ideas about as compared to painting—my apbuilding structures and sets—I was proach to painting. But nonetheless, swept up in this world of puppetry, I could see quite tangibly that there the idea that there’s a body that is not were things happening and problems fully autonomous. I was thinking, being solved every week. The other what if the [puppet] strings are a thing that kept me committed was structure. I was looking at the theater that I really like this object. It’s a of Robert Wilson [BFA Interior Demirrored image with this kind of visign ’66] and thinking, using steel is olent-looking center-waist constructhe most commonsensical way to tion. I like the fact that it’s a cage, but build structures that can support when you put it on it gives you definite weight and that can also be formally personal space. beautiful and stark. I wanted to make JL: Did you have to change your plans at those things—in addition to also any time? building the confidence around work- CF: There were a couple of moments ing in the metal shop and interacting that were a little bit of a stutter. Really with the technicians. this waist component, where all the JL: I want students to come away with a pressure is. There was no plan for it command of the processes and the until the end. It was actually good materials, but moreover, I look for that way, because I think if we had how they use the materials and the tried to plan everything out at the processes toward a larger purpose. beginning, it would’ve been an addiEven though it is a techniques course, tional obstacle to working. technical proficiency is secondary to JL: It would’ve been overwhelming. critical making. Most of our converBecause the class is for beginners, I sations, amid highly technical, spehave the approach that taking on an cialized shop talk, dig into thought entire process from start to finish process and judgment. might not be feasible. So identifying CF: I had this idea, but it was in an early and working through problems is stage. There were so many questions central to the course: this requires

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Connie Fu MFA Painting and Drawing ’19

assessment and choosing what to pursue and what to abandon, and to what extent. You gain knowledge and independence, you gain the ability to solve problems only by working through them.

CF: [Looking at images from the performance] I was thinking maybe I should document it in the traditional way—against a white background.

The thing about this space I was in is that there is a lot of competing visual information.

JL: The lopsidedness becomes enhanced because of all the lines, horizontal, vertical.

CF: It bothered me at first, but one way to think about it is as a gesture of the sculpture, that it was never meant to be so perfectly precise.

JL: When you were making this, your main concern was that the rings were not close to perfect circles. I said, what’s more important is when you line them up, they should all be level, very still.

CF: After I welded the nuts on the back, I think that actually changed something.

JL: I think securing the nuts by welding torqued the structure.

CF: Yes, so that’s something I have to figure out now. I’m excited to continue to work through this and other projects involving structures, motion, and the body in Independent Study with you this fall.

JL: I am also excited to continue our dialogue, Connie, and look forward to your breakthroughs.

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Nelly Bonilla, BArch ’10 Cocreators, Home Eleven Oscar Luna, BFA Film ’10

Nelly Bonilla and Oscar Luna effect on others, particularly in teamed up after Pratt to form the type of anonymous, detached Home Eleven, an artistic exchanges that happen on partner­ship that uses installation social media. works to spark dialogue and encourage understanding and The idea: compassion. With their Sticks “There are two sides to every and Stones Walk, taking its argument,” Bonilla and Luna say. name from the familiar childhood During a disagreement of their rhyme, the artists aimed to own, the pair came up with a create a space where viewers double-sided walkway as a visual could experience how their depiction of the dispute. During words could have a physical the time it took to move through

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the space, two people could encounter a number of ways— represented by a movable center wall—to discuss or solve a problem.

The precedent: Luna and Bonilla found formal inspiration in “the Great Wall,” an exhibition space created by D’art Design Gruppe in Germany composed of cardboard tubes stacked to form a wall that visitors could manipulate to discover

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hidden contents. An installation by design collective Les Astronautes for Quebec’s public art event Les Passages Insolites (Unusual Passages) led them to consider the sensations of passing through a space narrowed by protrusions.

The plan: The artists conceived of a 10-footlong enclosed walkway with a center wall filled with movable rods padded with pipe insulation. The

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sides of the structure would be made of wood planks separated by rocks or bricks to allow slivers of light through, creating the shadows of “sticks and stones.”

The center section would start out even, giving the visitor on each side two feet of space, but “the moment someone forces their thought onto you, an imbalance happens.” At the halfway point, a window in the dividing wall would allow visitors

Solved

a chance to break anonymity and it with variable-size PVC piping. consider their interlocutor.

“Ultimately, we felt it added to the aesthetic and language of the The modification: piece, illustrating that a strong With Hurricane Irma headed division between two people can toward their Florida studio in the be an accumulation of small and weeks before they were set big disagreements.” to transport the installation to the ArtPrize exhibition in Grand Rapids, The moment of truth: Michigan, last fall, the artists A week into the project’s exhibi­ had to compress their production tion, the artists received a call schedule and do without a from the Grand Rapids Public plexiglass center wall, replacing Museum alerting them that their

piece had been damaged— some guests had not observed museum etiquette, and the center wall gave way. “We came up with the idea of leaving the piece as is as a statement,” with a plaque adding a new layer of meaning to the piece. The closed walkway now represented a communication breakdown, but for the artists, another idea emerged: “A conversation should not defeat you.”

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The World In Young Eyes

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Pratt Alumni Uncover Harsh Truths and Hope from the Perspective of the Next Generation How can young people’s stories help us relate to experiences vastly different from our own and perhaps make the world a more understanding, connected, and tolerant place? Pratt graduates are confronting today’s most intractable challenges—from war and displacement, to poverty and neglect, to racial and gender-based hostility.

Seen through the experiences of young people, these issues take on clarified resonance. Pratt alumna Maria Gabriele Baker, MFA Writing ’17, interviews Pratt artists working in film, dance, and storytelling, delving into the discoveries made while working with and among those coming of age in a connected but conflicted era.

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Myrsini Aristidou Myrsini Aristidou, BFA Film and Art History ’13, a filmmaker, follows young protagonists in Cyprus and Greece as they face challenges of an adult world in her films Semele and Aria. Aristidou started her artistic career studying painting but discovered her love of filmmaking after being exposed to the range of practices at Pratt. She received a grant from the Spike Lee Film Prod­ uction Fund to create Aria, which was an official selection at a number of festivals, including Venice and Sundance in 2018.

In her film Semele, the relationship of a girl with her long-absent father, a laborer who struggles to care for his daughter, forms the basis of the subtle narrative, which unfolds from the child’s point of view. With a note from school as an excuse to reconnect with her dad, Semele takes a dusty journey through industrialized Cyprus to visit her father at his work site.

While it’s clear he’s initially disgruntled by her presence, as the day progresses, a mutual understanding awakens.

Aristidou’s second short film, Aria, opens at an Athens kebab shop where the film’s eponymous 17-year-old protagonist is waiting for a driving lesson with her father. When he finally arrives, it is not to go for a drive— instead, he leaves her to look after a young Chinese immigrant who speaks neither Greek nor English. Aria must decide her next moves and how to do right by another when she herself has been cast aside.

Maria Gabriele Baker: What drew you to inhabit or create space for

the stories of youth? Was the impetus personal, political, or a mixture of factors?

Myrsini Aristidou: I think both of the films are sourced from personal experiences. Semele for me is an exploration that shifts beyond a parent-and-child relationship as it sets out to further question any relationship of love/ exchange between two people.

There is an underlying understanding between the two characters, certain feelings and behaviors, which are universal. However, in Aria, there is an evolution in subject matter and context, as it deals with

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a mixture of political and current social concerns. For me, both films explore and expose how fragile and vulnerable human relationships are, and how important it is to accept oneself in order to take the leap forward and transcend.

MGB: How are Semele’s and Aria’s experiences influenced by their class, gender, and race?

To me, the intersections of all these identity markers are particularly present in Aria.

MA: There is a political undertone in both Semele and Aria, in that you can deduce the economic instability of both countries, in the first case Cyprus and then Greece. This atmospheric uncertainty is inevitably affecting the behaviors, jobs, and attitudes of the heroes. However, it’s also what becomes the catalyst that encourages these characters to seek a better future, to dream, and to allow for their feelings to exist. When I write, I always try to address prime elements

of our human nature, by focusing mostly on exploring the emotions of a certain experience. The social class, gender, or race surely affects the circumstances in the development of the plot, but it is never at the core of the emotion that I aim to explore within the story.

MGB: Your young protagonists’ perspective is the sole perspective of your films. Can you say a little more about the technical means by which you achieve

capturing your protagonists’

point of view of the world?

MA: Possibly. As adults, we feel that we have a certain sense of responsibility towards children, exactly because they are not grown enough to have any financial responsibility, and

we mistakenly think that they are also emotionally unaware.

But I do believe that children are incredibly intelligent, hyper­ sensitive, and operate in a higher level of consciousness to their surroundings. We most certainly ought to experience the world more like them.

MGB: Do you believe there are entrenched and crucial differences in the way adults see the world vs. how young adults and children see it?

MA: Age/time doesn’t necessarily define our level of consciousness. However, I think it may certainly enhance our acceptance towards the rest of the world, and ultimately towards our self.

MGB: How can we continue to bridge the gaps in the ways adults and children or young adults experience the world?

MA: Certainly [by encouraging] an effort to increase our awareness toward the sensitivity of children. There is a truth and an innocence that exist in a child’s mind that we should always aspire to.

MA: With the use of a handheld camera, I try to remain as subjective as possible to the child’s/teenager’s perspective of the world. Staying close to the characters with the camera also helps in really feeling and breathing the energy of the person, while they are walking, talking, moving.

MGB: Do you think we generally underestimate children’s com prehension of their own world?

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Detail of still from Aria, with Chrysa Platsatoura as the film’s protagonist Opening spread: A scene from Miranda Dahl’s Haidar. Photo by Kevin Condon

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Natalie Riquelmy Natalie Riquelmy, MFA Writing ’18, a poet and educator, worked with the young women (aka the Strong Sophisticated Sisters, or S.S.S.) of El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to help them discover how they might tell their own stories and create space for their peers to do the same.

Rather than steering the students toward creating something concrete, the work became about setting the stage for dialogue around social concerns that played out in real time in the young women’s lives.

Bringing their sessions with Riquelmy full circle, the S.S.S. created a workshop for their fellow students focused on sharing experiences around themes of body positivity, self-perception, and peer validation at the school’s annual Fly Girl Fest. Riquelmy’s teaching was part of the Pratt graduate writing program’s fieldwork component, in which writers link their practice to a community initiative.

NR: The world [they] are trying to navigate is one that does not want [them] to exist—meaning that there are [harmful or hostile] structures in place within our communities and society at large. I do not want to generalize, as I know that despite all of the young women being women of color, there are other ways in which they either gain or lose privilege. However, they live in a climate where young men their age are calling them “females” [in a pejorative sense] and derogatory terms and fostering an atmosphere of competitiveness between young women. Many of them come

from low-income neighbor hoods. Many of them are affected by the cycle of poverty, which bleeds into different parts of their lives. The world many of them know is of survival.

MGB: How did you create an environment conducive to sharing and listening in your meetings?

Maria Gabriele Baker: How did you decide to devote your MFA fieldwork to creating space for the voices of young women?

NR: For one meeting, I brought in readings by June Jordan and Audre Lorde to get us started on talking about how we piece together our identities. Being Natalie Riquelmy: My fieldwork for that this was happening after the MFA program initially came school, the young women didn’t out of poems from my thesis exactly want to read and that were centered on navigating therefore disengaged. At that predominantly male spaces point, I knew that the best as a woman of color. I was already I could do was open the floor for teaching at El Puente Academy them to talk about what they

for Peace and Justice, and had wanted to talk about. They did contact with the young women’s use what I brought up as after-school group, so I thought a starting point, and then went it might be interesting to start on to talk about social justice talking about this kind of survival movements and whether or not with them for the sake of prothey actually work. One young

moting rigorous questioning lady spoke rather pessimistically,

and consideration of the ways saying that despite efforts in which we show up in the world toward equality, women are still and have to move through treated badly and seen it. Doing this work with young as inferior to men. This led to people is critical for providing a debate between her and tools and building support sysother members who focused on tems that they can use as they the incremental progression

continue to develop and con of the ways in which women are struct their identities—and viewed and show up in society. is something I know I could have Other facilitators and I interjectbenefited from when I was ed only when discussions got a teenager.

heated or repetitive. For me, at

that moment, holding space just MGB: What defines the world the meant allowing myself to trust girls you work with are trying them in their own navigation to navigate? of space with one another.

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It meant giving them time to process in the ways they needed to.

MGB: Do you believe there are entrenched and crucial differences in the way adults see the world vs. how young adults and children see it?

NR: From my experience, I’ve

noticed insecurity and fear of

failure or living up to expecta tions on both ends of the age spectrum. For me, the differ ence is how those things are coped with and worked through.

Because adults have spent more time navigating life, they perhaps have learned methods of negotiating space and identity in ways that work for their survival, whereas youth may not have.

MGB: Do you think we, as adults, underestimate children’s comprehension of their own world?

NR: Absolutely. We as a society tend to see things so linearly, so when we think about development, we think of it as something that begins at its most basic level as a child and is most complex as an adult.

I believe that children have this magic, incredible ability to sense what is happening around them before others do. I believe that fear has the potential to accu­mulate with age. How do we connect with the youth within us in order to conjure new ways of being and thinking, or being without fear of being?

MGB: What does it take to successfully bridge the differences in the ways adults and young people experience the world?

NR: Creating opportunities for young people to voice their opinions and have those opinions validated by their peers and adults. Creating oppor­ tunities for adults to do the same.

If we as adults are able to honor

and integrate the experiences and knowledge of our youth in our practice, said practice and relationships can only become stronger.

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Detail of young women’s responses to the S.S.S. workshop exercise “What is your #?”

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Miranda Dahl

whose answers to some of our questions demonstrated such a maturity. We became interested in a child’s inter­ pretation of masculinity and how adult themes could be expressed just as powerfully through a youthful gaze.

Haidar is most definitely political in its focus on the refugee crisis, but the show’s content is very abstract in that its narrative may not be completely understood in a linear fashion. Rather, we leave the show open to interpretation—if the audience can connect with one single scene and empathize with our adolescent main characters, then they can empathize with the refugee existing in the real world.

Miranda Dahl, BFA Printmaking ’18, an artist and choreographer, explores childhood and loss of innocence in a time of war through movement, stagecraft, and sound in her performance work Haidar. After developing Haidar with two students at Central Saint Martins in London, where she was studying abroad, Dahl re-created the piece as part of her Pratt thesis, presenting it at Memorial Hall last spring, with fellow Pratt students Alistair Chew, assistant director, and Sara Knapp, Daniella Brown, and Yuyi Shen, performers, adding their diverse perspectives to the creation of this evolving, collaborative work.

Haidar’s story takes shape through physical theater and dance that engage with a weighty metal sculpture onstage, which the actors build and deconstruct throughout the show— MGB: Would you say that elements a symbol of the difficult transition of class and race play into from youth to adulthood and from the protagonists’ particular home to isolation. The narrative experiences? focuses on the self-discovery of a boy, Haidar, and his preadolescent MD: Class and race are absolutely friends exploring what it means to present topics within the show, be an adult—in particular, a man— though I think these themes amid a stark, war-torn world. Told in are also explored within the a palindromic framework, the show actual casting of the show, reverses at its midpoint to explore the as well. We felt strongly that our same sequence of events through the cast be as diverse as possible eyes of Haidar’s female friend, Radiah, and that we represented many but to a very different outcome. countries and ethnicities

onstage so that we could address Maria Gabriele Baker: Can you how the refugee crisis say a few words about the origin is a global issue that affects of this project? Was it a person­

everyone and that any one ally and/or politically motivated of us could be forced into idea to create space for the this situation. stories of children?

Miranda Dahl: The refugee crisis while I was in Europe was something

[my codirectors, Jordan Chandler and Dorothy Graham, and I] could very directly witness the effects of. We felt that it was a topic that needed to be addressed, and the best way for us to do that was through our artwork. We decided that the palindrome—a con­struc­tion that can be read the same forward and backward—would

be a perfect framework because of its representation of a circular history.

During our research process we ended up meeting a young Syrian boy, about 10 years old,

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that holds, at least initially, a safe childhood, right?

MD: You are absolutely correct! One of the biggest components of this show was working within the, what some might say, limitation of confined space.

However, that “limitation” actually offers a more innovative approach to the hierarchy of space and guides the creative process for choreography.

Having structure and borders at first seems comfortable— just like as a child having certain rules that must be followed gives a clear sense of morality.

However, when we break those borders and disrupt that structure, we have to work our way through this uncertainty until we find a solution.

MGB: Do you believe there are entrenched and crucial differences in the way adults see the world vs. how young adults and children see it?

MD: I think that adults often become set in their ways. They view things as more cut and dry than children, who have a stub­born­ness and vitality to keep

questioning their perceptions

of their surroundings.

MGB: I notice that the child’s world/ Haidar’s world is strongly

defined by borders and struc ture—the large, transformable, square frame creates a container

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Interviewer bio: Maria Gabriele Baker, MFA Writing ’17, is a performer, translator, and writer of prose, poetry, and drama.

Among her recent projects, developed while working toward her master’s at Pratt, is a long-term writing workshop held with a group of local senior citizens who went on to shape their writings for a collection, We Live Here. The book was published

by The Felt, the MFA in Writing program’s literary magazine and press, in 2017, and Baker is currently working on a follow-up oral history project, “As Told,” supported by a Taconic Fellowship from the Pratt Center for Community Development. Baker joined Pratt faculty in fall 2018 and is teaching two Pratt Integrative Courses.

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A scene from Haidar. Photo by Kevin Condon

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Reclaiming Joy:

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For Children Grappling with Pediatric Cancer, Purvi Shah, MS Communications Design ’95, Creates Spaces Where Their Visions Rule

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Art was giving him a chance to create a world he liked.

Purvi Shah knows the anxiety of waiting.

Waiting for the delayed doctor’s appointment to begin, waiting for the uncertain outcome of test results, waiting as treatment took its course for her young son as he battled the disease that forever changed her family’s life. In that liminal space reigned by chaos, Shah knew she needed to create a haven for her son and his older brother—and later for hundreds of other children and siblings experiencing cancer.

Shah’s son Amaey was first diagnosed with leukemia in 2005, when he was just three years old, on the day before Thanksgiving. For the next two years and nine months, Amaey underwent treatment, and life in and out of the hospital—countless hours in the waiting room—became the new normal. At the most turbulent time, Shah turned to something that for her had always been grounding: art making. At first, she describes, it was an act of self-preservation—but at its core, it was an act of love.

“I was selfish when I started creating art with my son who was going through leukemia treatment and his older brother,” she says. The illness, the treatment, the side effects, “I could not control any of that, but the small art projects we created, I could control them.” She watched their shared work transform the atmosphere, bringing laughter and color to days that might have been fogged in by stress and sadness. “I looked into the moments that my son was the happiest and most peaceful despite his cancer.

They were when he was creating art in the hospital therapy room, in the hospital playroom, at home. Art was giving him a chance to create a world he liked.”

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Seeing her son’s joy and, in the waiting room, other children’s and families’ curiosity, Shah began to encourage others to join in. “Little did I know that most caregivers felt like I did; they needed an escape, and our art workshops were just that,” Shah says.

In 2008, Shah arranged a special workshop to take place at Pixar Studios in the Bay Area, where she is based, imagining it would be a special, if one-off diversion for the families she’d befriended. The power of that experience resonated far deeper than the temporary escape. That first excursion led to an exhibition and auction of the children’s work to raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society—with physicians from the hospital in attendance not as caregivers but as art appreciators—all of which added a new level to the workshop’s significance. When the children saw their work transformed into something others admired and even acquired, they expressed a new sense of pride: Here, they were more than patients or siblings defined by a disease. They were makers, thinkers, and dreamers with voices in the world.

To continue the momentum, Shah established the Kids & Art Foundation.

This year, the nonprofit organization celebrates a decade of providing moments of solace, reflection, and enjoyment to children and their families grappling with pediatric cancer. Waitingroom workshops led by Bay Area artist volunteers remain at the core of the foundation’s programming, held weekly at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, and special destination workshops hosted by local creative meccas

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Reclaiming Joy

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I had to find beauty where there was none. I had to find happiness when there was none.

such as DreamWorks and Google are part of the annual calendar. The organization also created a special visiting-artist program for children in home hospice care.

Then, just as in the beginning, the children’s work is exhibited. This year, young artists showed their paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media pieces at the Palo Alto Art Center, the San Francisco Women Artists gallery, Art Attack SF, and the San Francisco Airport’s Terminal 1 through the SFO Museum.

dren’s lives. For the kids, having agency over process is a big part of the work’s meaning. For parents, there is power in witnessing moments when their children are experiencing the uninhibited joy of childhood, when time melts away into simply being and constructing something new that the world has never seen.

From the start, Shah knew it was important for the workshops to take shape as opportunities, with guidance but not regulation: “The kids and families have too many rules, too many appointments, too many things they cannot do or have to be careful about,” she says, noting that the volunteers are trained to act as creative catalysts. Each project has many possible approaches, and art making is presented as a journey, with revision encouraged, along with cooperation and collaboration.

When building her Kids & Art team of staff and volunteers, Shah looked for focused compassion: “I wanted a team that was present. These children and their families are facing many challenges and they have to leave many things halfway.

I wanted a team that understood the value of being there for each child and meeting them where they were, helping them complete their art so that they had a sense of accomplishment. It is a very small thing, making a piece of art while waiting for your treatment—it might even seem insignificant. To have a team that can come in with the empathy and vulnerability to see things as they are is very important.”

Shah set aside her career as a creative director to be a full-time caregiver to her son during his illness, but her instincts as a designer remained—and remain—a guiding force in her life. To develop a program that served the unique emotional and social needs of children and families grappling with cancer, she relied upon the strategies ingrained in her from studying communications design at Pratt, as well as applied arts in India, where she grew up, and her years coming up with solutions for clients such as DreamWorks and BlogHer. “It became who I am. I had to find beauty where there was none. I had to find happiness when there was none,” she says. Shah discovered an answer in observing how meaningful art making was to those around her. There was optimism in the “simple task of choosing a color or a paper” instead of focusing on the stress and pain surrounding treatment.

Art making offered opportunities to make decisions, rethink and restructure, problem solve, and determine when the work was complete—opportunities that In 2011, Shah’s son Amaey relapsed with cancer treatment can strip from chil- chemo-induced Acute Myeloid Leu-

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We let the art do the talking and we create an environment that exudes hope, creativity, and transformation. Anything is possible.

kemia. He passed away in September of that year. Amaey had fought cancer for six of his nine years. Shah says at that point, the will to look for the silver lining, the optimistic answer, felt distant to her, but one came to her nevertheless through the courageous spirit of her older son, Amaey’s big brother. “He wanted me to continue Kids & Art because for him as a sibling, the art workshops helped him escape and feel equally empowered,” she says.

The emotional and social challenges faced by children with cancer and their siblings, from anxiety to isolation and loneliness are well documented. The American Psychological Association lists among the potential effects of cancer on children forms of distress that include depression, anxiety, apathy, and low self-concept, which can be intensified by being away from school and peers. Siblings are often the silent warriors—managing an onslaught of complex emotions that can include feelings of neglect and guilt. A creative outlet can help them feel a sense of authority amid helplessness.

Shah has worked to establish a program that generates “a safe space where we do not prescribe anything. We let the kids be kids. We let the art do the talking and we create an environment that exudes hope, creativity, and transformation. Anything is possible.” Kids & Art has also begun to collaborate with hospitals’ established art therapy programs to offer projects that can be folded into formal therapeutic treatment.

In 2017, Shah received a Jefferson Award for Public Service for her work with Kids & Art. This summer, she transitioned

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from executive director to chair of the board, opening a new chapter to seek out ways to sustainably grow the organization—and she remains a vital presence at the workshops, often the first to show up and the last to leave, quick with a hug and a generous smile, echoed on the faces of the kids. “I attribute my background as a designer to who I am today and what I have done with Kids & Art,” she says. At Pratt, “the communications design program trained us to look for answers where there were none. Not settle for the mundane. Not wait for someone to solve your problem.” Because cancer threatened to stifle the joy and abundance of childhood for the young people and families around her, with tens of thousands more lives affected each year, Shah tapped into those problem-solving roots to create a solution with profound human meaning. “When I look at all the art created by both my boys and the other kids at Kids & Art workshops—when I look at the colors, the shapes, the stories weaved into each canvas,” she says, “I don’t see the cancer, I see the child.”

Artwork: Sunset on the Water (p. 19) and Angles 1 (p. 20), created by Kids & Art workshop participants at Stanford Children’s Hospital. Opposite: watercolor painting

by Purvi Shah’s son Amaey. Images courtesy of Kids & Art Foundation and Purvi Shah

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We Cont Multi We Contain Multitudes: Three Questions with This Year’s Alumni Achievement Award Winners, Exemplars of the Many Ways Empathy Helps Us Do Our Best Work

With humanity, compassion, and courage, Pratt alumni are changing culture, altering the landscape of the world for the benefit of others. Patients can access more effective care, communities that have experienced injustice grow stronger, and citizens find means to speak truth to power and reimagine society because of graduates’ notable contributions to industry and culture—work that wouldn’t be possible without endeavoring to understand experiences beyond their own. The 2018 Alumni Achievement Award winners, who were honored at Alumni Day in September, share their thoughts on the human resonance of their diverse work.

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Derrick Adams BFA Art and Design Education ’96 Derrick Adams is a Brooklyn-based artist working in an expanse of disciplines, with a practice rooted in fragmentation and manipulation of structures and surfaces to examine how popular culture and media messages inform the images we create of ourselves. Adams is renowned for his work exploring the nuances of the black experience, most recently through his multimedia exhibition Sanctuary, which used a series of travel guides written by and for black Americans in the mid-20th century as a departure point for his explorations of accessibility, barriers, and what it means to have freedom to move.

What advice would you give to young artists seeking out ways to generate understanding and awareness of others’ experiences through their work?

Look around you. Look at yourself. Look at others and see what they are going through. Ask what is important, what is urgent, what is missing. Present practical ideas showing us how we can be better.

To present others in the hopes of generating understanding, you really need to understand their experiences, which can be a difficult task depending on where you are coming from. The key is to know that understanding other people’s struggle does not detract from what you are going through; try not to compare.

Is there a project that has particularly underscored the human resonance of your work?

My last couple of years’ work asked me to investigate the ripples of domestic violence, cultural assimilation, and effects of mass incarceration. I am currently diving deeper into the research as a child of a victim of the mass incarceration system, so I feel like I’m truly just getting started.

As an educator, how do you guide your students as they attempt to use their voices to confront those challenges with wide ripples beyond their own experiences?

I am always holding up the mirror and the microphone. The people I work with are often reminded they should be silent.

They are awarded for this behavior. And when they speak up against atrocities, there is some tension. Through writing, we release the tension. We’re able to name it and reclaim our space in the room, in the world. I also remind folks that if we don’t write our own stories, who will speak up for us? This kind of action reminds them of history, how inaccurately our stories are retold when we aren’t the authors of our own memories.

tain itudes How do you see empathy functioning in your work?

My work draws inspiration from humanity in general, and black Americans specifically. Given the inequity and injustice against people of color in America and the world, the very act of making work with the black subject brings us into the consciousness of those who view it—what shifts take place in the mind of the viewer are unknown. I make work of people like myself at leisure as a testament to the fact that throughout struggle there is also a time for rejuvenation, play, and reflection. It is necessary to see a complete picture of black people and not just images of oppression and violence.

Only by seeing us as whole can understanding be achieved.

Is there a project that has particularly underscored the human resonance of your work?

My show Sanctuary at the Museum of Arts and Design here in New York was inspired by The Negro Motorist Green Book, an annual guidebook for black American travelers published by New York postal worker Victor Hugo Green from 1936 to 1967. I wanted to make work about this person who indirectly saved people’s lives by doing something so simple yet so profound. Mr. Green compiled information from across the country as a guide for safe places to eat, sleep, get gas, shop, etc. during an era when open and legal discrimination was widespread. Seeing what is happening in our country and world today, it felt important to make this show so audiences can compare the similarities and hopefully take positive action.

Mahogany L. Browne MFA Writing ’16

Mahogany L. Browne is a writer, organizer, and educator known for her bold works of performance poetry and her activism. Currently the artistic director of Urban Word NYC, a youth literary arts organization, Browne came up in the world of slam and spoken word, deftly weaving the personal and political in her work. Browne is the author of several books, including Redbone, nominated for NAACP Outstanding Literary Works, and the best-selling illustrated book Black Girl Magic (Roaring Press/Macmillan), and she recently coedited The BreakBeat Poets: Black Girl Magic anthology. During her time at Pratt, Browne founded the Women Writers of Color Reading Room and produced two years of social justice and arts programming for Black Lives Matter at Pratt.

Thomas J. Hughes BME ’65; MME ’67

The body has its own mathematics—and what if solving the right equations means saving lives? It’s a question Thomas J. Hughes has pursued since his early days as a researcher, and now one of the most widely cited authors in computational mathematics and engineering science, How do you see empathy functioning Hughes has devoted much of his career in your work? to engineering improved resources for I see the empathy breathing throughout patients at risk of life-threatening dismy pieces because they require humanity ease. Among his notable contributions to be considered. I’ve been investigating is laying the groundwork for HeartFlow, what is goodness and what is “bad,” and Inc., which developed a patented cardiac it’s required that my moral compass takes test that analyzes blockages and blood a backseat and I truly observe human flow in cardiac patients without invabehaviors. How does jealousy show up? sive procedures.

What does lack of attention as a child manifest as in the adult body? When is How do you see empathy functioning capitalism worth our community’s finan- in your work? cial stability and how are cultures deci- Empathy is the driving force behind the mated because of it? And rather than ask areas in which I choose to work, the who’s to blame, I am trying to ask, what problems in these areas that I attempt to does support look like? solve, and with whom I choose to work— for example, in the area of cardiovascular disease. It may seem strange that an engineer would be working on such problems, but in recent years there has been a confluence of technologies and

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We Cont Multi Derrick Adams, BFA Art and Design Education ’96

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We Cont Multi Thomas J. Hughes, BME ’65; MME ’67

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disciplines brought to bear on medicine.

When I was about to choose a PhD thesis topic, I heard about initial work in the new—at the time—field of biomechanics, in which mechanical ideas were used to study problems of orthopedics and blood flow. My father died when I was nine years old of a “heart attack,” but I didn’t really know what those words meant. He suffered for years before he died, and I wanted to know more about this illness and to eventually do something about it. The thesis topic I chose was motivated by this—namely, blood flow in arteries. It was very mathematical and perhaps ahead of its time, but it set the stage for my future involvement in medicine.

they should pursue. I usually say something like this, “Cardiovascular disease and cancer are the number 1 and number 2 killers in the US, and worldwide, respectively. Pick one.” Often, they question whether they have the necessary background, but smart people can learn anything, and modern research is multidisciplinary and team oriented. They have the ability to bring unique skills to the subject and often the talent to really make a contribution.

A final note: I practice what I preach.

I am also now working on prostate cancer, which I became interested in after a good friend died from it.

Is there a project that has particularly underscored the human resonance of your work?

The Haiti Campus is a project I collaborated on with students in the ACE Mentor Program [a national program for young people pursuing architecture, construction, and engineering careers] —a unique opportunity to join two of my passions: mentoring and design. We worked together to redesign a school, in CapHaïtien, Haiti, for the Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad organization, whose school campus in Port-au-Prince was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake.

Incorporating educational, support, and community functions, the campus is now able to house 1,500 students ranging from elementary to high school, withstand earthquakes and hurricanes in the flood-prone area, and create a resource that ties into the existing fabric of the community.

tain itudes Is there a project that has particularly underscored the impact of your work?

In 1994, during the time I was on the Stanford University faculty and also had an engineering company, the university’s new chief of vascular surgery, Chris Zarins, came to see my company’s computer simulation technology. It was all devoted to traditional engineering products, so the only thing I had that I thought he could relate to was a garden-hose problem that looked a little bit like an artery, but it was squirting water all over the place and seemed like a vascular surgery gone awry. I had no idea what his reaction would be and I became a little worried. He stared at it for what seemed an eternity and then turned and said to me, “This technology is going to revolutionize vascular surgery.” That was the beginning of a collaboration and friendship that have gone on ever since. Chris and our first graduate student, Charles Taylor, cofounded HeartFlow, Inc., which has commercialized a computer-based, patient-specific, noninvasive procedure for precisely diagnosing coronary artery disease that replaces risky invasive procedures still in current use, at lower cost and with better patient outcomes.

What advice would you give to young engineers seeking out ways to improve others’ lives through their work?

Most of the young engineers I work with are advancing toward PhD degrees that will prepare them for research careers.

They typically have very strong technical backgrounds and possess skills in mathematics and computing that could be exploited on a wide variety of problems.

As they are coming to the end of their studies and thinking about the future, they often ask me about what direction

Pascale Sablan AIA, NOMA, LEED AP, BArch ’06

A rising talent in the field of modern architecture inspired by urban narratives, Pascale Sablan takes inspiration from today’s city landscapes and their inhabitants, as well as the quiet strains of history that might otherwise be drowned out by more dominant voices.

Representation and voice are at the heart of Sablan’s practice, which has seen her contribute her expertise to the African Burial Ground National Monument, the first black slavery monument in New York City; help redesign a Haitian school campus destroyed in the country’s 2010 earthquake; and most recently, curate the exhibition SAY IT LOUD, a showcase at the Center for Architecture and the United Nations in New York City featuring more than 20 distinguished minority designers.

How do you see empathy functioning in your work?

There are 109,748 licensed architects, and 2 percent are African American.

Those 2 percent faced many obstacles and persevered, and some contributed greatly to the built environment. However, due to the forces of erasure in both the education system and profession, their work and their existence is rarely recognized. I feel empowered to protect, elevate, and proclaim their contributions. Most of my work is shining light on others to inspire a more diverse profession in the future.

We Contain Multitudes

What advice would you give to young architects seeking out ways to improve others’ lives through their work?

Wholeheartedly join organizations and participate in initiatives and programs that address an issue you feel passionate about. This will help you immediately make an impact. It will educate you on many facets of the issue as well as expand your network to like-minded and motivated professionals who also are passionate about the cause. You do not need to invent the wheel. Support one another and make an impact.

Tucker Viemeister BID ’74

Tucker Viemeister thrives on the collaborative exchanges that make meaningful, lasting design. Since cofounding Smart Design in 1979, he has gone on to lead teams at such firms as frogdesign, for which he launched the New York City office; Razorfish; Thinc; Ralph Appelbaum Associates; and Rockwell Group, where he founded the Lab. Known for his OXO Good Grips ergonomically designed kitchen tools, iterated through dozens of models to best serve users with a range of abilities, Viemeister has been a forerunner in design that prioritizes both accessibility and aesthetics. His latest project, with Shanghai studio Xenerio, sees him helping to bring complex science to a broad audience in the planning of a new planetarium in China.

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We Cont Multi Pascale Sablan, AIA, NOMA, LEED AP, BArch ’06

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tain itudes Tucker Viemeister, BID ’74

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We Cont Multi How do you see empathy functioning in your work?

Empathy is a prerequisite for any designer because design is a back-andforth project. Designers need to understand the clients, the manufactures, the workers, the materials, and especially the user. User-centered design is not solving the users’ problems—good design is about creating opportunities in the whole ecosphere. Instead of climbing Maslow’s hierarchy of needs one layer at a time, industrial designers are always trying to achieve all levels at once—function, safety, meaning, and beauty. It’s not possible to actually live someone else’s life, and it’s very easy to apply your own assumptions that may tangle with reality, so to be really sympathetic, you need to always probe the boundaries of your own empathy—beyond the comfort zone.

Is there a project that has particularly underscored the human impact of your work?

Empathy is a moving target—cultural ideas about human relationships are evolving at the same time technology is adding new dimensions. I’m working on a conference [which took place in September at the Japan Society] whose theme is empathy—it’s about how advances in digital-sensing technology are affording new avenues for empathy and what human relationships mean to artificial devices.

I’m also working with Xenario on a huge new planetarium in Shanghai, China. We are designing the exhibitions to help people understand the universe and inspire further exploration and discovery. We are attempting to present some of the biggest questions, scales, and ideas in ways accessible to people of all levels of understanding—this requires a gigantic level of empathy!

It’s something I learned at Pratt from my teacher Rowena Reed Kostellow, one of the founders of the industrial design pedagogy. As she told us, “Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization!”

Margot Williams MSLIS ’80

Margot Williams’s work restores humanity to lives affected by structures of power around the world. Her career at The Washington Post—where she was part of two Pulitzer Prize–winning teams— The New York Times, NPR, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is one of the most respected in the investigative-reporting world, with research that has shone a light on civilians who lost their lives in police shootings in Washington, DC, and terrorism suspects sequestered in an international network of secret prisons.

Currently research editor for investigations at The Intercept, Williams reports on national security and surveillance for this news outlet specializing in deep-digging, justice-minded journalism.

How do you see empathy functioning in your work?

My favorite quote about journalism comes from the newspaper reporter played by Gene Kelly in the 1960 film Inherit the Wind: “It is the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

A newsroom is a team effort internally and a public function externally. Empathy figures in both. In the newsroom, researchers and reporters have to support and engage with each other in order to succeed. This is especially true in investigative reporting, which is a collaborative process. As a news researcher, throughout my career I have primarily worked in teams and partnerships, in the news library and on breaking news, data dives, and investigative projects.

Externally, news research and journalism aim to help people and hold government accountable. To do this consistently and objectively, you have to empathize with the plight of others, at home or abroad. Journalism is a humanistic profession.

tánamo, and they were prisoners without names until 2006. I set out to find out who they were and how they got there. At The Washington Post and later at The New York Times, NPR, and The Intercept, I have continued to collect, research, and publish data on these men, which can be seen at The Guantánamo Docket interactive database of documents and analysis on The New York Times website.

I have been to Guantánamo three times and have met with families of the 9/11 victims as well as the defense attorneys for the men accused of the terrorist attack. Every person caught in a secret system of kidnapping, detention, and torture was a human being. Some had committed heinous crimes and deserved punishment. Many more had committed no crime at all. I could relate to the innocent ones, and that gave me the determination to account for them all.

What advice would you give to young people seeking out ways to use data to tell important stories and generate greater understanding?

Develop expertise in a subject area involving people you are passionate about.

These could be people very much like you or people who are very different.

Understand why you care about them and why you want to tell their story.

Develop the technical skills to organize and analyze your reporting. I’m proud to be a data nerd. Girls can do math and women can be data journalists.

My Pratt MSLIS degree showed me I could do it.

Don’t lose hope. We live in terrible times, where delusion and deceit are ascendant, but that can change. It has before, thanks to people who tell new stories that make new sense to the world, people like you.

What advice would you give to young designers seeking out ways to improve others’ lives through their work?

Here’s what I say to all designers: Your work is really important! You can’t just “be true to your work.” The things you make will shape other people’s behavior.

Designers may think their talent is what’s important—but actually empathy is more important. Empathy is a key ingredient of user-centered design, making the world more beautiful and society more civil. Form and function Is there a project that has particularly are one when the design is beautiful— underscored the human resonance of that’s why I coined the word beautility. your work?

In January 2002, the first detainees landed at the detention camp at Guan-

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tain itudes Margot Williams, MSLIS ’80

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News

129th Commencement Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum, urged graduates to “go do right” and “construct a better future for all” at Pratt Institute’s 129th Commencement. The event was held on May 16 at Manhattan’s iconic Radio City Music Hall, where more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students crossed the stage to become newly minted alumni of Pratt Institute. The 2018 celebration marked the first Commencement for President Frances Bronet.

Honorary degrees were awarded to Pasternak (Doctor of Humane Letters), who was also the Commencement speaker; installation and conceptual artist Jenny Holzer (Doctor of Fine Arts); and jazz pianist and music educator Ellis Marsalis Jr. (Doctor of Fine Arts) at the ceremony.

During the opening declaration, President Bronet thanked the students and faculty for their hard work and dedication and asked the students as well as their parents, friends, and other supporters to stand for a round of applause.

“Enjoy this celebration. You have earned it,” she said, and encouraged graduating students to keep in touch with the Pratt community as alumni.

Graduation speakers also included Associate Professor, Mathematics and Science, Damon Chaky, who was named Distinguished Teacher (2018–19) and was honored with a medal designed by Mansoo Han, MArch ’19; and elected student speakers Shaina Garfield, BID ’18, and Natasha L. Seng, MS Art and Design Education ’18.

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Allied Works Selected to Design New School of Art Building Renowned architecture firm Allied Works has been selected to design a state-of-the-art School of Art building on Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn campus.

The new building will provide a welcoming space where students, faculty, and guest artists can collaborate in exciting new ways, and will provide a hub for engagement with the local community, the broader New York City arts world, and beyond. Deepening the Institute’s role as a cultural anchor at the heart of Brooklyn’s dynamic arts community, the building will have exhibition spaces and an auditorium for public programming that will foster deeper creative exploration and discourse related to the arts.

“Allied Works is an outstanding choice to design Pratt’s defining new School of Art building,” said President Frances Bronet. “Providing our faculty and students with an inspiring facility is critical to the cross-fertilization of ideas and artistic approaches. Allied Works has demonstrated an unparalleled ability in its work to create powerful learning environments for intense investigation.

We are looking forward to how they will shape engaging and interactive spaces for our community and the public to join us for exhibitions and cultural events.”

Founded in 1994, with offices in New York City and Portland, Oregon, Allied Works is recognized for creating architectural spaces that resonate with their specificity of place and purpose. The studio has received international acclaim for its work in the cultural realm in particular and has designed new buildings and expansions for educational

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institutions, museums, and arts and cultural organizations around the world.

Industrial Design Alumni Honored at Rowena Reed Kostellow Fund Event Executive Director of Global Chevrolet Design John Cafaro, BID ’77, was presented with the Rowena Reed Kostellow Award for his support and enhancement of the industrial design profession at a ceremony on March 28 at the Knoll Showroom in Manhattan. Pratt alumna and Associate Footwear Designer— Innovation at Cole Haan Ariana Zarillo, BID ’13, was honored at the event as the second recipient of the Rowena Reed Kostellow Young Designers Award in recognition of her work to advance the principles of design developed by Rowena Reed Kostellow. The awards presented to Cafaro and Zarillo were 3-D models created by graduate industrial design student Sam Cotton with Kate Hixon, Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design.

This event benefits the Rowena Reed Kostellow Fund, which was established in 1988 to support scholarships and communicate the philosophy of its namesake, one of the founders of Pratt’s Industrial Design Department, through programs and published work.

BAP Honors Cultural Luminaries in Support of Pratt Students The Black Alumni of Pratt (BAP) hosted its 28th annual “Celebration of the Creative Spirit” Scholarship Benefit Gala at the Park Hyatt New York in Manhattan on May 8, honoring individuals and companies in the world of art and design

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“You are the designers of our shared future. So, design it well.

Design it with intention. Design it with inclusiveness and humility. Design it for the common good. Above all, design it with love.”

—Anne Pasternak, 129th Commencement keynote speaker, to the class of 2018

Left to right: Ariana Zarillo, President Frances Bronet, Sam Cotton, and John Cafaro at the Rowena Reed Kostellow Award event

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Industrial design and communications design students explored solutions to waste reduction in The Future of Take-Out, presented at the Design Pavilion in Times Square during NYCxDESIGN.

Interior design student work on display in Noguchi + Pratt. Photo by Katherine Abbott

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whose accomplishments and values resonate with those of Pratt Institute.

This year’s honorees were supermodel and actress Naomi Campbell, who was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award presented by designer Marc Jacobs and accepted on her behalf by Christy Turlington; David N. and Joyce B. Dinkins, who were honored with the inaugural David N. and Joyce B. Dinkins Pinnacle Award presented by Sylvia Rhone, President of Epic Records; renowned artist David Hockney, who was recognized with a Lifetime of Artistic Excellence Award presented by Ian Alteveer, Aaron I. Fleischman Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Creative Spirit Award recipients Virgil Abloh, creative director, fashion designer, and artistic director at Louis Vuitton; and Pat McGrath, renowned makeup artist and entrepreneur.

The evening also featured the announcement of the 2018 Marcio Moreira Multicultural Scholarship and McCann Internship winners. Sponsored by global marketing firm McCann Worldgroup, the annual scholarship recognizes top academic junior students studying communications design.

Since its inception in 1990, BAP has raised more than $5 million to further the BAP endowed student scholarship effort, provide precollege awards for high school students looking to pursue an arts education, and help fund other BAP initiatives.

Pratt x NYCxDESIGN Pratt participated in NYCxDESIGN 2018, New York City’s official citywide celebration of design, through a variety of exhibitions, discussions, and presentations of work in venues around the city in May. President Frances Bronet appeared in high-profile panel discussions on women and design, including a special Pratt Presents at Design Talks NYC program, “Women of Influence in the Business of Design.” Work by Pratt alumni, students, and faculty was recognized with NYCxDESIGN-related awards and media coverage. Among the honors, Maryam Turkey, BID ’17, was named the Best of Launch Pad 2018 winner in the Furniture/Objects category at WantedDesign for her piece, Mazamla, a contemporary water cooler inspired by traditional Middle Eastern terra-cotta water coolers. CRÈME/Jun Aizaki Architecture and Design, the creative design agency of Jun Aizaki, BArch ’96,

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won the NYCxDESIGN award in the On the Boards: Commercial category for Timber Bridge at LongPoint Corridor, a floating passageway between Brooklyn and Queens. Adjunct Associate Professor of Interior Design Francine Monaco’s design firm, D’Aquino Monaco, was awarded the NYCxDESIGN award in the Kitchen and Bath category for Central Park South Apartment.

Noguchi Museum Showcases Interior Design Student Work Each spring, Pratt graduate interior design students collaborate with The Noguchi Museum, located in Long Island City, Queens, for Noguchi + Pratt, an exhibition of Isamu Noguchi-inspired work. This year’s exhibition, which was on view at The Noguchi Museum in May, featured work created by 39 students as part of the spring 2018 Interior Design Graduate Level Qualifying Design Studio course taught by Adjunct Associate Professors Wendy Cronk, Sheryl Kasak, and Tetsu Ohara, and Visiting Assistant Professor Gregory Bugel. This year, students chose objects from the Museum’s permanent collection and highlights from the Akari: Sculpture by Other Means exhibition to research and incorporate into a hypothetical Noguchi Museum Annex in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. #PrattResearchPower Showcases Research across the Institute The power and potential of research at Pratt and beyond was on full display at #PrattResearchPower: A Research Open House, a half-day event held on March 29 on the Brooklyn campus. The open house began with a panel discussion featuring leaders from industry, government, and the nonprofit world who focused on why #ResearchMatters. Google search guru Dan Russell moderated the discussion, which featured Barbara Ferry, Head of Natural and Physical Sciences Research Services for the Smithsonian; Eli Kuslansky, founding partner and Chief Strategist at Unified Field; Anina Major, ceramicist at Pratt Institute; and Jacqueline Karaaslanian, Executive Director of the Luys Foundation. Guided tours on the Brooklyn campus gave attendees the opportunity to see how Pratt faculty and students are changing the world of research, with presentations from all of the Institute’s schools and research centers.

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1 Wave Barrette by Preview Wear Victoria Bott, BFA Interior Design ’06; Ben Duarte, BArch ’09; Veronica Duarte, BFA Printmaking ’09 from $56 A contemporary take on a classic, Preview Wear’s Wave barrette blends artistry and utility in a playful design— just one style from the Brooklynbased interdisciplinary collaborative’s considered hair-accessories collection.

The two-piece barrette, crafted from plated stainless steel, comes in three sizes designed to securely hold tresses of any density. Available in gold and silver finishes at previewwear.com.

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2 Aura Medium Sphere Ring

by M. Monroe Yunjo Lee, BFA Fine Arts ’98 from $1,250 Yunjo Lee is design director at M. Monroe, a newly launched fine-jewelry brand inspired by the timeless beauty and spirit of Marilyn Monroe. Designs such as the Aura ring are imbued with the essence of the icon in a poetic way. Aura is available in red agate, as pictured, and a range of other natural gem­ stones, including rose quartz and black onyx, at mmonroe.com.

3 HiLo by Box Clever Bret Recor, MID ’01 $499 “There has been this ongoing battle between whether it’s better to stand or sit,” says designer Bret Recor. “HiLo wins this battle.” This adaptable perch keeps the body engaged while lessening its load, designed with the active workflow of the creative professional in mind.

HiLo’s lightweight frame enables portability between work environ­ ments and its adjustable height makes it the perfect companion to convertible seated-standing desks. Available at knoll.com.

4 The Illustrated History of the Snowman Bob Eckstein, BFA Communications Design ’85 $29.95 An update of his 2007 book on the subject, New York Times best­ selling author-illustrator Bob Eckstein’s The Illustrated History of the Snowman travels through time and around the globe to trace the footprints of the inter­ national winter­time phenom­enon.

The book is packed with enlight­ ening anecdotes and evidence from the annals of art, culture, and history, including more than 200 illustrations, many rendered in the New Yorker and MAD magazine cartoonist’s unmistakable hand. Available at rowman.com.

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5 Persist Denim Apron by Victory Garden Collective Louise Eastman, MFA ’14, Jess Frost, Tara Geer, Katie Michel, Wendy Small, and Janis Stemmermann $75 Created as a project of Victory Garden Collective, begun in 2016 by Louise Eastman and five fellow women artists, this denim apron reflects the moraleboosting spirit of the group’s namesake. (Victory gardens were grown during WWI and WWII as a civic duty, but were also meant to uplift, creating purpose and community in the harshest of times.) The unisex, pocketed, reversible piece is sewn and screenprinted by hand in Brooklyn.

Available at www.russelljanis.com.

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6 Red String of Fate Ring by DPRD Gabrielle Nicole Morris, BFA Jewelry ’13 from $50 From Gabrielle Nicole’s unisex jewelry brand DPRD comes a collection of pieces rooted in the concept of shared fate. Taking inspiration from legend that links human stories with a knotted thread, the Red String of Fate ring and its coordinating bracelets, necklace, and earrings signify the deeper meaning of the moments its wearers share. Hand­ made in New York City and available in red, gold-plated, and sterling silver finishes at www.dappdesigns.com.

7 Soft Stuff Knife by Overlook Woods Naomi Feuerstein, BFA Sculpture ’12 $45

8 Cali Play Rug by Ruggish Co. Liza K. Savary, IIDA, LEED A, MS Interior Design ’05 $199

Made for spreading the love— especially in jam, brie, and butter form—each of these deliciously chunky knives is hand-carved to order by Brooklyn-based sculptorwoodworker Naomi Feuerstein for her brand, Overlook Woods.

The piece complements Feuerstein’s selection of one-of-a-kind cutting and serving boards, all of which are finished with a hand­ made natural oil blend. Available in cherry, walnut, and maple at www.overlookwoods.com.

This reversible rug-meets-playmat by interior designer Liza K. Savary of Ruggish Co. is ready for the splash zone of life with kids—or without (home yogis, take note).

A contemporary upgrade on popular children’s crawling mats and tiles, this standard-size (4’7” x 6’9”) rug features a water­ proof, easy-clean surface and a layer of memory foam for safe, comfortable exercise and play, and it flips to reveal a kid-inspired motif. Available in four print styles at ruggishco.com.

Fall/Winter 2018

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Faculty Honors Eliza Hittman, Assistant Professor of Film/Video, was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Hittman’s most recent film is Beach Rats, which premiered in the US Dramatic Competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where she won the Directing Award.

Samantha Hunt, Professor of Writing, was named a 2018 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her 2017 book, The Dark Dark: Stories.

Fine Arts Chair Jane South was selected by the American Academy of Arts and Letters to exhibit work in its 2018 Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts in New York City, held last spring. Pratt alumna Carrie Moyer, BFA Painting ’85, was also among the 35 artists who were chosen from more than 100 nominees to participate in the exhibition by the Academy, which is the country’s most prestigious honorary society of architects, artists, writers, and composers.

Pratt Welcomes New Leadership Pratt named Anthony Cocciolo, who served as interim dean of the School of Information since July 2017, as dean of the School of Information. He assumed the role in July.

Artist and educator Shannon Ebner assumed the role of chair of the Photography Department within the School of Art, succeeding Stephen Hilger.

Artist, teacher, and academic leader Leslie Mutchler assumed the role of chair of the Foundation Department.

Dr. Helio Takai, a physicist, author, scholar, researcher, and educator, has been named chair of the Mathematics and Science Department within the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He succeeds Carole Sirovich, who has stepped back into the faculty after 18 years as chair.

School of Architecture Receives Grant from IDC Foundation Pratt has been awarded a significant grant from the IDC Foundation for its School of Architecture. The grant will enable Pratt to create a New Technologies and Fabrication Research Initiative that will address the critical need for advanced experience-based learning that provides research and entrepreneurial skills for undergraduate architecture students. Participating students will innovate by making prototypes with new building technologies and will face real-world problems at full-scale.

News

Pratt is one of four institutions in Greater New York City that received grants from the IDC Foundation, the legacy of the Institute of Design and Construction, for research and educational programs, along with The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York Institute of Technology, and New York University Tandon School of Engineering.

Pratt Center Celebrates 15 Years of Made in NYC United States Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Congressman Jerrold (Jerry) Nadler, and other government leaders joined several hundred members of New York City’s manufacturing community and other guests at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Building 77 on May 3 to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Made in NYC, an initiative of the Pratt Center for Community Development, which is part of Pratt Institute. Made in NYC was launched in the aftermath of 9/11 to encourage New York City–based manufacturers and residents to support one another by buying and sourcing locally. Made in NYC’s network of manufacturers has since grown to include more than 1,200 members in all five boroughs, including a number of companies founded or led

by Pratt alumni.

Remembering Beloved Faculty Chava Ben-Amos, who served on the faculty of Graduate Communications Design/Packaging Design for 44 years, passed away on May 19 at the age of 87.

A Holocaust survivor who immigrated to the US in 1964 after earning her degree in graphic design from Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, she worked as an art director at several prestigious New York design firms before founding her own studio, Ben-Amos Design, in 1993.

Ben-Amos taught at Pratt from 1971 until her retirement in 2015, when she was awarded the status of professor emerita. Donations in her memory can be made to the USC Shoah Foundation at sfi.usc.edu.

In Memoriam Dorothy Arata, BS Home Economics ’48 Francis Bertulis, BFA Illustration ’59 Paul W. Bisaha, BEE ’51 Rose Marie “Rosee” (Greer) Boehme, Certificate, Costume Design ’48 Francis Boroughs, BCE ’43 Claire Louise Bruch, Certificate, Sculpture ’37 Donald C. Bryk, MLS ’66 Robertina “Ina” Campbell, MLS ’66

Allen Leroy Carlsen, BID ’59 Philip A. Cerniglia, BArch ’79 George E. Ciulla, Technical Chemistry ’37 Martin B. Cutrone, BME ’57 Allen J. Davis, BArch ’64 Robert William Deichert, BEE ’48 Eva Silverling (Mackin) Eaton, Food Science and Management ’44 Herbert Friedland, Certificate, Leather and Tanning Technology ’64 Bill Gold, Certificate, Advertising Design ’40 Helen Greschler, BFA Printmaking ’87 Kenneth Hagen, Mechanical Engineering ’52 Dorothy B. Howard, Certificate, Food Science and Management ’48 Frank Jones, AAS Mechanical Engineering ’60 Irvin Koons, BFA Sculpture ’42 Bro. Andrew LaCombe, MArch ’72 Mark Anthony Lacy, BFA ’93 Peter Henry Langmack, BID ’61 John Mahony, MLS ’55 Henry W. McIver Jr., Certificate, Illustration ’48 Claudia McLaughlin, Certificate, Costume Design ’46 Alexandria Nelson, Certificate, Costume Design ’41 Sally Ondra, Industrial Design ’43 Eric Oppenheimer, Architecture H. Robert Prager, Certificate, Leather and Tanning Technology ’52 Paul Rosenlicht, Mechanical Engineering ’51 Joseph A. Roy Jr., BID ’58 Beatrice C. Sawyer Alan Schwartzman, MArch ’75 Katherine Sins, MFA ’81 Robert Stannard, Certificate, Industrial Design ’51 Robert A. Threadgill, BFA Product Design ’66 Irene Tobin, Costume Design ’37 Sylvia Tracy Leland Williams, Certificate, Advertising Design ’51 For more on these stories and the latest updates from Pratt, visit www.pratt.edu/news.

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Spotlight

Celebrating Carole Sirovich

labeled as “hard,” and you had to be good in math if you took her courses. I was young and cocky and had done really well in math at Tech, and I remember saying to myself, “Wait until she gets a load of me....” I registered for Calculus I with Dr. Sirovich. Soon, I was able to confirm the rumors. She was tough. What wasn’t included in the rumors, though, was how great of a teacher she was.

What struck me first was her transparency. She came off as cool to me, and at that time cool and smart were two adjectives that could not be used in the same sentence. Once, I was having lunch in the cafeteria, and right at the next table was the Professor. I had spent all night trying to understand and solve a homework problem, and the curiosity was killing me. I walked up to her at her table and asked for help. Without hesitation, After 18 years serving as chair of the she told me to sit down. I was sitting down Mathematics and Science Department, with the master among my peers, proud Dr. Carole Sirovich stepped back into to be the student to whom she was giving the faculty at the close of the last academic instruction during lunch time. year. Upon this move, Dr. Sirovich was honored for her continued work as a venerDr. Sirovich never said no to me when able Pratt educator and a driving force I needed help. She would talk with me in the thriving of the department, whose about my family challenges at home. I curriculum touches students across the told her about me being the first one in Institute. One of her many former students, Eric Garner, BEE ’90, offered a moving tribmy family to go to college. I told her ute to his mentor, who shepherded him as an about my oldest brother who had fallen engineering student. The first in his family victim to alcoholism. I told her about to attend college, Garner grew up in New York City Housing Authority’s Fort Greene projects how the environment at home wasn’t and came to Pratt after graduating from always suitable for learning. It was very Brooklyn Technical High School (Brooklyn Tech), difficult growing up in a neighborhood on DeKalb Avenue near Pratt’s Brooklyn campus. His experience with Dr. Sirovich, as he where no one was doing what I was doing—studying and attending college. She describes it, was transformational. This is an abridged and edited version of his remarks. offered words of encouragement that I have called on throughout my life.

The first two semesters of the EngiIn North Hall, where our math classes neering Program were heavily loaded were held, you could look out the winwith math and physics. Dr. Sirovich was dow to Willoughby Avenue. I remember

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many times during instruction when the class was baffled and we just didn’t get it, but Dr. Sirovich never ran out of patience—instead, she’d stare out the window for what seemed like 5 or 10 minutes, and then she would start the lesson again from another angle. Lightbulbs would go off in everyone’s heads.

She’d done it again. It became a joke to all of us in class: We started asking her if someone was holding up the answers across the street on Willoughby Avenue.

She would just laugh. I took four more classes with Dr. Sirovich, five in total. I received A’s in all my classes with her.

Dr. Sirovich is and has always been the cornerstone to whatever success I have achieved. Her humble, clever, relentless need to help people understand and learn has been unmatched in my life.

Through the years, I have helped many people with many things, including math—my kids being a few of these people. My experience with Dr. Sirovich has allowed me to build and design weapon systems for Navy AEGIS Cruisers and Destroyers for the Naval System division at Lockheed Martin Aerospace.

I am presently in charge of close to 300 skilled tradesmen building a 60-story tower in Downtown Brooklyn at City Point. But most important, I have four kids, two of whom are at the cusp of completing master’s and undergraduate degrees. The new family requirements for education in my family have been shaped by my time studying at Pratt with Dr. Sirovich. I will continue to look out at Willoughby Avenue searching for the answers.

Thank you, Professor.

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Class Notes We want to know what you’re up to, and so do your fellow Pratt alumni. See page 52 for Class Notes submission guidelines.

1940s

1950s

Barbara (Gidansky) Golub, Certificate, Costume Design ’48, worked for many years as a children’s dress designer in New York City. She now does research for her daughter’s promotion business, is an attendee of the OLLI program at Stony Brook University, and writes reviews for TripAdvisor. Of her time studying at Pratt’s School of Home Economics, she writes, “So much was crammed into the two wonderful years I spent at Pratt.

I was now an adult in an adult world doing what I had always yearned for.” Golub has remained friends with several of her classmates, including Adele Yeiser and Helga Harris, whose Class Notes (below) she helped collect.

Helga (Tannenbaum) Harris, Certificate, Costume Design ’48, worked as a fashion designer for 50 years in New York, Miami, and Sarasota, Florida. She had her own label for 10 years. At the same time, she always painted and exhibited her art. For the past 20 years, she has been writing, publishing four books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles. She has also been teaching a writing workshop for 20 years for OLLI in Sarasota, where she now lives.

Adele (Simola) Yeiser, Costume Design ’48, worked many years as a designer, including with a famous designer in West Nyack for many years. She married Charles William (Bill) Yeiser, an art student at Pratt. She lives in West Nyack, New York.

Class Notes

1960s

Neville Lewis, Certificate, Industrial Design ’56, is enjoying retirement following a celebrated career that encompassed building his namesake company, Neville Lewis Associates (13 years), and designing for Raymond Loewy (3 years), Becker & Becker (3 years), and JFN (8 years), among others. He has also served many years as a teacher and consultant.

Among his honors, Lewis was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 1987, named Designer of the Year by Interiors magazine in 1997, received a Gold Medal in Interior Design from The National Arts Club, and was appointed Vice Chair of the New York State Board, licensing interior design.

John De Broske, BS Art Education ’62, writes, “After a 30-plus-year career in public education and education administration, I started a hobby of creating radio-controlled scale-model boats. I constructed replicas of early-20th-century Chris-Crafts plus New York harbor tugboats and others.” De Broske’s work has been featured in several hobby magazines, including Nautical Research Journal, Seaways’ Ships in Scale, Marine Modelling International, and Boating on the Hudson & Beyond. He has garnered the distinction of having one of his models—a 1930s ELCO (Electric Boat Company) cabin cruiser—added to the permanent collection of the Hudson River Henry Sanoff, AIA, BArch ’57; MArch Maritime Museum in the Newburgh/ ’62, Distinguished Professor Emeritus Kingston area of New York State. at the School of Architecture, North Above: John De Broske’s scale-model ELCO Carolina State University, and founder cabin cruiser of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), organized a plenary William J. Gallo, AIA LEED AP, session, “The Language of Social Action BArch ’69, founder and CEO of Gallo in Planning and Design,” at the EDRA49 Herbert Architects, is celebrating his conference. For the event, held in Oklafirm’s 30-year anniversary. The awardhoma City in June, Sanoff brought towinning Southeast Florida firm, which gether experts in the area of design and provides master planning, development social action to explore the community management, architecture, and interior design process and how it can have an design services to institutions and corimpact on social equity.

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porations in the Southeast, was the 2017 recipient of two design awards from American School & University. Both projects were for Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale. The first award was for excellence in design for the new Noel P. Brown Sports Center, the second for repurposing the Sheppard Broad College of Law. The firm is currently master planning an 800-resident continuing care retirement community in Pompano Beach.

Peter Maier, BID ’66, had solo exhibitions of his paintings this year at the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and at Madison Square Park Tower in Manhattan. Much of Maier’s work is life-size or larger than life, painted on aluminum panels using state-of-the-art waterborne automotive paints, to “impossibly real” effect. Maier has a distinguished background in automotive design, hired as one of General Motors’ youngest designers before his junior year at Pratt. He worked on the 1980 Cadillac Seville and 1980 Eldorado, among other vehicles, before leaving GM to focus on his fine art, which can be viewed on his website, petermaierart.com.

Robert Irwin Wolf, BID ’68; MPS Art Therapy ’72, recently earned a doctorate of psychoanalytic studies and was elected a fellow at the Parkmore Institute, South Africa. Dr. Wolf is also president of the Institute for Expressive Analysis in New York City and professor of graduate art therapy at the College of New Rochelle. His website is www .robertirwinwolf.com.

Steven Bleicher, BFA ’77; MFA ’79, professor at Coastal Carolina University, had a solo show earlier this year at the Franklin G. Burroughs-Simeon B. Chapin Art Museum in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The exhibition, titled The Kings Highway—taking its name from the first trans-American highway (US Highway 17)—featured Bleicher’s mixed-media art combining photorealistic graphite renderings of sites along the road, pho Lloyd Ziff, BFA Graphic Arts ’67, had tographs from his travels, maps, and a retrospective exhibition of his photogfound objects. Focused on the southern raphy, A Diary of My Life, shown in Paris section of the road, the works on view this spring at Galerie Claude Samuel. highlighted the highway’s history and Above: Lloyd Ziff and his husband, Stephen the call of the open road that permeates Kelemen, at the entrance to their joint shows at Galerie Claude Samuel the American psyche.

1970s

Robert “Rosey” Rosenthal, BFA Graphic Arts and Illustration ’64, recently illustrated and published a bilingual fable written by his artist wife, Barbara Rosenthal. All the illustrations were linocuts. The Rosenthals have been pulling their original prints together in California and Spain since 1976.

Leslie Bender, BFA Painting ’75, had paintings included in a group show at Green Kill Gallery in Kingston, New York (March); Circus! @ The Howland: The Art of Balance at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, New York (June and July); and Wired Gallery in High Falls, New York (October) this year.

Joseph Szabo, MFA ’68, had a selection of his work chronicling the world of Jones Beach in the summer highlighted

by The New Yorker. The June 22 feature in the Culture pages of newyorker.com included 17 images from Szabo’s decadeslong photography project, focusing on his documentation of the lifeguards who keep watch over one of the region’s busiest shorelines.

Above: Joseph Szabo, A Jones Beach Lifeguard Scanning the Shore for Swimmers in Distress, 2002

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Richard Bettini, Associate AIA, BArch ’72; MArch ’73, was awarded 2017 Resident of the Year by the New Jersey State Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Bettini is adjunct professor of architecture at Kean University’s Michael Graves College Robert Busch School of Design. His teaching load includes AutoCAD, Revit, and Materials and Methods of Construction.

John A. Calabrese, MFA Painting ’75, is professor emeritus of art at Texas Woman’s University, where he taught art history, film history, and aesthetics. His career as an art educator spans 38 years.

His graphite drawings have been featured in juried and group exhibitions. He recently had works in Fun House 2018 at Barrett Art Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, and the Hudson Valley Art Association’s 85th Annual. His recently published articles include “How Alfred Hitchcock Lampoons Modern Art in ‘The Trouble with Harry,’” International Journal of the Image, and “Hitchcock’s Disturbing Use of the Portrait in His Films,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Above: Leslie Bender, Sleeping Mother, Carrying Dad, oil on canvas, 46 x 56 inches

Lillian E. Benson, MFA ACE, BFA Art and Design Education, 2017 Alumni Achievement Award winner, a television and feature film editor whose professional work over the past four decades has garnered many honors, joined the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, class of 2018, and is a new member of the Film Editors category.

Fall/Winter 2018

Nanette Carter, MFA ’78, Adjunct Associate Professor CCE, had a solo exhibition at Skoto Gallery earlier this year. The show, An Act of Balance, was highlighted in the Brooklyn Rail, which

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cited its “cumulative effect, which is based on a sharp insight into similarities of form. Practiced from one work to the next, the echoing components of Carter’s paintings actually strengthen the works, both individually and as a group.” This fall, she has exhibitions at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba (through November 19), and the New York Studio School (Known: Unknown, which also features work by Lisa Corrine Davis, BFA Painting ’80, and Carrie Moyer, BFA Fine Arts ’85, on view through December 2).

Below, opposite: Nanette Carter, Cantilevered #39, 2018, oils and oil stick on Mylar, 28 x 36 inches

Jan Degenshein, BArch; MS City and Regional Planning ’70, was elected to the American Institute of Certified Planners College of Fellows, the highest recognition afforded a professional planner.

Degenshein has been a principal in private practice in planning and architecture since 1975. This year he was also awarded the Rockland County, New York, Municipal Planning Federation Dedicated Service Award and recognized for the State of Connecticut’s most energy efficient new home in its Zero Energy Challenge program. Over the course of a career, his work has been celebrated frequently by the American Institute of Architects and his community leadership celebrated by many municipal and notfor-profit organizations.

picture books and illustrated another 40 for other authors, with titles on The New York Times Best Sellers list four times.

Garland has won four state reading awards and his last three books have won a number of national honors, including a 2018 Correll Book Award for children’s picture book Birds Make Nests, a 2018 Junior Library Guild selection for Pizza Mouse, and a 2018 Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People citation from the National Council for the Social Studies and the Children’s Book Council for Daddy Played the Blues. His website is www.garlandpicturebooks.com.

Douglas R. Giebel, BFA Fine Arts ’71, had work exhibited over the summer at the Delaware Contemporary Art Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. Two of his paintings were part of a group exhibition titled The Figure: The Indicative and the Allusive. The exhibition was featured in the June 2018 issue of American Art Collector and included an illustration of one of the paintings and a quote from the artist. Giebel is professor of visual arts emeritus at Roberts Wesleyan College in Rochester, New York. His artwork can be seen at his website douglas-giebel .squarespace.com.

Jeff Eichel, BEE ’77, writes, “I am currently working for Raytheon, living in northeastern Massachusetts. After Pratt, I got an MSEE from Brooklyn Poly.

I am into ASIC/FPGA design and verification. I enjoy the beach, foreign films, travel, staying fit, wallyball and volleyball, especially on the beach, and hanging out with my daughter and two sons, Above: Dougals R. Giebel, Standing Figure, oil who are in college.” on canvas, 22 x 18 inches

May and June. Gillis’s work historically shows a balance of movement versus stasis, gestures anchored by simple geometry. Here, color plays a bigger part in the movement. Recycled highway guardrail comes at us with obvious reference to its past. Now, fertile with symbolism as presented out of context.

Animated with gesture from paper torn and tossed, anchored by color and newly found structure, this spolia lends new waves of strength.

Below, left: Mary Gillis, Averted Disaster/Spolia, 2016, thermoset polymer, paper on recycled highway guardrail, 103 x 103 x 4 inches

Rudy Gutierrez, BFA Communications Design ’79, Professor of Communications Design at Pratt, had his paintings of John Coltrane from the book Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane’s Musical Journey featured in the documentary Chasing Trane, and his painting A Love Supreme is being used for the film poster and publications related to the film. In addition, Gutierrez recently illustrated Young People’s Poet Laureate Margarita Engle’s novel-in-verse Jazz Owls (Atheneum, May) and Carlos Santana: Sound of the Heart, Song of the World (Henry Holt, September). His cover art for Pablo Moses’s The Itinuation was selected for American Illustration 37 and his Jimi Hendrix stamp (2014) was included in the Complete Collection of Black American Stamps.

Above: Cover art by Rudy Gutierrez for Pablo Moses’s The Itinuation

Michael Garland, BFA Illustration- Mary Gillis, BFA Painting ’74, had Communications Design ’74, has au- a solo exhibition titled Metalscapes at thored and illustrated more than 38 K.Oss Contemporary Art, Detroit, in

Class Notes

Barbara Hines, Environmental Design, had work exhibited in the Jerusalem Biennale last fall. For the Watershed Moments in Israeli History exhibition, Hines created five large works on canvas, incorporating silkscreen process with acrylic brushwork.

In addition, she showed five large-scale oil-on-canvas works from the past exhibition Mysteries, Signs and Wonders.

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Richard Hyman, MS City and Regional Planning ’70, writes, “After an almost 50-year city planning career ranging from planning commissioner in Mount Vernon, New York, to housing director for HELP USA to planning consultant, I was recently appointed chairman of the Westchester County Planning Board. I look forward to using my education and experience on important planning issues in Westchester.”

Lorene (Bodenstedt) Lederer, BFA ’77, sent a photograph taken by Richard N. Pollack, BArch ’73, from her window in Willoughby residence hall when they were both students at Pratt. The view from Room 801 in the spring of 1972 captures the soon-to-be-completed World Trade Center towers, which she watched being built during her freshman year.

Above: Photograph by Richard N. Pollack, BArch ’73

Tobi Kahn, MFA ’78, had a solo exhibition, Aura: New Paintings from Nature, at the Museum of Art-DeLand, Florida, this summer. The accompanying catalog featured an essay by Mark D. Mitchell, Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery.

Kahn also notes that one of his paintings, Grya (1984), has been installed in the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, near works by Albert Pinkham Ryder.

“Moonlight Cove, which Ryder created in the early to mid-1880s, is among my favorite paintings. One hundred years later, this evocative Ryder is in conversation with Grya, one of four of my works in the collection of the Phillips.”

Above: Cover of exhibition catalog for Tobi Kahn’s Aura: New Paintings from Nature

Haresh Lalvani, MS Architecture ’72, Professor of Undergraduate Architecture, received the IIT-KGP Distinguished Alumnus Award 2018 during the 64th Convocation on July 20 at his undergraduate alma mater, IITKGP (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, West Bengal), where he studied architecture. The IIT-KGP Distinguished Alumnus Awards are given “to select alumni on the basis of their exemplary contributions to the domains of science and technology, industry, academia, and society.”

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Saberah Malik, MID ’72, had a solo show of her sculptural fiber work, Measurement of a Dream, at the Community College of Rhode Island in February and March. She also had work featured in an invitational fiber show at the Jamestown Arts Center in Jamestown, Rhode Island, and in the group exhibition The Other Side at Hera Gallery in Wakefield, Rhode Island.

Daniel Reif, BArch ’71, founder of Design Works, Inc., in Amherst, Massachusetts, has invented three products that allow student and amateur designers to experience some of the work and reward of being a designer, architect, or STEM professional. His Architect’s Drawing Kit, Home Quick Planner, and 3-D Home Kit provide materials and show users how to draw, plan, and construct three-dimensional models of their own real or dream homes. These hands-on products are based, in part, on his experience at Pratt’s School of Architecture. More than 500,000 kits have sold worldwide, and product videos have one-million-plus YouTube views. For more information, visit homeplanner.com.

Andrew Serbinski, BID ’71, of Machineart Industrial Design sent a dispatch from his studio’s recent work in mobility products, shaping the travel experience from infancy to adulthood. Machineart designed upgrades to Chicco’s NextFit convertible car seat; numerous iterations of strollers, including the QuattroTour Above: Saberah Malik, Broken Boundary, Duo, which accommodates two children 2011, polyester fabrics and ink on metal base, of different ages; eCycle’s Marine 9.9 HP 7 x 36 x 18 inches environmentally friendly outboard motor for small power boats; and a concept Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, BFA for the BMW R1200GS Adventure Tourer Drawing and Art Education ’78, serves motorcycle. Serbinski’s website is www as deputy director/chief curator of the .machineart.com.

Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, dedicated to the Ruth Shorer, BFA Sculpture ’79, had art of illustration in all its variety. She work in several California exhibitions writes, “Pratt launched my museum over the summer, including Narratives career through an internship at Brooklyn at Gallery 113 in Santa Barbara and Fond Museum some years ago (they hired me), Memories at the Coastal Arts League and I remember my time at Pratt with Gallery and Museum in Half Moon Bay. great fondness.” Plunkett shares that an Shorer also showed work at the Oakexhibition she curated with James J. land Chamber of Commerce and the Kimble, PhD, of Seton Hall University, Orinda Library.

Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms, is currently on a sev David Shostak, BEE ’75, is a worlden-venue tour through the US and class, versatile, dynamic leader, a certiFrance after opening at the New-York fied Project Management Professional Historical Society this summer. Learn who has worked as a Senior Program more at www.nrm.org.

Manager for four decades with hightech companies. A father of vehiclenavigation GPS, he drove handheld consumer products to market for Ma-

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gellan, generating more than $150 million the first year and $350 million the second year with the RoadMate, which made “Oprah’s Favorite Things” in 2004.

He led design and development for the first DirecTV Dish antenna. Last year, he published Project Management in the Real World: Explaining All This Nonsense About Project Management in Plain English, available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Constance A. Smith, BFA ’71; MID ’73, recently joined Liz Wetzel, General Motors Head of Global UX, and MaryEllen Green-Dohrs, Certificate, Industrial Design ’50, in a presentation on early women auto designers organized by the Society of Automotive Historians and the EyesOn Design committee in the Peacock Room of the Fisher Theatre in Detroit. The event fundraised for the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology and introduced Smith’s 2018 book, Damsels in Design: Women Pioneers in the Auto Industry. Smith and her book were also highlighted in significant features in Crain’s Automotive News and InsideCox magazine, and Smith wrote an article about early women automotive designers for the spring issue of Home and Away magazine.

was awarded an artists’ assistance grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation in 2017 and a project grant from MA Humanities in 2016.

Society of Allied Weight Engineers (SAWE), winning five society awards in the process. He is presently giving seminars on automotive engineering at Below, left: Above: Elaine Smollin, Jean D’Arc SAWE international and regional conDisarmed, 2015, oil on birchwood, 7 x 4 feet ferences. The first seminar was at the SAWE Texas Regional Conference in Steven Steinberg, BArch ’74, archi- Irving, Texas, on September 23, 2017. tect, opened a new practice in Sea The following seminar was held at Ranch, California, in 2017. Having the SAWE Hampton Roads Regional studied the Sea Ranch project while an Conference in Norfolk, Virginia, on architectural student at Pratt, Steinberg September 15, 2018. happened upon the actual project in 2008 while attending a company retreat 1980s near the community. In 2014, he and his wife, Beth, purchased a home there, fulfilling a longtime dream. Last December, they moved permanently to their Sea Ranch cabin and opened their new practice devoted to innovative custom residential design for discerning clients. In their thriving new practice, they are in the process of completing five projects for wonderful clients in the Northern California/Bay Area region.

Meryl Taradash, MFA ’78, is presenting kinetic sculptures in the exhibition Whirlwind: Art in Motion, on view through September 30, 2019, at the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens in Overland Park, Kansas. Her artworks Sisyphus and Blue Lotus will be on display.

Charles Belfoure, BArch ’83, had his third novel, The Fallen Architect, published in October. His previous novels were New York Times bestseller The Paris Architect and House of Thieves. He is currently a historic preservation consultant in Baltimore.

Above: Meryl Taradash, Sisyphus, 2001, rotating hollow aluminum on painted stainless steel, 8’ x 9’4” x 4’

Glen Weisberg, BFA Painting and Drawing ’75, recently designed a 36page large brochure for the 2018 Long Island Guitar Festival, which was held at LIU CW Post College this past April. The brochure contained each day’s sched Elaine Smollin, BFA Painting ’75; ule of events, programs, performer MFA Painting ’81, is presenting a solo Heidi Lanino Bilezikian, BFA biographies, directory, and sponsors’ exhibition of her large-scale figure paintDrawing and Illustration ’89, had a solo advertisements. ings, Dawn at Acheron, from October show, Folded Females, at Flatiron Prow 30 to March 18, 2019, at The Hanover Art Space over the summer. The exhi Brian Paul Wiegand, BME ’72, reTheatre in Worcester, Massachusetts. bition, curated by Cheryl McGinnis, tired in 2009, after nearly 40 years in the Smollin lives in Rhode Island and has employed expressive line, a deep interest aerospace/maritime industries, to debeen a member of the studio faculty at in kinesthetic form, and the notion of vote his free time to writing papers and Worcester Art Museum since 2012. She liminal space. The works featured were making technical presentations for the

Class Notes

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made intuitively using paper or metal, folded to create a portrait of the female, portraying both strength and vulnerability in their various forms. Referencing Greek and Roman sculpture, the works explored questions about accepted ideals of beauty and the process of folding and unfolding of oneself in response to each moment of the human, lived experience. Lanino’s website is heidilanino.com.

William (Bill) Billec, BFA Film/ Media Arts ’88, has been appointed Art Director at Meadowlands YMCA in Rutherfold, New Jersey. He previously designed graphics for the pharmaceutical industry for over 20 years, with clients including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, Lilly, Merck, and Novartis. At the Y, Billec is responsible for developing Y branding and designing their advertising and marketing materials, plus invitations to fundraising events supporting the YMCA’s new facility in the former NBA New Jersey Nets training center. Billec has also been busy working on public art projects, such as painting outdoor street pianos and murals, and showing his photographs at galleries.

Mikel Frank, MFA Painting ’83, curated, exhibited, and demonstrated live in Visual Strategies: A Collaborative Project in Concord, North Carolina, this summer. The exhibition featured works by members of Global Art Project, an international multimedia collaborative collective of which Frank is a member.

Most works in the show were “made up of fragments (frags) of discarded art materials or things ripped from the chaos of everyday life and mailed to group members, who created original works.”

The event included painting by the Visual Passion Duo (Frank and Gerard Amsellem) to live music and Frank’s collaborative painting sessions open to community participants. Frank’s websites are www.visualpassion.net and www.mikelfrank.net.

Liz Goldberg, MFA ’81, exhibited her latest paintings and premiered her newest film, Cuban Queens, made in collaboration with filmmaker Warren Bass and animator Lowell Boston, at Joan Shepp boutique in Philadelphia.

Goldberg writes: “Cuban Queens is an experimental animation based on subliminal hand-drawn portraits based on the diva, the archetype of the flamboyantly uninhibited female, and the political empowerment she represents. The installation was inspired by my trip to Havana and the women that I had the pleasure of meeting in this wildly vibrant Robert Gaskin, BArch ’81, CEO of and creative environment.” Visit www RCGA Architects, has completed several .lizgoldberg.com for a complete guide to projects for American Airlines at JFK all her exhibitions and films.

International Airport’s Terminal 8.

Gaskin was nominated for a design award for the terminal’s $16.5 million roadwalk canopy project. RCGA also completed a $32 million, nine-aircraft gate project at Terminal 8, which included new passenger gate areas, passenger hold rooms, and aircraft airside facilities for the gates. For both projects, RCGA served as prime architect consultants from design through construction management, coordinating client approvals with vendors for material specifications and finishes; managing the build-out; and conducting inspections with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.

Jane Greenwood, BArch ’87, a PrinAbove: © Buck Ennis/Crain’s New cipal of Kostow Greenwood Architects, York Business was named to HOUZZ’s “7 LGBTQ Architects and Designers You Should Know” list, and Crain’s selected a Kostow Greenwood project for its first-ever “5 Coolest Offices in New York” roundup.

A leader in preservation/adaptive reuse and mixed-use master planning for urban environments, Greenwood has been recognized by BUILD magazine; the Women Builder’s Council; OUT magazine in its annual OUT 100; and the New Randy Gaul, BFA Illustration ’81, York Business Journal as a “Woman of is working on his 75th film project and Influence.” Greenwood is also a corecently opened a community gallery founder of the Organization of Lesbian in Northern California. The gallery, + Gay Architects and Designers.

Halocline Studio (@haloclinestudio on Facebook), promotes and supports Bay Johannes M.P. Knoops, BArch ’87, Area creators working in mediums such had a residency with the Cini Foundation as film, literature, and art, and also on the island of San Giorgio, Venice. showcases Gaul’s works of sculpture and There, he analyzed historical maps and painting. He brings decades of experi- digitally reconstructed the 16th-century ence in the artistic side of the film indus- Campo San Augustino to illustrate the try to this new project, including 20 years true location of the 1500 AD printas an illustrator, art director, and matte ing press of Aldus Pius Manutius—the painter at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light & printer credited with creating italic type, Magic, DreamWorks Animation, Sony, establishing the modern use of the semiBlue Sky Studios, Digital Domain, colon, and popularizing books in the Illumination Entertainment, Warner octavo form—to site a future memorial.

Brothers Animation, and many more.

Last year, Knoops also planned and Above: Randy Gaul, Inner Workings

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installed the museum of the Ten Mile River Boy Scout Camps in Narrowsburg, Virginia, on the FDR-founded camps’ 90th anniversary.

tion at the Bronx Museum, through September 19.

Michael Sweeney, BCE ’87, was appointed Executive Vice President by HNTB Corporation. Sweeney has held various high-profile leadership positions since joining HNTB in 2012, including serving as New York office leader and Northeast Division president. Sweeney Matt Magee, MFA New Forms ’86, has 31 years of industry experience, inreceived the 2017 Arlene and Mort Scult cluding expertise in transit, design, Contemporary Forum Artist Award, construction management and program which includes an exhibition at the management, alternative financing and Phoenix Art Museum. On view through delivery, as well as disaster recovery and November 4, the show features paintings resilient infrastructure. and a series of found-art sculptures titled Prima Materia, which Magee has been Marc Van Cauwenbergh, MFA making since the late 1970s. In a recent ’89, had work featured in several exhibiinterview with Magee coinciding with tions this past summer. His paintings Ann Kresge, MFA Printmaking his exhibition, Interior Design noted, were showcased in Different Strokes at ’84, had artist residencies this year at “With a diverse body of work rooted in Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York; Proyecto’ace in Buenos Aires, Argentina simple textures and grid-based compoPaintings at Galerie Alice Mogabgab in (June/July), and Salem Art Association sitions, Magee is a master of his genre.”

Beirut, Lebanon; and in a solo show, in Salem, Oregon (September), with His website is www.mattmagee.info.

Beyond the Shore, part of a four-artist upcoming residencies at Playa in Above: Installation view of Matt Magee’s exhibition at AMP Gallery in Provinceexhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum Summer Lake, Oregon (November/ town, Massachusetts.

December), and Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York (Sep- Janet Neuhauser, MFA Photography tember/October 2019). She exhibited ’86, has been a photography educator for work in Gathering Spaces at Proyecto’ace the last 30 years, 24 of them in a high and Radius 25 at the Salem Art Asso- school. This year, she is retiring to work ciation this summer. Her website is in her studio full time as a fine art phowww.annkresge.com. tographer. She will continue to teach workshops through Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle. Her website is janetneuhauser.com.

Barbara Lehman, BFA Illustration ’85, has illustrated and authored many wordless children’s picture books. Her latest is Red Again, which is both a sequel and prequel to her New York Times bestseller The Red Book, which also won a Caldecott Honor. She has shared her work with children in programs at the Whitney Museum and the Eric Carle Museum and has had her illustration shown in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Information about her books can be found on her website, barbaralehman books.com.

Above: Cover illustration from Barbara Lehman’s book Red Again

Class Notes

Randy Richards, BFA Communications Design ’87, won first place in the juried show Photoshow39 at the Mystic Museum of Art in Mystic, Connecticut, for his piece Palmer Cove/Mid-day and Sunset. He refers to his work as a fourth dimension where time and space overlap. Richards had eight group shows at museums and galleries in 2017 and two in 2018 at the time of this writing. In 2017, he participated in three group shows in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In an original style he initiated in 2008, he combines overlapping photos taken at different times of day into one piece. See more of his work at randy-richards.com.

Deborah Willis, MFA ’80, was appointed in January to the Board of Commissioners of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where she will serve a four-year term. Named one of the 100 Most Important People in Photography by American Photography, Willis is considered one of the nation’s leading historians of African-American photography and curators of AfricanAmerican culture. Willis has pursued a dual career as an art photographer and curator, receiving a number of prestigious grants, including the 2000 MacArthur Fellowship. She is the chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.

Moses Ros, RA, BArch ’83, is showing the public sculpture Unity Bridge as part of the exhibition RIVER RISING at Starlight Park in the Bronx, New York City, on view for a year through June 30, 2019. The sculpture incorporates ceram- Above: Deborah Willis with her son, ic artworks created at the Bronx River Hank Willis Thomas, and Hank Thomas Art Center community workshops. In at Pratt in May addition, he showed ATERRIZAJE/ LANDING, a solo sculpture exhibi-

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1990s

Rebecca Jordan-Glum, BFA Communications Design ’99, had her debut picture book, tentatively titled Melt, acquired by Roaring Brook Press/ Macmillan. The book follows a group of Adrienne (Batson-Cooper) Cooper compulsive Antarctic penguins that deEwing, BArch ’98; MS City and Regional velop a disastrous love of campfires and Planning ’05, worked for New York City discover the hard way that some things Transit for more than 10 years as a space are meant to be shared. Publication is set planner and is currently the deputy di- for spring 2020. rector of facilities at the New York City Department of Finance. Her songwrit- Maya Kopytman, MFA Computer ing debut featuring her new single, Graphics ’95, Partner, C&G Partners, “What Are You Waiting For,” was re- served as an art director for “1938 Projekt: leased on June 18, 2018. Her daughter, Posts from the Past,” a yearlong website, Chloe, is featured on the single playing social, and physical exhibition program the flute. The single is available on designed for the Leo Baeck Institute reiTunes, Spotify, and YouTube, and was search archives. The project features recently picked up by Rádio Pamppas daily social media and website posts Web, a Brazilian radio station, where it of archival documents from Germanaired this summer. speaking Jews who lived through the horrifying events leading to Kristallnacht Vann Graves, MS Communica- and the beginning of the Holocaust— tions Design ’96, was named executive with select archives on view in a physical director of Virginia Commonwealth exhibition space. The design approach University (VCU) Brandcenter. He was conveys the narrative by “dating” each selected for the role after serving as chief document chronologically while the creative officer at J. Walter Thompson. web-navigation structure closely resembles an old-fashioned calendar, with Stephanie L. Gross, MSLIS ’95, was graphic design reflecting the modernist, appointed librarian of scholarly com- Bauhaus style of the late 1930s. munication for YAIR, the new Yeshiva University institutional repository, in June. The repository, accessible at repos itory.yu.edu, includes scholarly works from both faculty and students. programs throughout the country.” For more information, visit www.allpeoplesday.org, facebook.com/allpeoplesday, or @all_peoples_day on Instagram.

Sally (Kershner) Balestrieri, BFA Fashion Design ’97, illustrated the children’s book How the Ariana Crickets Got Their Chirp Back by Lovie R. Smith. The book’s message is about hope, positive influence, and long-overdue healing for Afghanistan, and it features indigenous animals, adventure, science, architecture, agriculture, at-risk historic sites, history, family, and working together with others for common good. Proceeds will fund printing in native languages in Afghanistan for children’s literacy programs. Both illustrator and author also hope to see the book produced into an animated film to show the beauty found in Afghanistan. Books are available at www.siddhabound.com.

Sook Jin Jo, MFA ’91, shared images of her recent work Art House, 2018, an art chapel located in Nicaragua, on the site of a mission church that had fallen into disrepair. Evoking local architecture and utilizing the mission’s original roof and foundation stones, as well as chairs from a former school, Art House creates a space for healing, contemplation, and inspiration. Jo also noted that she has been invited to be a master artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, next year.

The residency runs from October 13 to November 2, 2019; application information is available at atlanticcenterfor thearts.org/master-artist/sook-jin-jo.

Susan Berkowitz-Schwartz, MPS Art Therapy ’91, founder/president of All People’s Day, writes, “I was honored to receive the Florida Diversity and Inclusion Award and numerous proclamations. Last March, our ninth annual All People’s Day Diversity Festival in Delray Beach, Florida, showcased 20 diverse arts performances and 50 booths. The all-volunteer nonprofit holds monthly planning meetings for our festival, where people from many different groups form connections by doing art together. These connections are one way to fight prejudice that thrives on fears of unknown groups. My dream is to spread my arts Above: Sook Jin Jo, Art House, 2018

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Fall/Winter 2018

Jason Lempieri, BArch/Art History ’95, designed a product series, Under Cover: Coasters and Trivets, based on manhole covers around the world. The project has its origins in the streets of Greenwich Village, where Lempieri spent time exploring as an architecture student at Pratt, and was inspired further by the manhole-cover art of Copenhagen, where he studied abroad. The series currently encompasses more than 40 cities, and the products—all designed, produced, and packaged in Philadelphia—are sold in a number of museum shops, including those of the Museum of Arts and Design, Cooper Hewitt, and the

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Tenement Museum. Lempieri’s website is www.rethinktankdesign.com.

in America. Sousa’s work can be found recognized by Wallpaper* magazine as on Instagram (@rachelsousanyc) and at one of the “Ten Most Wanted” emerging www.rachelsousa.com. designers in the world while earning his Steve Light, BFA Illustration ’92, has Below, left: Rachel Sousa’s Sing for Hope master’s from Pratt. Today, Ascalon is which was installed in Tribeca’s Duane written and illustrated 23 children’s piano, known for his distinctive reductive style Park books since graduating from Pratt. He and a passion for traditional materials. writes, “I enjoyed my time at Pratt and even met my lovely wife there— Christine A. Cincotta, BFA Art and Design Education ’92.” Among his books are Puss in Boots, Have You Seen My Dragon?, Trucks Go (the first in a series of similar forays into the world of vehicles), Lucky Lazlo, and most recently Black Bird Yellow Sun and Builders & Breakers, both published this year by Candlewick.

Light’s website is stevelightart.com.

Mark Smith, BFA Painting ’99, designed Tidal, a sculptural chandelier for the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina, in collaboration with Swarovski and TVS Design Atlanta. With a total of 44,000 Swarovski crystals, the illuminated sculpture consists of suspended laser-cut stainless steel panels with embedded Swarovski crystals encircling the center form, graduated strands of faceted Swarovski crystal beads that create topographical lines representing an inverted range of mountains. The work embodies the San Diego coastline and communicates movement and waves, as well as the caress of light on the water and mountains. Through floor-to-ceiling glass walls, this gigantic wonder is visible to the public from Harbor Drive.

Rachel Sousa, MFA Fine Arts ’96, was commissioned in 2018 to design and paint a piano for Sing for Hope’s seventh annual summer public art event that places pianos outdoors throughout New York City for public enjoyment. Pianos are then donated to public schools, hospitals, and community centers; Sousa’s piano now lives at I.S. 285 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Sousa was also commissioned by Make Room, a fair-housing advocacy organization, to design and paint a door for an exhibition, held in September in Washington, DC, promoting awareness of the rental housing crisis

Class Notes

Peter Wachtel, MID ’92, is now a teacher of product innovation and design and architecture at Adolfo Camarillo High School in Camarillo, California. Earlier this year, his industrial technology students had their work featured in the Camarillo Acorn, VC Star, and SkillsUSA Champions. This spring, he was awarded the VC Innovates Pathfinder Award for his industrial design teaching.

2000s Meherunnisa Asad, MFA Digital Arts ’06, cofounded the design collective Lél with her mother, Farhana Asad, in Peshawar, Pakistan. As the collective’s creative director, she guides the work that blends contemporary design with the traditional craft of stone inlay. The collective’s work was recently profiled in Harper’s Bazaar Arabia. Their website is www.thelelcollection.com.

Maggie Balistreri, MLIS ’09, had her book The Evasion-English Dictionary: Expanded Edition published in July. The book was cited as “a must read for a post-factual world” and “an insightful road map to popular words and phrases that reveal what we really mean,” dissecting 40-plus slippery terms with wit and playfulness. Balistreri, a namer, librarian, and taxonomist in New York, is also the author of There Was a Young Lady Who Swallowed a Lie and A Balistreri Collection: abc poems, both published

by Em Dash Group. Her social handle is @nycmaggie.

Michael Buchert, MPS Art Therapy and Creative Development ’05, is a practicing art therapist and mental health counselor in Seattle, where he is on the teaching faculty at Antioch University.

He is also the cofounder of Ritual Cannabis, a sungrown farm in South Central Washington, and his work was recently highlighted on Leafly.com, in a story exploring the potential benefits of cannabis-informed art therapy, as well as the struggle to integrate cannabis and mental health treatment in the US at the dusk of prohibition.

Brad Ascalon, MID ’06, shared news of the release of his furniture series with legendary Danish brand Carl Hansen & Son, the 110-year-old company’s first collaboration with an American design studio. The company unveiled the result of their four-year creative collaboration, Preludia, a range of chairs and tables that unite Carl Hansen & Son’s design heri- William D. Caballero, BFA Comtage and Ascalon’s signature modern, puter Graphics ’06, was named a 2018 minimalist approach. Ascalon has been Guggenheim Fellow. His is among 173

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fellowships awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation this year to a varied group of artists, scholars, and scientists selected from nearly 3,000 applicants. Caballero is the creator of 3-D printed film works including the series Gran’pa Knows Best and short film Victor and Isolina, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, and last year, he launched Storybored USA, a Latino Public Broadcasting– funded web series encouraging young people from diverse backgrounds to use creative practices to tell their stories. His website is www.wilcab.com.

Bill Caplan, MArch ’09, authored and photographed Contrasts 21c (Libri Publishing, October, 2018), a 256-page photo essay about people and places in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia; 21stcentury contrasts among rural and city life; and conflicts among self-sufficiency, sustainability, and pollution. Over a millennium, an array of ethnic peoples migrated from China. Settled in mountainous terrain, lowlands, and banks of the Mekong and Red rivers, these lands of stunning beauty are now home to a rich diversity of cultures—an admixture of ancient tradition and presentday reality. The warmth of the people, their adaptability and spirit, inspired the book. For more information, visit contrasts21c.com.

Kristina Filler, BFA Communications Design ’05, launched a fundraising campaign supporting Everytown, an organization working to end gun violence in the US, with the design of a T-shirt. She created the design in the wake of the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as well as to honor the memory of her father, a history teacher who was shot and killed outside the school where he taught 20 years ago. The website for Filler’s campaign is hold-your-fire.com.

Prattfolio

Kimberly Lewis, BID ’08, who works as a textile and wallpaper designer with an eponymous Brooklyn-based studio, had her New York City apartment search featured in The New York Times’s The Hunt. The article featured a look at the interiors of Lewis’s new home, highlighting the bold colors and patterns she Leah Bedrosian Peterson, BFA uses in her designs. Her studio’s website Photography ’00, multimedia artist and is shopkimberlylewis.com. associate professor of film and video arts and chair of the communications depart Monica Maccaux, BFA Commu- ment at Lycoming College, received nications Design, Graphic Design ’04, recognition at multiple national film designed Motorix, a typeface with versa- festivals for her stop-motion animation tile and highly flavorful constructivist Under the Walnut Tree. The film won First design in three weights with correspond- Place-Audience Favorites at the Florida ing italics, and hundreds of variant forms. Animation Festival and was an official Motorix was initially designed as a grad- selection for the Atlanta Shortfest, uate school project while at Otis College the Florida Animation Festival, the of Art and Design, with the mentor- Austin Spotlight Film Festival, and the ship of type designer Sibylle Hagmann, Arpa International Film Festival. It was and later a collaboration between Rod chosen as a finalist in the DaVinci Cavazos and PSY/OPS Type Foundry International Film Festival and as semi(www.psyops.com), where it can be pur- finalist at Animayo (an Oscar qualifying chased. Motorix has won numerous festival) and the Los Angeles CineFest. awards, including a Gold Award for View the trailer at vimeo.com/232123569.

Graphis Typography 4, a Silver Award for Indigo Design Awards, and an Iron Award for the International A′ Design Awards.

Katie Middleton, BFA Painting ’07, published Color Theory for the Makeup Artist: Understanding Color and Light for Beauty and Special Effects (Focal Press & Routledge) in May. She is currently a professional makeup artist for film and television with credits including the film Loving, for which she was nominated for a Make-up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Award in 2017; Showtime’s Homeland; AMC’s Turn: Washington’s Spies; PBS’s Mercy Street; and Mystery Science Theater 3000. She is also a recipient of the Makeup Achievement Award from Vancouver Film School, where she studied makeup and special effects after Pratt. Her website is www.katie middleton.com.

Fall/Winter 2018

Willy Bo Richardson, MFA Painting ’00, had his painting Number 1, the first in his current multi-decade series, acquired this April by the Albuquerque Museum for their permanent collection.

The museum’s art collection features artists living in or influenced by the region and includes masterworks by Georgia O’Keeffe, Raymond Jonson, Fritz Scholder, and Jaune Quick-toSee Smith. The painting was made in Richardson’s campus studio in East Hall.

To celebrate the acquisition, Richard Levy Gallery hosted a solo exhibition of Richardson’s work, including Number 1.

His website is willyborichardson.com.

Above: Willy Bo Richardson, Number 1, 1999, 58 x 62 1/2 inches, oil on canvas

Ted Southern, MFA Sculpture ’07, who won second place in NASA’s Astronaut Glove Challenge in 2009 along with design collaborator Nikolay Moiseev, a Russian space suit designer,

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is now helming Final Frontier Design, on the Constellation Park Tower in which he founded with the funds from Century City, Los Angeles. his award. Under contract by NASA, the company developed an EVA astronaut 2010s glove that is more agile than today’s models. The design, described by Air & Space magazine last year as “Spanx for your hands,” was recently included in a feature on Mars-excursion attire in Racked. More recently, Southern’s company has begun designing full space suits and secured a NASA contract to develop life-support-system backpacks.

in June. In September, her work was featured in a show at Northern Kentucky University.

Above: Caiti Borruso, Delaware Water Gap, from Shady Acres, 2016, silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 inches

Bruce Horan, MFA ’10, had a solo show, Same Day, Different City, at the University of Connecticut Stamford Art Gallery. Horan’s work explores the people and places one encounters in the urban environment.

Diana Kokoszka, MArch ’15, received a Fulbright US Student Program award from the US Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. She travels to Mauritius this fall to conduct research at École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes (ENSA nantes) as part of a project to study how residential architecture can support a rising female class and to visually define the ways in which a modern Mauritian woman navigates a female-led household. Kokoszka is one of more than 1,900 US citizens who will conduct research and provide expertise abroad for the 2018–19 academic year through the Fulbright US Student Program.

Dimitris Stefanidis, MS Communications Design/Packaging Design ’05, Partner/Creative Director at G Design Studio in Athens, shared a recent initiative with Italian design school Raffles Milano: “30 days, 8 students, 5 deliverables, 1 design studio. Ours was one of 10 European creative agencies selected to teach a Masters in Visual Design course with a different design director every month. We couldn’t have been in better company: Pentagram Design, Landor Milano, Lava Design Studio, Optical Cortex, LeftLoft Design, Raffinerie AG, and Studio FM Milano also joined the faculty. We enjoyed every moment: lecture, critiques, the group exhibition, and above all the opportunity to exchange ideas and share our experience.”

Maria Arenas, BFA Communications Design ’16, served as the design lead for the branding of Democratic congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s winning campaign earlier this year. For her first foray into campaign design, Arenas, a designer at Tandem in New York City, took thematic inspiration from revolutionary posters as well as the candidate’s heritage and bold progressive message. “Alexandria is a candidate with a revolutionary spirit,” Arenas told Vox, which featured the design process in a story this July. “The Krista LaBella, MFA ’14, was interbranding is a reflection of her, which viewed last spring on the podcast Art made it successful.” Arenas’s website is Uncovered about a series of photographic www.maaarenas.com. work she began at Pratt, titled I Am Above: Image courtesy of Tandem NYC Venus. This year also saw LaBella’s piece Above: Dimitris Stefanidis (center) with Venus Altarpiece selected for the show students at G Design Studio THREE at the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts, where it won the Juror’s Shamona Stokes, BFA Communicaaward, and her work was in the group tions Design ’02, showed 17 large sculpexhibition Celebrating Women at Locatures at the Superfine Art Fair in Mantion 1980 in Costa Mesa, California. She hattan’s Meatpacking District during was awarded an artist residency at the Frieze Week in May. Stokes’s website is Vermont Studio Center in August. Her shamonastokes.com. website is kristalabella.com.

Josh Treiber, BArch ’01, is a registered architect and worked at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates on 10 Hudson Yards in Manhattan from the beginning of the project to near completion of construction. He also contributed to the 30 Hudson Yards tower and the Hudson Yards retail shopping center. He relocated to Los Angeles in early 2017 and is now working at Johnson Fain Architects

Class Notes

Above: Krista LaBella, Venus Altarpiece, 2014, photography triptych of framed inkjet prints, 40 x 94 inches

Caiti Borruso, BFA Photography ’16, had work and an interview featured in The Heavy Collective last December.

Borruso also recently started a publishing press with a friend and published a book of her work, Shady Acres, which was released at the Philly Art Book Fair

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Ali Macdonald, MS Packaging Design ’11, recently designed limitededition packaging celebrating more than 50 locations around the world for the Kiehl’s Loves campaign.

in Constitution Park, Larchmont, New York. Scheler is the Rittenberg resident artist at Clay Art Center, Port Chester, New York; there, some of her work was on view over the summer in a duo show, I-70. Scheler will spend a second year as CAC’s resident artist. The two alumni plan to get married ASAP. Their websites are www.paulclarkminor.org and www .zoeybscheler.com.

Below, left: Zoey B Scheler and Paul Clark Minor in front of a sculpture by Scheler and a painting by Minor

about Cal Poly Pomona’s Pokémon Go AR Orientation,” with a colleague and an article in College and Research Libraries News, “Popular culture as a tool for critical information literacy and social justice education: Hip hop and Get Out on campus.”

Aubrey Smyth, BFA Film ’10, was a Grand Prize winner in the 2018 Moët Moment Film Festival. Her dramatic 60-second film, The Bout, was selected out of 550 entries, and Smyth received a $25,000 grant supporting her work as a director. Contest judges included Laura Dern and Billie Lourd. The Bout portrays the real-life story of Smyth’s mother’s battle with cancer. The director cowrote the film with her mother, Deborah Zawol Smyth, who also served as production designer. Bryant Fisher, BFA Film ’09, was the director of photography. To view the film, visit www.aubreysmyth .com/#/moet/. Smyth is currently in development for her first feature film.

Congratulations, Class of 2018 Share your updates in work and life with your fellow Pratt grads. Our inbox is always open at classnotes@pratt.edu (submission details below).

Yael Malka, BFA Photography ’12, had a solo show at Rubber Factory this spring. The exhibition, Almost Touching, explored “how we see and know others as well as how we reveal ourselves to strangers, lovers, and friends. The body of work balances conventions of intimacy with clues and intimations: disembodied limbs, unmet gazes, and mute objects trying to speak.”

Above: Yael Malka, Untitled (Touched Me), 2017, inkjet print, 40 x 30 inches

Ryan Oskin, BFA Photography ’12, was part of a two-person show at LVL3 in Chicago from May through July.

Moments in Between featured work by Brooklyn-based Oskin alongside that of Chicago-based Victoria Martinez, both of whom “draw inspiration from their respective, ever-shifting surroundings and discover materials from the places in between.” Also this spring, Oskin was invited to give a talk by the CONFAB, a photography working group based in Pittsburgh; the event was hosted by the Silver Eye Center for Photography. A selection of his work was recently published in Dear Dave, #27.

Above: Ryan Oskin, Crying Dionysius, 2018, UV curable ink on aluminum, 43 x 10 x 10 inches

Paul Clark Minor, BFA Painting ’11, and Zoey B Scheler, BFA Ceramics ’11, shared their June 8 engagement. Both achieved MFAs from Purchase College SUNY in 2017. Now, Minor teaches art and continues his studio practice. His 20-foot steel sculpture Pink Goblin Shark Pig will be included in a sculpture garden

Prattfolio

Kai Alexis Smith, MSILS ’13, was a recipient of the 2018 H.W. Wilson Foundation Research Award from the Art Libraries Society of North America for the project “Building Bridges with CSU Art and Performing Arts Librarians,” developed with Laurel Bliss from San Diego State University and Ann Roll from Cal State University Fullerton.

Smith also published a book chapter, “Gotta Catch ’em All: A Case Study

Fall/Winter 2018

Submission Guidelines — Send submissions of 100 words or less to classnotes@pratt.edu.

Please include your full name, degree or program, and graduation year. All submissions will be edited for length, clarity, and style. Image submissions should be high-resolution (300 dpi at 5 x 7 inches).

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PRATT INSTITUTE SCHOOL OF CONTINUING AND PROFESSIONAL STUDIES SPRING 2019 ART, BUSINESS, DESIGN, AND ARCHITECTURE

ARTISTS & FRIENDS PRATT.EDU/SCPS-SPRING2019 855.551.7727

GREAT IDEAS CHANGE THE WAY PEOPLE LIVE, WORK, AND THINK. They create new possibilities and oppor­ tunities for individuals, communities, and society at large.

An Exoskeleton For The White Helmets Of Syria Jacob Lemon, BID ’18

Twisting In Space Brian Brooks, Adjunct Associate Professor, Foundation

Speak English We’re In America Ada Chen, BFA Jewelry ’18

Bubsy Vest Taeyoung Chang, BID ’18

The Fund for Pratt supports the intel­ lectual and creative activity that leads to innovations like these. To learn more about how Pratt students and faculty are creating change with their creativity, visit fundfor.pratt.edu.

Networks In their first eight months, Pratt’s burgeoning Regional Networks hosted more than 50 events across the US.

We asked alumni volunteers how the cultural, and professional development Regional Networks were helping them of our alumni and students.” build connections among their commu Norma Krieger, BFA ’77 nities. Here’s what they had to say: Chair, NYC Network “It can be difficult to find the energy and passion that you shared with classmates and instructors after leaving New York, particularly when you’re moving to a new city with a really different vibe. Connecting with local alumni has opened up many new avenues, where network members can share their hardearned local insight for events and meetups, new leads for projects, and even potential job opportunities. Personally, I’ve reconnected with several people from my major and others who were there at the same time I was in Brooklyn, and I happily have gotten to know a recently retired professor whom I had originally met at Pratt outside of my program.”

Josh Eyre, BID ’08 Chair, Seattle Network

Alumni in 12 network cities came together for museum tours, picnics, happy hours, a recent work show-and-tell in DC, a “path from Pratt” Pecha Kucha in Boston, a cruise around Galveston Bay in Houston, a wine tasting at Barnsdall Art Park in LA, and more. Regional Network events weren’t just about sharing Pratt memories and making new ones but also forging local connections that help alumni enhance the practices and careers that took root at Pratt.

Networks

“I’m having a terrific experience reconnecting with and meeting new Pratt alumni through the network events.

Volunteering as vice chair has been particularly rewarding—it’s reminded me of the amazing skills Pratt taught me for my career and life.”

Amy Egner, MS ’95 Vice Chair, Bay Area Network

“It has been fun to plan and attend several social events, but one of the advantages has been professional: As a distance learning specialist at the National Building Museum, I needed to reach out to engineers as content experts for an upcoming program. With limited time, I contacted the chair of the DC Network, Roberto Cruz Niemiec, BArch ’96, and he provided me with full access to his staff at CannonDesign. Without the network, it would not have been as easy to collaborate on this exciting project.”

Yanitza Tavarez, BFA ’94; MID ’98 Vice Chair, DC Network Excited to link up with the Regional Network in your area—or sign on as a volunteer? To learn more and get connected, visit www .pratt.edu/regionalnetworks or contact alumni@pratt.edu.

Top left: LA Network members at Barnsdall Art Park, also pictured below. Bottom left: Mare Weiss, BFA Interior Design ’96, and Felicia Kornegay, BFA Merchandising and Fashion Management ´85, at a Boston network happy hour.

“I was inspired by Pratt as a student, and I am now honored and energized to return to Pratt and contribute to building an exciting and sustainable alumni NYC network—a way to connect with each other and advance the educational,

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A gift to Pratt can provide you with risk-free income Receive fixed payments for life

Your gift of stock or cash to Pratt through an annuity gives you the security of lifelong payments that are not subject to market risk. Rates are set by the age of the recipient. Here are sample rates for one life: Age Rate 90+ 9.5% 85 8.3% 80 7.3% 75 6.2% 70 5.6% 65 5.1% For confidential details with no obligation, please contact Ron Brown, Office of Planned Giving, at plannedgiving@pratt.edu or 718.399.4296.

Community

It Happened on @PrattAlumni The newest class of Pratt alumni brought their regalia A game to the Institute’s 129th Commencement.

We love these decorated mortarboards from #PrattGrad18!

May 16 Radio City Music Hall

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Keep up with the ever-unfolding Pratt story—follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @prattalumni and @prattinstitute.

Community

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Pratt Institute Office of Alumni Institutional Advancement Relations Institutional 200 Willoughby Advancement Avenue 200 Willoughby Brooklyn, NY 11205 Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205 Return Service Requested

Our ability to see multiple perspectives, to look out and gaze in, to remain porous and curious in relation to others’ experiences equips us with a powerful tool to do meaningful work —empathy.