For alumni address changes and obituary notices, please contact Alumni Engagement at alumni@pratt.edu or 718.399.4447.
Prattfolio is printed by Lane Press, which has a long history of responsible environmental practices. Learn more at lanepress.com.
A Time for Coming Together
As I write this, our community at Pratt has recently begun another academic year energized with ideas, explorations, new alliances, and discoveries both inward and in the world.
This is a moment when we come together. It’s a season of beginnings and thinking about how we move within and shape our society, our culture, and the life we imagine for ourselves and our communities. It’s also a time of reflection on civil discourse and democracy—what do these concepts mean in action, and at Pratt, among our empathetic, visionary, critically curious designers, artists, researchers, specialists, and scholars, how do we contribute?
As we explore these questions, to create space for dialogues to flourish, Pratt’s Critical Conversations: Bridging Pathways Forward series of events is underway, supporting discussion and learning about our community’s cultural contexts, political engagement, and modes of expression. (Learn more at pratt.edu/criticalconversations.)
This is also a time of milestones that connect us around shared histories. Among them, the School of Architecture celebrates its 70th anniversary this year. It is the 100th anniversary of accreditation by the American Library Association of the School of Information’s library science program, and next year will be the 135th anniversary of the school’s first class. The Pratt Center for Community Development’s 60th anniversary kicked off in May with an event highlighting one of its long-standing initiatives, Made in NYC. Another Pratt Center program, the Taconic Fellowship, marks 10 years of supporting faculty, staff, and student projects undertaken in partnership with local organizations.
Meanwhile, 41 years ago, the first issue of Prattfolio arrived as a “campus feature newsletter” for the academic community and alumni, highlighting students, faculty, graduates, and staff along with Institute news. Decades and many iterations later, the magazine continues to represent the numerous facets of Pratt, now with a newly refreshed design and editorial framework we’re excited to share with you.
This issue is a celebration of how Pratt’s campus community connects and has through generations: the many ways of seeing and experiencing Pratt life and work, the range of our students’ and graduates’ extraordinary creative and innovative contributions, and the voices of Pratt people across generations—including yours.
We hope you’ll share your perspective (see the prompt on page 68) and stay in touch, with Pratt and with one another.
President Frances Bronet
by Dahlia
Photo
Dandashi
In Progress
Incoming Pratt students during last year’s Orientation. Read more on page 14.
What’s happening at Pratt now, from recent events to projects, explorations, and student life.
Updates from Pratt’s News Page
Read more from these stories and keep up with the latest from campus and beyond at pratt.edu/news.
Celebrating the Class of 2024
In her Commencement address, art and cultural historian Sarah Lewis celebrated Pratt Institute’s class of 2024 and encouraged students to harness the power that arts have always had to create a more just society. “You have that skill. You have that power,” she said. “May your goal for your work, for your life, be so large that it includes far more than you.”
The May 15 Commencement honored the class of 2024 with a ceremony in the grand setting of Radio City Music Hall, recognizing more than 1,350 students who received their diplomas after years of hard work and became the newest members of Pratt’s alumni community.
Pratt bestowed honorary degrees upon three leaders in their fields whose work embodies the innovation and creativity promoted by the Institute, including Lewis (Doctor of Humane Letters); Pratt Institute alumna Doris Magsaysay Ho (Doctor of Humane Arts), president and CEO of Magsaysay Transport and Logistics Group; and Pratt Institute alumnus John Pai (Doctor of Fine Arts), a sculptor and Pratt Institute professor emeritus.
The graduation speakers also included Justice A. Whitaker, visiting assistant professor of film/video, who was named Distinguished Teacher (2023–2024). Feyisayo Aluko, BFA Writing ’24, and Nehal Sharma, MS Information Experience Design ’24, were the elected student speakers.
Find photographs from Commencement on Pratt’s news page, on social media (explore #PrattGrad24), and at pratt.edu/commencement-2024-livestream.
Page 5: Left to right, standing: Ian Glennon, Mia Palk, Anna Avent, Halle Goldberg, Ainsley Gibbons;
kneeling: Jeanne Tsai, Weston Tybor.
Photo by Justin Hogan. This page:
Photo by Rebecca Smeyne
Student Projects Imagine the Future of New York City
What if some of the recent thesis projects by Pratt students were brought to life on a citywide scale? From transportation to culture, buildings, and parks, many Pratt students have proposed novel ideas that could power the future of New York City and beyond—like Plastic Cycling (above), a community hub for recycling, repurposing, and revaluing plastic waste that Jiyeong Lee, BFA Interior Design ’24, proposed for a site in the Flatiron district. Explore 19 of these projects—compiled into an imagined city guide—in “What Could Be: A Guide to the Future of NYC” on Pratt’s news page.
Made in NYC, an initiative by the Pratt Center for Community Development, hosted its first-ever Taste of Made in NYC event at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on May 18, as part of Made in NYC Week, spotlighting the city’s culinary entrepreneurs. Pictured here: Made in NYC member Ethel and Annie Mae’s Soul Food.
The Nord Family establishes Pratt’s first endowed fund to support student internships.
The Eric and Jane Nord Family Endowed Internship Fund is a $5 million endowment that will provide stipends to students who wish to pursue otherwise unpaid or underpaid internship experiences in their chosen fields.
President Frances Bronet Elected AICAD Board Chair
The Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) elected Pratt Institute President Frances Bronet as the new chair of its board of trustees, effective July 1, 2024. Prior to this appointment, President Bronet served on AICAD’s Executive Committee for six years.
“We are committed to strengthening creative institutions, our connections to internal and external constituents, sharing emerging and significant practices, and building diverse and sustainable career opportunities for art and design graduates,” said President Bronet.
Newly Elected Members and Trustee Emeritus for Pratt’s Board of Trustees
Pratt Institute’s Board of Trustees has elected three distinguished new members: President of Olin College Gilda A. Barabino; Chairman of Steiner Studios Doug Steiner; and artist, Pratt graduate, and cofounder of Pratt>FORWARD Mickalene Thomas. The appointments took effect on July 1, 2024.
Board of Trustees member Bruce J. Gitlin became trustee emeritus effective July 1, 2024. Gitlin, whose father graduated from the Pratt School of Engineering in 1936, joined Pratt’s Board of Trustees in 1997, leading its Buildings and Grounds Committee as it transformed the Pratt campus into a green destination and sculpture garden for the community and visitors alike. He served as Board of Trustees chair from 2012 to October 2022. Gitlin is CEO of MILGO/ BUFKIN, the Brooklyn-based, internationally renowned metal fabrication company.
Essential Listening
As jazz reaches younger generations through the artists of this century, Cisco Bradley, associate professor of social science and cultural studies at Pratt, has been making sure the art form’s overlooked visionaries and their stories are receiving their due. Bradley’s new podcast Music and Migration Presents is his effort to showcase the unique insights from these musicians.
For a long time, Bradley was concerned with uplifting new, innovative voices, hosting loft shows for lesserknown, boundary-pushing performers, as well as cataloging the recent past, as he did in his recent book covering underground music in New York City from the 1980s to the 2010s, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront.
Over the last few years, the scope of Bradley’s scholarship has expanded in time and space. With an interest in jazz music and its practitioners’ migration throughout the US, Bradley established a project space, the Music and Migration Lab, to focus on Black experimental music’s enduring influence on politics, culture, social justice, and, broadly, community, from the 19th and 20th centuries onward. The Music and Migration Lab houses Bradley’s Free Jazz Oral History Project—which aims to document, preserve, and make publicly available the history of the music in the words of those who created it—and the new podcast.
In what started as an oral history project, Bradley has recorded more than 500 interviews with artists aged 70 to 100, such as pianist Dave Burrell and Karen Borca, the bassoonist and composer. The Music and Migration Lab is releasing these conversations biweekly (at musicandmigration.podbean.com and on other podcast platforms), spotlighting a long-neglected archive of Black creativity and authorship. The podcast is organized in three sections—Origins, New York Live, and Reflections—and
Jazz historian Cisco Bradley’s new podcast shares the wisdom of the form’s vanguard artists.
features musicians from throughout and beyond the USA, offering unprecedented insight into their lives and work.
To mark its debut, Prattfolio spoke to Bradley about his research, recording these conversations during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the vital role this work plays for emerging musicians, scholars, and jazz lovers today.
How did you come up with the concept for this podcast? What inspired you to speak with these musicians?
Cisco Bradley: I actually began the oral history project in 2013, formalized it in 2016, and then stepped up the frequency of the interviews during the pandemic. I came at this from the perspective of an archivist, but in 2023 I began to think
about the possibilities of featuring some of the interviews as podcasts.
I have always taken time with these things—if a musician wants to talk for multiple hours, I will take that time. They have done important work and often have not been documented enough. Their lives are as important as the music they make and so I’ve tried to really dig in and talk in an in-depth way with people about their origins, upbringing, and methods of learning and what they did through the course of their careers. Why these musicians in particular? I’ve been fascinated with experimentation in music for most of my life, and I find experimenters to have fascinating ways of thinking. So, I reached out to some of this country’s most fascinating musicians and thinkers for these conversations.
Jazz pianist Dave Burrell, one of the subjects of Cisco Bradley’s new oral histories podcast.
In the beginning, I interviewed mostly younger musicians, under age 45, because I saw value in pushing for the next generation. In 2016, when I began working with bassist William Parker on his biography, I expanded the project to include many people of his generation or older and have since put a lot of my focus on documenting the elders of the music. This has included people born as early as 1921, so it covers a century of American history. I have also interviewed people from around the world, usually when I am traveling, and that has brought in other dimensions, from places like Ethiopia, Mexico, South Africa, Korea, and various places in Europe.
What led you to release these conversations as a podcast?
CB: My work really began when I founded [the website] Jazz Right Now in 2013 and began interviewing musicians. As a writer, I have often thought primarily through the written word, but in recent years, I have begun to also consider audio and video. The orality of the interviews lends them well to a podcast—there are always things people convey in their voice that are lost when it is transcribed into text. So I wanted to find a way to make the recordings available to the general public. The podcasts are aimed at reaching beyond whatever audience has engaged with my writing. Some people may listen to a podcast who will never buy a book. I think it connects with a younger audience and is easily accessible to people from around the world in ways that a book may not be.
What is your biggest takeaway from the project so far? What do you hope people will take away?
CB: The musician elders I have talked to have a tremendous amount of wisdom, expertise, and pure genius that they share through these conversations. We don’t live in a wise society these days. I hope people will listen and really hear what these premier American artists have to say about a wide range of things, from music, art, and philosophy to social change, politics, race, and class-based oppression in the US, and all kinds of related issues. These are serious artists and they have given the world a lot of thought.
nikolas slackman
Explore More New York Jazz in These Books by
Cisco Bradley
Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University
Press)
Cisco Bradley’s first book on music is a comprehensive biography of jazz bassist, composer, and bandleader William Parker. Bradley follows Parker’s trajectory from the New York City loft scene of the 1970s to present day, with a special focus on the role of activism and community in Parker’s artistic development. This book lays the foundation of Bradley’s project to amplify the original voices of the form. Reviewer Lee Rice Epstein wrote on Free Jazz Blog that one of the most important aspects of Universal Tonality is “how many voices are there, on the page, including Parker’s. It’s his story, most of all, but now it’s also ours, as the audience, as the experiencers, as the ones who’ll carry it forward.”
The
Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press)
In his most recent book, Bradley chronicles the Brooklyn experimental music scene, from its roots in Williamsburg to its growth into an international phenomenon to its continued incubation of new sounds in Bushwick and Red Hook. Featuring recordings, interviews, and other archival materials, the book’s focus on the growth of the music and its stalwart struggle against encroaching gentrification tells a broader story of, as Bradley puts it, “the struggle of artists of all disciplines to find art space, to nurture their art forms, and to build a healthy community of like-minded creators.”
Bradley’s current book-in-progress, The Horn Is the River: The Revolutionary Life and Music of Charles Gayle, is a biography of the late avant-garde saxophonist. The project, which received the support of a grant from the New York Council on the Arts this year, is directly connected to the oral histories Bradley has been working on with the Music and Migration Lab.
Interior Design Students Imagine an Immersive Museum Experience
Design student Kefei Xiao, MFA Interior Design ’25, has a personal passion for exploring museums. On any given weekend, Xiao might find herself perusing New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, or beyond. “I enjoy observing how different areas within museums employ finishes, lighting, and ambiance to evoke sensory changes in visitors, depending on the exhibited artworks or themes,” she says.
This interest was Xiao’s main driver for signing up for the Advanced Options Studio Reenvisioning the Museum Experience. Led by longtime Pratt Institute professor Tetsu Ohara, adjunct associate professor (CCE) of interior design, the studio asked students to consider new ways for visitors to engage with museums and exhibitions.
“During the first class session, I shared these experiences with Tetsu,” says Xiao. “He [noted] that museums like the Metropolitan and MoMA are of a traditional type, whereas in this project, we would consider more interaction between visitors and space, aiming to provide visitors with sensory experiences including auditory, tactile, and even olfactory and gustatory sensations.”
Reenvisioning the Museum Experience marks the 10th year of collaboration between Pratt and The Noguchi Museum, located in Long Island City, Queens. Every spring, MFA interior design students participating in versions of this studio are asked to draw inspiration from Isamu Noguchi’s work to focus on a different design consideration—from a hypothetical Noguchi Museum Annex in Brooklyn’s DUMBO to a traveling pop-up exhibition.
Kinetic Ceiling “Gradual Unfolding”: Students proposed an interactive exhibition space to emphasize the “beauty and tactility of Akari,” Isamu Noguchi’s term for his signature lamps made using mulberry bark paper and bamboo ribbing. Visitors can explore the Akari production process and structure hands-on while above them, “the ceiling design reflects the translucent and collapsible nature of Akari. It folds and unfolds slowly, providing a sense of its ‘rhythmic breathing.’”
—— A model of the reimagined section of The Noguchi Museum. —— A study of daylight and sustainable design elements in the space.
—— The students in the Reimagining the Museum Experience studio at the Noguchi Museum exhibition showcasing their project.
This year, a group of 10 students including Xiao reimagined a section of the museum’s main building for the first time. Along with designing primary exhibition space, they were asked to propose several immersive spaces and laboratory areas to get closer to Noguchi’s work. In addition, they designed a hypothetical show, “Peace: Together,” incorporating objects and ideas from Noguchi and his collaborators (artists, architects, and designers whom he worked with on some level) that revolve around global peace.
“The problem or the design challenge was to come up with new, innovative solutions to reenvisioning museum experiences from a multiple-sensorial point of view,” says Ohara. “Which comes from [the idea] that typically museums are ocular-centric.” Exploring beyond the visual, the focus was to create a more inclusive museum experience and one that also integrates sustainable design principles. “It reexamines the museum visit and challenges other forms of understanding about the artists or objects displayed,” Ohara says.
The semester, including research, analysis, and exhibition and museum
design, was divided into three parts. The first two were dedicated to research, beginning with museum visits.
“The first four to five weeks were really spent experiencing museum spaces in person,” says Hannah Hemmerly, MFA Interior Design ’25. This ranged from the Whitney to Brooklyn Botanic Garden to, in Hemmerly’s words, the highly immersive Mercer Labs, a new museum that opened this year in the Financial District.
“We were able to analyze: How did they deal with flexible partition systems? How do they deal with using light in the space?” Hemmerly recalls. “Did they conceal the sprinkler system or do you see the exposed sprinkler system? How was the art displayed? How is the way the art is displayed affecting your viewer experience of that art? And, do the plaques include Braille? Do they not include Braille? Are they at a certain height where everyone can access them? All of those questions.”
Students supplemented their inperson research with online research of other museums and spaces around the world, “to explore designs worth studying
in terms of circulation, materials, accessibility, sustainability, and more,” says Xiao. They also had three visits to The Noguchi Museum. These began with a comprehensive site visit that included a focus on sustainability. The students participated in a low-vision workshop in a second visit and finally were introduced to the space dedicated to their project work.
Students then focused their research on learning about Isamu Noguchi and those he collaborated with, from Buckminster Fuller to Issey Miyake. With each student choosing a particular collaborator to investigate, they analyzed their specific works, including Noguchi’s Bell Tower for Hiroshima.
“We spent a considerable amount of time on the research phase, which allowed us to gain a deep understanding of Noguchi and his works, as well as related artists and concepts,” says Xiao. “This provided a solid foundation for our design process, enabling us to more accurately integrate Noguchi’s ideas and aesthetics into our project.”
The final step of the course was the museum renovation and exhibition
design. For their mid-review, students presented individual design proposals. Based on their votes, as well as feedback from Noguchi Museum staff and Pratt faculty and guidance from Professor Ohara, they combined the best ideas to conceive the final design as a group.
“I think the thing that’s always interesting about working in a group is everyone has a different skill set. And so when you are able to utilize everyone’s different skill set, your output can be far greater,” says Hemmerly. “Part of the value is, if you go work for a firm, you’re going to be working in a team. That is an important ability to exercise, and learning how to really communicate.”
Looking to Noguchi’s towered Ikebana sculptures as a metaphor, the students’ final design is centered around three sculptural towers with skylights and sculpted, narrow openings creating daylighting, vertical circulation, and visual connection. These spaces reflect design contrasts students explored between darkness and light, visibility and invisibility, touchable and untouchable, among other spatial relationships. Their intention is to allow
visitors to embody Noguchi’s organic aesthetic among their twists and smooth curving surfaces, their sculptural lines.
Spread across three floors, the proposal includes flexible and sustainable exhibition space on the middle and upper floors. Students proposed a system of modular grids and geometric partitions that are made from recycled materials and can be reassembled.
The four immersive spaces include a “stone forest where visitors can engage with the surface and textures of Noguchi’s sculptures,” says Xiao, along with a meditative space with a flowing fountain centered around an acoustic experience, and a room dedicated to Noguchi’s Akari lanterns where a folding and unfolding sculptural element on the ceiling offers a kinetic experience.
“[These spaces] really question the idea of how you experience Noguchi, and art as well,” says Hemmerly.
The students presented their final work in an exhibition and presentation at the Noguchi Museum on May 8. Like Hemmerly, Xiao found value in learning how to work with others.
“One of the most significant takeaways is learning how to collaborate effectively within a design team of 10 individuals. Understanding the importance of time management and how to allocate tasks efficiently has been crucial,” she says. “Moreover, the course taught me the significance of integrating diverse ideas and perspectives to create comprehensive and innovative designs. These skills are not only essential for success in the field of design but also applicable across various professional settings.”
As a whole, Hemmerly appreciated understanding how to adapt public spaces in an inclusive lens and an environmentally sustainable lens, “which is very important,” she says. “And then there’s the takeaway for me specifically, which is more about how to take a space that has a very rich history and a very specific history and how to give a redesign of that space that respects its history but also looks into the future.”
joann plockova
Learn more about Pratt Interior Design: int@pratt.edu/@prattinteriors.
Photos by Marko
—— The students’ final proposal and models on display at The Noguchi Museum. —— The exhibition opening at The Noguchi Museum. —— The students’ proposal for a “tactility chamber,” an immersive space that mimics Noguchi’s sculptural surfaces and finishes and can also be touched.
First Looks, Final Thoughts
At Pratt’s Orientation 2023 and Grad Fair 2024, Prattfolio caught up with students on both sides of the Pratt experience—to bottle the moment and capture the excitement of new starts and taking flight.
“Remember that you came to Pratt because you have an artistic vision and artist’s intuition, and trust that . . . trust that you’re here for a reason, and that you’re talented and amazing.”
Alex Brinkman, BFA Film ’24 (left)
“My current obsession right now is New York. Coming from the Bay Area I am just really excited to be in a new city with new people, and more stuff to explore.”
Delaney Icard-Cullen, Photography, class of 2027 (kneeling, left)
“Always stand in your power. Know that you’re the coolest, and talk!”
Euneek Turner, BFA Communications Design ’24
Opposite: top, left to right: Cass Brent-Nurse, Film; Bodhi Martinez, Communications Design; and Brian Ardelean, all class of 2027. Bottom: Alex Brinkman (left) and Kayla Jones, both BFA Film ’24. This page, clockwise from top left: Gabby Sapozikov, Architecture, class of 2028. Delaney Icard-Cullen, Photography, class of 2027 (kneeling, left), with (clockwise from top left) B Zalc, Halle Stephens, and Willow Troise Angela Li, MS Data Analytics and Visualization ’24. Euneek Turner, BFA Communications Design ’24.
Photos by Justin Hogan
“I wanted a perfect balance of city as well as a campus, so what other than Pratt?”
Aditya Patil, Architecture, class of 2028 (standing center)
“I’m a Pratt Munson alum, so this is my first year at Pratt in Brooklyn—I wanted to be in New York City but I wasn't exactly ready to be thrown into it, so having that two-year program was perfect for me.”
Galen Marquess, Fine Arts (Printmaking), class of 2025 (left)
“I’m going to miss studio life! . . . The ability to be surrounded by all your friends not only makes it a fun environment but a helpful one as well.”
“I now have a network of people I know who are all over the world, so that’s going to be interesting, hearing stories from them, from everywhere.”
Jonathan Chisesi, BFA Digital Arts (2D Animation) ’24
Julia Young,
MArch ’24 (left)
Opposite, clockwise from top left: Ashna Garg and Aditya Patil, both Architecture, class of 2028; Aditya Gadgil; Graham Gorman, Film, class of 2027. Alice Freitas, Fine Arts, class of 2026. Chaelyung “Ava” Jang, Communications Design, class of 2027. Owen Balakumar, Architecture, class of 2028. Anthony D’Agostino, Communications Design, class of 2025. Hank Swift, Film, class of 2027. Galen Marquess (left) and Uriah Weaver, both Fine Arts, class of 2025. Alondra Benicio, Industrial Design, class of 2027.
This page, clockwise from top left: Micayla Brewer (left) and Anishaa Kashyap, both BFA Interior Design ’24. Left to right: Julia Young, Zeynep Gorken, and Moxuanzi May Xu, all MArch ’24. Jonathan Chisesi, BFA Digital Arts ’24. Josie (Zhuoran) Xu, MS Information Experience Design ’24. Left to right: Priscilla Maria, AAS Graphic Design/Illustration ’24; Finn Evans, AOS Graphic Design ’24; and Pax Meyer, AAS Graphic Design/Illustration ’24. Catherine Chattergoon, BArch ’24. Liv Baerga (left) and Hannah Grenier, both MSLIS ’24. James Moutsos, BFA Film ’24.
TRADITIONS, CLUBS, SPACES, PLACES, EVENTS, HAPPENINGS, AND HIDDEN GEMS THAT MAKE PRATT OUR PLACE
W YS O F SEEIN
For some, it’s the annual Brooklyn Bridge walk or the Alumni Basketball Game, for others, a festival like Holi, the spectacle of Halloween, or a visit to the Material Lab’s library or one of the many shows put on by Pratt Exhibitions in Brooklyn and Manhattan every year. Whatever that galvanizing moment may be in life as a Pratt student (or alum), here is a visual tour through just some of the experiences, storied and new, that bring the Pratt community together.
BROOKLYN BRIDGE WALK
ALUMNI BASKETBALL GAME
A tradition with records going back to 1974, this annual basketball match-up between alumni athletes draws Pratt graduates from all over the US to play and celebrate their Cannoneer roots. The event, organized by Pratt Athletics and Alumni Engagement, has also seen standout teammates honored and brought a festive spirit to the air before a student Cannoneers game. Athletics alumni, stay tuned! More events are being planned for the year ahead.
The annual sunrise walk across the Brooklyn Bridge is more than an energizing start to the fall semester—it’s a rite of passage, an opportunity for camaraderie among first-year and transfer students against the picturesque backdrop of the New York City skyline. A highlight of Orientation Week, this gathering of students and administrators begins on the Brooklyn campus and gives an informal initiation to Clinton Hill’s neighboring areas.
ATHLETICS
The Cannoneers, Pratt’s athletics team has a long history on the field, court, and track—with around 180 student athletes currently competing in sports that include basketball, cross country, soccer, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and equestrian. In the latest move for the athletics program, Pratt was added as the eighth full-time member of the Atlantic East Conference, a member of NCAA Division III, this year. Fans can keep up with all things athletics on goprattgo.com.
big damn prints
In 2006, Pratt Fine Arts launched Big Damn Prints, bringing Pratt students and faculty together for a day of largescale printmaking, transforming the heart of the Brooklyn campus into a hub for collaborative artmaking. Participants work together in small groups as they collectively sketch and carve intricate designs, ink the woodblock surfaces, and stretch fabric to prepare for the printmaking process. Forget a printing press: a visiting steamroller is employed instead of traditional machinery. Read more and view photos from the event’s 20th installment at pratt.edu/prattfolio
The campus-wide initiative Cultural Highlights honors the richness of traditions, practices, values, and customs across the global community through programming curated by the Office of Student Involvement and the Center for Equity and Inclusion. With events around holidays and festivals like Holi, pictured here, the campus community comes together for celebration and cultural appreciation throughout the year.
EX IBITIONS
1
Exhibitions have long been a fixture at Pratt, for the campus community and beyond. During the 2023–2024 academic year, Pratt’s public galleries organized some of their more ambitious and critically acclaimed shows to date. They ranged from cutting-edge downtown NYC fashion to meditative reflections on environmental destruction, and the gallery
spaces hosted events from an experimental “drone” music concert to a Vogue-featured runway show. Here’s a look at those shows and a glimpse of what’s on for this year.
with contributions by andrew riad, mfa creative writing ’25
Amazonia, curated by Berta Sichel with Patricia Capa, wove together a group of artists and artworks whose material shared the common thread of the Amazon Rainforest. The exhibition introduced the framework of “ecocriticism,” a theoretical position that simultaneously addresses environment, climate change, and aesthetic ephemera. Sounds, colors, and traditional practices from the Amazon Rainforest territory appeared alongside reminders of the territory’s ever-present threat of extinction and extermination.
Christina Thurston and Dean Sidaway, co-curators of the Fall 2023 Faculty/Staff Fashion Exhibition, spoke of the fashion department at Pratt as an ecosystem of experimentation, where formal as well as political themes imbue textiles and garments with expressive meaning. In No Wire Hangers, motifs that united the diverse practitioners included the use of crochet, weaves, and knits; reflections on the experiences of women, queer, and Black artists; reproductive rights; reinterpretations of traditional garments; and a balance between gossamer delicacy and whimsical play.
Installation view of No Wire Hangers. 5
3
The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion, curated by Jennifer Minniti and Matthew Linde, paid homage to downtown NYC’s world of avant-garde fashion and art. By assembling looks ranging from street wear to couture alongside installations and sculptures, the exhibition constructed its very own “village” of artists and fashion designers. As Ada O’Higgins writes in her review of The New Village for Artforum, the exhibition gathered together a set of “underground legends, lingering on the lips and gracing the bodies of downtown trendsetters, from emerging DJs to established creative directors and unemployed party monsters.”
Installation view of The New Village.
4
An Egg in a Dream in a Landscape at the Schafler Gallery showcased an expansive range of styles and practices of the faculty and staff of Pratt’s Film/Video Department. Curators Emily Rose Apter and Inney Prakash both specialize in film festivals; An Egg in a Dream in a Landscape marked their debut gallery exhibition. The pair faced a unique challenge: the group show included five projections, a dozen monitors, and one four-channel sound installation, among collages and wall works. Despite the many forms of media, Apter and Prakash organized a show with both an overarching narrative and careful attention to individual accomplishments.
Installation view of An Egg in a Dream in a Landscape
ON NOW
Curator Barbara London’s concept for Seeing Sound introduces sound as a central and dynamic avenue for contemporary art. Seeing Sound is on view at Pratt Manhattan Gallery through December 17, 2024.
Undoing the Border Fantasy, curated by Swati Piparsania and Jess Saldaña, organized in collaboration with the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, is on view at Schafler Gallery through December 7, 2024.
SPRING 2025
*dates tentative
Black Dress II at Pratt Manhattan Gallery January 24–March 22, 2025
Dona Ann McAdams/Abby Robinson at Pratt Manhattan Gallery April 18–June 7, 2025
Architecture + AI Exhibition at Schafler Gallery January–March 2025
5
The Apex Is Nothing brought together paintings, drawings, and textiles codified through the languages of shape, data, mark-making, and tactility. The work of abstract expressionist painter Alfred Jensen, who is known for his use of grids and thick impasto, served as a jumping-off point for the exhibition. The fourteen other included artists are linked by their use of mathematics, numerical calculation, ancient calendars, lists, and patterns as methodology and subject matter. Curators Ken Weathersby and John O’Connor define these elements as “extra-aesthetic imperatives”—systems that permeate artworks from beyond the picture plane.
Xylor Jane, Tiger Twins, 2022, Oil and graphite on wood panel, 31 × 23 inches. Courtesy of the artist and CANADA, New York
6
Summer 2024 shows: To Live in the Imagination showcased alumni photography at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Pieces of You, Pieces of Me, a School of Art exhibition at Schafler Gallery, featured students and recent graduates who are African American, African, Caribbean, or identify as having African descent.
Jingge Zhang, Untitled, 2024, laser print transferred to packing tape on Plexiglas, 20 × 15 inches. Courtesy of the artist
ALTESPRINGRNATIVE BREAK
Students who stay in New York City during Pratt’s Spring Break have a week of local activities to dive into, organized by Student Involvement’s Community Engagement Board. This year, the week started with a visit from the pups of New York Therapy Animals (above) and toy making for the organization Pillows for Paws. Students also came together for service-oriented projects that took them outdoors with PS 216’s Edible School Garden and the Lower East Side Ecology Center.
earth action week
The Pratt Sustainability Center heads up this twice-yearly week of academic presentations, panel discussions, workshops, and hands-on activities to highlight ongoing sustainability efforts by students, faculty, and staff. “We’re celebrating the action that’s happening at Pratt, the work that’s being generated,” said Carolyn Shafer, director of the Pratt Sustainability Center, in a Pratt news story, “and also providing opportunities for people to feel empowered as individuals to make change.”
FOUNDATION EXPANDED
Each spring, Myrtle Avenue becomes a bustling pop-up shop, runway, and outdoor gallery for first-year students to share their projects during Foundation Expanded, in collaboration with Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership and Pratt’s Foundation Department. The 2024 opening event included a performance by Pratt’s Aura dance crew (@auradancecrew, above).
OFUNDATIONS LAB
DRAG SHOW
Given Brooklyn’s lively drag scene, it’s no wonder that Pratt Institute’s annual drag show takes center stage during the Institute’s Pride Week celebrations. Hosted by the LGBTQ+ student group Queer Pratt (@queerpratt) since 2013, this event dazzles the audience with a showcase of artistic flair featuring students and guest drag performers. For Queer Pratt, Pride isn’t confined to a once-a-year occasion. Aimed at encouraging self-expression and creating a stronger community at Pratt, Queer Pratt’s year-round programming includes education, outreach, activities, meetings, and campus-wide events.
Natural wonders abound in the Foundations Lab, where students can explore an expansive collection of rocks and minerals, skeletons and specimens, plants, and other objects in a free-form environment. The lab also hosts programs that bring artists, designers, scientists, and other innovators into conversation with the campus community.
horses campus on
Equine models get their moment in the sun on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus at this much-anticipated annual event. A collaboration between the School of Art and Pratt Equestrian— one of Pratt’s varsity athletics teams (@prattequestrian)—Horses on Campus brings everyone outdoors and together for a day of drawing and horse-lover joy.
halloweencontest costume
Every October, the Pratt community immerses itself in Halloween celebrations across Pratt’s Brooklyn and Manhattan (PMC) campuses. Students gather for crafting sessions, film screenings, and the much-anticipated annual costume contest. As an extra treat, the West Village Halloween Parade waltzes by PMC, connecting Pratt’s academic haven and the vivacious downtown tradition. Pratt’s Halloween festivities aren’t just about celebrating the holiday; they infuse it with a distinct artistic fervor.
GUEST ARTISTS AND INNOVATORS
The stages at Memorial Hall, Higgins Hall, and beyond have played host to inspiring artists, designers, and luminaries over the years, through Pratt’s numerous series and events organized by schools and departments, faculty, students, Pratt Presents, and more. Last academic year, visitors included John Wilson of HBO’s How To with John Wilson and show editor LJ Frezza (above), shoe designer Stuart Weitzman, chef Marcus Samuelsson, artist Sky Hopinka, and Pratt alumni costume designers Emilio Sosa and Paul Tazewell. (Learn about upcoming programs at pratt.edu/events.)
Photos: Megan Proctor ’25 (Halloween); Tejas Setlur ’26 (Guest Artists; pictured, left to right: LJ Frezza, John Wilson, and curator/moderator
Lauren Goshinski, MS Urban Placemaking and Management)
MATE RIAL LAB POETICS LAB
From textiles and ceramics to metals and polymers—more than 25,000 material samples make up the Material Lab’s collection, all available to check out for Pratt students, faculty, and staff. It began as a resource for the Interior Design Department, cataloging numerous finishes and surfaces, and is now a hub for fields across the Institute, with its numerous circulating specimens, plus special collections and a library of books and periodicals for on-site research, programming, and an annual awards competition.
other bookIslandsfair
After years of Graduate Communications Design majors creating innovatively designed books for their thesis capstone projects, chair Gaia Hwang had an idea: hold a book fair on campus where students could present their work alongside members of the vibrant local small press and indie publishing community. In 2023, Other Islands Book Fair was born. The two-day spring extravaganza brings printed-matter lovers from across the city, hosting roughly 45 vendors, including art, design, and literary publishers like Draw Down Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, who this year hosted a bookmaking workshop for fair attendees. Among the Pratt community participants are alumni outfits such as Dream Labor Press (read more on page 45) and Fruit & Rot, run by adjunct professor Jean Brennan.
Pratt Reef
This spring, Poetics Lab celebrated its 10th year as a beacon of transdisciplinary exploration at Pratt. Founded in 2014 by Professor Ira Livingston and Professor Jennifer Miller (Humanities and Media Studies), Professor Duncan Hamilton (Undergraduate Communications Design), and others, Poetics Lab began as a faculty initiative to encourage collaboration across fields. Today, Poetics Lab offers a class that embraces play as a creative process and also supports faculty and student projects. Over the years, hundreds of collaborative projects have come out of the class and Poetics Lab has also published seven books. The anniversary event, pictured here, brought the campus together for a celebration of that work—music and dance performances, readings of poetry and manifestos, collaborative drawings, tarot readings, and a showcase of books and zines.
North Hall holds one of the unexpected wonders of the Brooklyn campus: Pratt’s aquariums, known as Pratt Reef. Tended by Randy Donowitz, director of the Writing and Tutorial Center, this meditative space is home to a powder blue tang, clown fish, and an exceptionally rare Cuban fish, the Gramma dejongi. It’s also the hub for Pratt’s Reef Club, a student group that comes together twice a month around “all things aquatic.”
S OWS PR TT
The annual celebration of graduating students’ work runs through every spring semester, with exhibitions across the Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses and beyond. This showcase includes gallery openings on Monday evenings with an abundance of art across mediums and forms; literary readings; film and animation screenings at Brooklyn standbys like BAM Rose Cinemas and Alamo Drafthouse; Pratt Shows: Fashion, the annual runway show that extends from a Pratt tradition dating back to 1899; InfoShow, the School of Information’s culminating event; and an immersion in architecture and design students’ work in the ARC at Pratt Shows: Design.
This annual spring event sheds light on the wide range of research happening at Pratt. For the past two years, Research Open House has been held at the Research Yard at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which brings Pratt’s research activities together in one space (see the map on page 68).
From seed to plant to pigment, the connection between creativity, community, and the earth threads through every activity in Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden (@prattdyegarden). Led by School of Design professors Gina Gregorio and Isa Rodrigues and maintained by students of the Dye Garden Crew, the garden welcomes the Pratt community and the public through various programs throughout the year that have included bundle-dyeing workshops, papermaking and poetry, the history and science of natural dyeing, and even a bring-your-own-bowl soup night for students. The garden also has roots in Pratt history, linking back to the Institute’s first educational garden, where students in the teacher-training program worked with children to care for a garden.
STUDE NT DE SIGN MARKE TPLACE
and sell their work at the annual Student Design Marketplace, a Student Government Association–sponsored annual event. This year’s offerings included prints, stickers, jewelry, knitwear, and more.
A tradition steeped in the rebellious echoes of the 1960s college radio scene, WPIR (@wpirprattradio), Pratt’s radio station, has provided generations of Pratt students with a platform for expressing themselves through sound. Once broadcast at AM 600 from Willoughby Hall, WPIR has had its share of ebbs and rebounds over the years, its most recent reboot during the post-pandemic return to campus. Today, with a team of more than 25 students and faculty members, the station streams online throughout the week, featuring shows covering an eclectic array of genres and thought-provoking topics, from reggae to hyperpop, conversational podcasts to deep dives into architecture. Read more and look inside the studio at pratt.edu/prattfolio
Power of Two
Shared obsessions, polar-opposite sensibilities—the exact forces that bring artists and designers together as collaborators run the gamut.
For the Pratt alumni creative partnerships highlighted here, Pratt was an incubator for that unique alchemy. These graduates’ years at the Institute were about more than shaping a craft, practice, and career path—they were a launchpad for life-changing relationships.
Interviews have been edited and condensed. Read more at pratt.edu/prattfolio/duos.
Chen Chen Kai Williams
BID ’07 & BID ’06
A year apart in their industrial design studies, Chen Chen and Kai Williams became friends at Pratt but came together in their work a few years post-graduation, going on to form their eponymous design studio in 2011. It wasn’t a shared approach that ultimately forged their creative partnership, but contrasts—“our sensibilities are quite different, and that’s what makes the work more interesting,” they said in an interview with Prattfolio, started jointly over email and continued in their Brooklyn studio last spring. Those differences have brought to life a lineage of objects, furnishings, and one-of-a-kind works that revel in material experimentation, unexpected combinations, and the beauty of process.
You’ve mentioned the differences in your creative sensibilities—how does that influence the work?
Chen Chen: There’s a little bit of tension pushing the work forward. If you’re on the same page already, then maybe the first draft doesn’t get revised.
Kai Williams: I would say that there are particular differences. I feel like I under-structure, and Chen overstructures, which maybe is [also] in our language: I under-explain and Chen overexplains.
CC: We used to argue a lot about whether or not there
should be two more screws in something. I think having that debate really helps push things forward.
KW: We each take on different areas of work. Chen does more of the wood and stone, and I do more of the metal and electronics. Naturally, you find your own specialties.
CC: It’s not like we couldn’t do all that stuff, but I think when you’re in a partnership, it allows part of you to atrophy and part of you to develop deeper, because it’s just easier to specialize.
How do you support each other through problems and creative challenges?
CC & KW: We normally work independently, with one
person taking the lead on certain projects, or we divide up the work and then combine it together. This means there’s always a fresh set of eyes that can look at a problem from a more removed perspective.
What piece of advice would you give to current students about finding their people?
CC & KW: Just as important as making connections with people within your field is making connections with people outside your field. Graphic designers, photographers, writers are all important people who can help you with something you’re not trained to do.
jean hartig
Opening spread: Kim Schifino (left) and Matt Johnson.
Photo by Matt Christine.
This page: Kai Williams (left) and Chen Chen. Photo by Dahlia Dandashi
It all began at a Purple Rain party at Pratt in 1985. James Ransome asked Lesa Cline to dance, and one thing led to another. The couple started dating, and helping each other with their assignments; James helped Lesa draw illustrations, and Lesa helped James write his essays. “That’s how our creative collaboration began,” says Lesa, calling from her and James’s house in Rhinebeck, New York. Forty years and about as many books later, the married couple and authorillustrator duo have produced children’s books amplifying the stories of groundbreakers throughout African American history, like Game Changers: The Story of Venus and Serena Williams and Fighting with Love: The Legacy of John Lewis. The pair’s newest book, They Call Me Teach: Lessons in Freedom, marks the latest chapter of a life and career rooted in early collaborations between dorm rooms.
Tell us about your roles in creating a book and how you work together.
James Ransome: The honest answer is we really don’t work together like most people perceive we work together. Lesa writes a manuscript, which takes her six months, nine months. She’ll read that manuscript to me . . . and I’ll sort
of give her my intake. Once she finishes with the manuscript, then it goes on my list. She can write much faster than I can illustrate, so it’s probably a year before I can get to that manuscript. When I start illustrating the book, she doesn’t come in and give me feedback about the illustrations—I think she trusts me.
That said, we brainstorm and talk about the ideas or direction before Lesa starts writing. We also travel together to do research.
Lesa Cline-Ransome: I think what publishers like— and I think it is true—is that there is a marriage of art and words, because we understand each other’s intention for the work.
How have you supported each other in difficult times?
LCR: To be two freelancers and raise a family of four I think in itself was a miracle. I will say, just for my part, that there’ve been many times when it’s been very difficult to get traction as a writer and also as a mother. There were many times when I felt like giving up—but the beauty of having a partner who’s also a creative person
and a freelancer is I would come to James and I would say, “This isn’t working. I don’t know if I can do this anymore.” And James, who is very much a straight shooter, would say, “Knock it off. You are going to get through. This is a difficult time. Go back in there and keep working.”
I needed that; I needed somebody who understands that this is difficult and that there are highs and lows in creative work, especially in freelance.
JR: Yeah, we support each other through the highs and lows. And with anyone who’s creative, there is doubt. Sometimes when we’re presenting, I’ll say, “Lesa, this is going to be a tough one,” and she’ll carry the load. Or vice versa. But it is wonderful to have someone there who understands what you’re going through.
nikolas slackman
Claire McKinney Sophie Andes-Gascon
BFA Fashion Design ’15 & BFA Fashion Design ’15
Since founding their fashion label SC103 in 2019, Claire McKinney and Sophie Andes-Gascon have kept things fresh by resisting dominant trends. The pair met while studying fashion at Pratt, where they felt encouraged to “individualize [their] own work” from day one, and were quickly hired by independent New York fashion brands after graduation. They launched their label while working full-time, putting on self-produced runway shows that highlighted their organic and tactile designs as a reaction against the fashion world’s culture of exclusivity. In 2021, they committed to SC103 full-time, hosting pop-up shops in their studio in Manhattan (before a recent move to Red Hook, Brooklyn), where they spoke with Prattfolio about the origins of their creative partnership. (The duo also gave joint responses over email in an earlier Q&A.)
How did you begin collaborating? How did you learn that you have shared creative sensibilities?
Claire McKinney & Sophie Andes-Gascon: We met in class and had many of the same professors in the Fashion Design Department . . . we began to admire each other’s work beginning junior year. We participated in group gal-
lery shows, shops, and competitions organized by the department and started to see compatibility through these opportunities to share work with each other. While in the program, we were focused on developing our individual skills and visions—our design collaboration began after graduating.
To document a final project
junior year, we pooled our resources (our friend as a model, one of our backyards as a shoot location) and served as each other’s shoot assistants day-of, photographing on our own cameras . . . a glimpse of future SC103 collection shoots!
How did your time at Pratt influence your practice today?
CM & SAG: When we were at Pratt, we were in an environment that really welcomed exploring, and we had the space to bounce ideas off of each other and do joint projects. We got a taste of what it’s like to work with other people.
SAG: Pratt had a big focus on the handwork, making processes, and materiality. To create your own habit of working. Creating our own studio practice started at Pratt, just nurturing this love
of making and of designing and creating.
CM: We’ve definitely carried that into SC103. We love our studio time here, and outside of just the business aspects of operating the brand, I think what grounds us is knowing that we still love the design process the most, and getting our hands dirty.
What words of advice from your time as a student have stayed with you?
CM & SAG: Take advantage of this time to build healthy work habits as a foundation of your future practice.
Acknowledge the time you have to explore and be guided by your own creative voice. Work beyond what is required of you, for your own fulfillment.
nikolas slackman
Claire McKinney (left) and Sophie Andes-Gascon in their Manhattan studio.
Photo by Dahlia Dandashi
John Requa Glenn Ficarra
BFA Film ’91 & BFA Film ’91
When the filmmaking duo John Requa and Glenn Ficarra met as film majors at Pratt Institute, they had a clear path—Requa was set on becoming a writer, and Ficarra on becoming a director. That went nowhere, says Requa. “But every time we worked together, people liked it. So we just followed the heat, which is always the thing I find with people who are successful in business.”
After Pratt, Ficarra and Requa moved to Los Angeles and got their start as writers of both family-friendly and irreverent comedies (Cats and Dogs, Bad Santa). The two soon became trailblazers of cross-genre films they call “mixed tone,” directing and producing their scripts for I Love You Phillip Morris and Focus, eventually bringing their style to award-winning television (This Is Us, Rabbit Hole). The duo has struck an unusually long-lasting creative partnership, prioritizing a balanced collaboration throughout all the different facets of the film industry.
How did you begin collaborating at Pratt? How did you learn that you have shared creative sensibilities?
Glenn Ficarra: We had a lot of shared classes because we were in the film program, but I think we really bonded more in Foundation. We were both struggling to draw and sculpt and do all those things, so we hung out together.
John Requa: We bonded by our fear and misery. [Laughs.] We complained a lot but we use what we learned in those classes every day when we’re directing.
GF: [Those lessons] kicked in eventually.
JR: In the film program, we did long films that were very serious and about death. Neither of them went anywhere.
At the same time, for class assignments, we would do these short video pieces that were funny. And people loved them. We were like, Wow, short and funny! That’s the secret!
GF: We’d have an assignment, and instead of just doing the assignment coldly, we would have fun with it, and that just turned into . . .
JR: A career!
GF: A discovery that we were good at it.
How do you bolster each other through difficult times?
GF: We have a rule we established fairly early on: only one of us is allowed to freak out at a time. No matter how you feel, you can’t agree—you have to offset it. Very early in our career, we would work each other up and we would go into shame- or work-death spirals.
For emotional support, I think it’s really good to have a partner that you trust that
you can go through these things with.
What advice would you give current students about finding their people?
GF: You just never know where the hookup is going to be for success. There’s a lot of luck, and connections help you find luck.
JR: I think the social aspect of going to school is something that people never talk about. There’s a personal aspect to it beyond just your professional life. It’s important to be social and work with people on projects and collaborate. If you think somebody doesn’t have your sensibility, that should be a reason you want to work with them, not a reason you don’t want to work with them. Try to understand where they’re coming from, and try to broaden your perspective. Those relationships you develop are the relationships of your life.
nikolas slackman
Christina Perla Manny Mota
Christina Perla and Manny Mota met in the woodshop at Pratt, where their shared approach to problems forged an easy bond, both personally and creatively. Fast forward several years, and that synchronicity opened up a transformational opportunity. When a friend asked the couple if they’d be interested in taking over their small 3D-printing company, they saw a chance to put their combined and complementary skills to work. Today, that business, Makelab, has grown into a multimodal operation, with a team of creatives in Brooklyn and San Francisco. Last spring, they emailed with Prattfolio and spoke with us in their Brooklyn office about leading a growing business with their balanced creative and business instincts.
How did you discover your shared creative sensibilities?
Manny Mota: I was a very systems-minded person. I adhered to the philosophy of “measure twice, cut once.” Christina thought the same exact way. It felt very easy, very organic, working together. And that’s hard to find.
Christina Perla: They always say that the best business partnerships happen when you have a complementary set of skills, not the same set of skills. We both went to Pratt, both ID [Industrial Design], but we do have very different skills, and so it works
really well. As we’re scaling this company, we don’t step on each other’s toes.
The way I like to put it is, we’re on the same highway, going the same direction, different lanes, and we’re going the same speed. We always make sure we’re going the same speed.
Tell us about your roles in your company and how you work together.
MM: I’m the CIO-COO. I stay close to the operations and am always thinking of ways to make them better. We work together in the strategy of the
business; we meet every week to discuss it.
CP: I’m the CEO, so I do a lot of everything, as everyone does in a startup. We spot the same opportunities, but the way we go about it is very different. Manny’s the guy that brings the newness to this company and keeps us fresh.
MM: I’m also way ahead. Like, I’m on Mars. I’m thinking, What do we do to get things on Mars? And she grounds me.
How do you bolster each other through difficult times?
CP & MM: In our first year of business, we lost a big client in the middle of a project, which happens more often than most want to talk about. At that time, we were freaking out. We had to triple the size of the business or let go of it altogether. We put it all on the table and decided to let go of many things that were distractions from the most profitable and scalable aspects of the business. We decided to hunker
down and focus on just the 3D printing. We eventually added and layered in more, but at that moment, it was a back-to-thedrawing-board situation and we laid it all out, together.
What are you doing now?
CP: Essentially—it’s crazy— in this span of 12 to 18 months, we’re going to go from one city, one location, to two or three different time zones. That’s really intense.
MM: But we’ve been planning this for a long time. It’s just, we don’t like to get ahead of ourselves. We don’t like to be ahead of the technology itself.
We like to curb expectations and keep it real, as real as it can be. So that means moving a little slower. But by doing so, we create a better foundation for the business itself.
CP: We care about this and are passionate about this too much to let that happen. We really wanted to build [Makelab] in a way that makes this a long-lasting business.
nikolas slackman
BID ’14 & BID ’02
Manny Mota (left) and Christina Perla.
Photo by Dahlia Dandashi
Kim Schifino Matt Johnson
BFA Communications Design ’02 & BFA Film ’04
Back in the early aughts on the Pratt campus, Kim Schifino met Matt Johnson while taking a break from silkscreening, sitting on the wooden bench outside the Engineering Building. That first encounter, which they shared in an interview with Prattfolio this spring, was the beginning of more than a relationship. In 2004, Kim and Matt came together as the music duo Matt and Kim: a fun and frenetic pop punk band whose anthemic melodies energized and inspired young, sweaty crowds in DIY venues all around Pratt. In their 20 years as a band, they’ve gone on to release a steady stream of albums and singles, and perform internationally at sold-out shows for tens of thousands of fans—while also staying true to the DIY roots of their creative partnership.
How did you begin collaborating at Pratt?
Matt Johnson: We ended up just being people who worked together on things, and at that point it was my school projects, films and things like that.
Kim Schifino: We did art installations together. You know, typical art-schoolkids stuff that you do. But
then I saw the Dickies play [at Club Exit, now Terminal 5] and at that show I thought, damn, I want to learn how to play drums. Ian Vanek [BFA Communications Design ’02] from Japanther gave me a hand-me-down kit and I was learning how to play, and Matt had a keyboard he was messing around with, so we just decided to do it together.
We weren’t trying to be a band. Basically, Ian forced us to play a show.
MJ: And we couldn’t think of a band name.
KS: So they put us down as Matthew and Kimberly.
How would you describe your roles in the band and how you work together?
MJ: Kim is the muscle. She pushes things over the finish line.
KS: Well, I’d say that Matt’s the genius dreamer. And I’m the doer.
MJ: That’s very kind of you to say. Without Kim, no one would have ever heard any music I had made. I think about the early days: I’d be finishing some songs, and Kim would be booking a whole tour. And the last element of that is that Kim turned out to be such an in-
credible performer and a fun person to watch.
What advice would you give to current students about finding their people?
KS: It’s so important to have community in the creative space. The scene that was happening in Brooklyn in [the mid-’00s], everyone knew each other, everyone went to each other’s shows, everybody supported each other. You have to find the group that you can interact with and share ideas with and be inspired by them.
MJ: You have to put yourself out there. Similar to exercise, it’s really important. Even if you’re like, “I really just want to stay in, it’s rainy, it’s cold.” You go out and socialize and you’re like, “Oh, I feel like I exercised. That was good. It wasn’t easy to do, but it was good.”
andy p. smith, bfa writing ’04
Neda Kakhsaz Zabie Mustafa
BArch ’16 & BArch ’13
Craft and experimentation, history and future, architecture and design—bringing ideas and practices into harmony has been part of Zabie Mustafa and Neda Kakhsaz’s work since they were both undergraduate architecture students at Pratt, where they met in 2011. It follows that collaboration would come naturally to the pair. “Although our professional careers had barely just begun, we had a sense that we were both curious about the same concepts, we shared a common sensibility,” they said in a joint interview with Prattfolio over email. Today, this plays out in their practice as Studio MUKA, the Los Angeles-based firm they formed in 2021, which takes a multidisciplinary approach to architecture and design for spaces. Connections—among their small team and clients, and elements of design—remain at the heart of their practice, which they’ve said strives to “achieve a ‘total work of art’” with projects at every scale.
How would you describe your roles in your design practice and the way you work as a team?
Neda Kakhsaz & Zabie Mustafa: We take great pride in working collaboratively
with one another. Both of us move between the disciplines of architecture, interior design, and object design, and we believe that our ability to shift fluidly in these roles makes our practice unique.
We tackle all our projects with a holistic approach and believe that a project really comes together when the sum of the parts work cohesively together to make the whole.
How have you developed your shared creative— and entrepreneurial— sensibility as you’ve built your practice?
NK & ZM: We look at every project as an opportunity to discover something new, and we take discovery and experimentation very seriously. The same goes for our entrepreneurship; we are big believers in setting up the groundwork and foundation of the firm both from a creative sensibility as well as [from] the business
side. We always go back to this notion of thinking and making at the foundation of our practice.
What advice would you give to current students about finding their people?
NK & ZM: We formed some of the most meaningful connections of our lifetime during our time at Pratt and we are so grateful for the friendships we created. Our suggestion to current and future students would be to listen closely to your intuition and be open to new experiences. You never know what you can learn from and how you can grow from different relationships in these formative years.
jean hartig
Zabie Mustafa (left) and Neda Kakhsaz in their Los Angeles studio.
Photo by Carlos Jaramillo
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For generations of Pratt students, The Prattler has been the voice of the student body.
by nikolas slackman
symbol of ourdesire
in the spring of 2003, the staff of Pratt’s longest-running student publication, The Prattler, was pulling together their first issue of the new year. “At the time, The Prattler had an office in Willoughby that also functioned as an archive,” says then–Editor in Chief Andy P. Smith, BFA Writing ’04. “One of our staff members combed through these boxes and stacks of old Prattler s and pulled out the oldest one there.” It was The Prattler’s very first issue, back when it was a weekly newspaper, from January 18, 1940.
In that Spring 2003 issue, Smith featured the mission statement from the first issue of The Prattler on its first page. Titled “Symbol of Our Desire,” the statement reads like a manifesto for the publication, and set out a vision for The Prattler as a publication that depended on student involvement, meant to serve
as an “instrument for the exchange of ideas and ideals” among the student body. It would also be an essential tool for building community. In the eyes of Professor Steven Doloff, who served as faculty supervisor for The Prattler just before Smith was the editor in chief, its “exchange of ideas and ideals” (to quote the founding editors) meant a lot in the era of print media. “Newspapers, not digital screens, were how people found out what was going on in their immediate vicinity,” Doloff says. The Prattler “began to function as the campus’s all-purpose paper town square, with monthly issues throughout the school year reporting on, commenting on, and provoking debate about everything going on at the Institute.”
Year after year, as the students’ interests and priorities shifted, so did The Prattler, which transformed from a
newspaper to a magazine to a literary magazine. Today, the publication also has an online presence that’s accessible to an audience beyond the “paper town square” of Doloff’s era.
However, the basic principle of creating a public forum for students’ “ideas and ideals” never changed. Throughout the changing tides of the last 80-plus years, The Prattler has been a place for students to share their experiences, express their views, and process the events of their world.
For Smith and his staff, who attended Pratt during the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, The Prattler helped channel these “massive, gravitational shifts in the world.”
According to former Prattler Editor in Chief Nancy Hom, BFA Advertising and Visual Communications ’71, who covered the student protest movement of the late ’60s, the publication offered a space where “students could decide
what actions resonate with them and where they can find common ground.”
It was also a place of camaraderie for each year’s staff—for Hom, The Prattler felt “like a little family dedicated to serving our Pratt community.”
Each edition was also perishable, which meant that mission never really let up.
“Prattlers, like flowers, were wilting things,” writes Doloff.
“You knew in a day or a week they would turn into wrinkled, stained kitty-litter box liners. But when they showed up in freshly minted, fragrant piles, one day a month in the cafeteria, the spontaneous appreciation among campus readers was palpable, with hundreds of copies being snapped up and flipped through with anticipation by people sitting next to one another.”
Here’s a look at moments in Prattler history, a snapshot of students’ voices through the decades.
Images
1960s
In 1969, with the rise of the anti-war and student protest movement across the United States and social-political tensions mounting nationally and on their own campus, Pratt students initiated a strike. While the student body protested student disenfranchisement, Prattler Editor in Chief Nancy Hom and her staff covered student voices across the campus, from strike dissenters in the Young Americans for Freedom to the Students for a Democratic Society to the Black Students Union, who each wrote up position papers with lists of demands. “We published all their positions,” Hom says. “We wanted to cover as many activities as possible, including strike activities in other colleges, to show the breadth of this student awareness and activism. It was important to show the Pratt students that they were part of a larger movement.”
Strike, Volume 15, Number 11, April 8, 1969
This first issue of The Prattler typifies the publication’s early days. Back then, in its own words, The Prattler was a weekly newspaper that helped students gain a “better understanding of their mutual relations.” Bill Richards, founding editor of the publication, shared in a 2003 interview with then-editor Andy P. Smith that The Prattler started with a rather practical objective: to collate the mimeographed sheets that served as informal monthly newsletters for each of Pratt’s schools into one weekly newspaper. Richards, who was enrolled in the first class of the industrial design major, called a meeting with all of the schools to suggest a paper “that goes beyond the individual schools and tells about the sports activities, the social activities, the museums and galleries around New York, and make it all available.”
“Symbol of Our Desire,” Volume 1, Number 1, January 18, 1940
1950s
The Prattler kept its format as a weekly newspaper throughout the 1950s, bringing a journalistic approach to its coverage of campus activities like the annual Winter Festival, student government elections, athletics, and faculty promotions, along with local politics and institutional projects that would broaden the school’s academic offerings and its student body in the process. This 1954 issue features a front page story about the launch of a $1,750,000 (nearly $20 million by today’s standard) project to construct two residence halls and other buildings, add courses, and create the School of Architecture, marking a time of expansion that would shape Pratt students’ future.
“$1,750,000 Pratt Project Started,” Volume 15, Number 11, April 30, 1954
1970s 1980s
While the art curriculum was undergoing a revision in 1972, creating, in the words of The Prattler contributor and Art and Design alumnus Robert Castro, “freedom in the school itself,” The Prattler shifted from a black-andwhite newspaper to a playful magazine with pops of color, featuring far-out illustrations, student poetry, and reviews of groundbreaking records from the time by the likes of David Bowie and The Who. Fittingly for an article admiring the shift from an “old, rigid structure” to a curriculum with more individualized paths for students, Castro’s story embodied The Prattler’s new spirit with a bright pink, abstract illustration by a student artist.
“Art School Curriculum Changed,” Volume 33, Number 18, March 21, 1972
In the late ’70s through much of the ’80s, The Prattler became, in the words of Professor Steven Doloff, a “relatively modest publication of some 8 to 10 pages, filled mostly with ads for local businesses.” This changed by the late ’80s, when, under the editorial guidance of Editor in Chief Michele Lifshen, BFA Fine Arts ’90, it transformed into what Doloff calls a “ripsnorting newspaper.” Lifshen’s Prattler was a galvanizing force, with moments like a Letter from the Editor section that once featured a letter for students to cut out and mail to their congressperson, protesting legislation that would prohibit National Endowment for the Arts funding for art deemed “obscene,” directly declaring: “The government may not break the First Amendment by discrimination in its support of the arts.”
From the Editor, Volume 56, Number 2, September 26, 1989
1990s
When Jean Shin, BFA Fine Arts ’94; MS ’96, now adjunct professor (CCE) of fine arts, served as editor in chief, she kept Lifshen’s politically engaged vision alive, covering social justice movements on campus and the city at large. In the issue themed Being Woman, her feature about the Guerrilla Girls—the anonymous group of female artists who, clad in their signature gorilla masks, target sexism and racism in the art world—was paired with a sister article assessing how many women artists galleries around SoHo were featuring. That piece, written by student reporter Hindy Preskin, MFA Fine Arts ’95, was a direct action against misogyny in the art world that mirrored the Guerrilla Girls’ rebellious spirit: “One gallery tried to take my notebook away out of fear that perhaps I was a news reporter (or maybe a Guerrilla Girl),” writes Preskin.
“War with the Art World,” Volume 59, Number 7, March 25, 1993
2000s
By the time Andy P. Smith arrived at The Prattler, it had gone from a “ripsnorting” periodical to a newsletter. He decided to reinvent the publication altogether, into a magazine with an edge that drew from early ’00s counterculture—with with offbeat design, a sardonic writing style, and, at its most freewheeling, the chronicling of a Prattler staff trip to Celebration, Florida—a suburb of Orlando—in a freedom-themed issue. “It was the time of freedom fries,” says Smith. “We were able to go to the student activities administration and say, ‘We’re going to Orlando in search of freedom. We’re going to go to this planned community to do some investigative reporting.’ And that’s what we did.”
Volume 74, Issue 3, aka “the freedom issue,” December 2003
2010s 2020s
As The Prattler transformed into a magazine, it retained its coverage of social issues on campus. Following Pratt’s long tradition of activism, students drew inspiration from the Occupy Wall Street movement and participated in a nationwide walkout. The article “Occupied Pratt” followed these student activists protesting increased economic disparity in the United States and on college campuses across the country as they marched from the Pratt Cannon to Zuccotti Park in Manhattan “to join the multitudes already gathered there.” This being the Versus Issue, the editors also covered another side of the topic—being too busy to protest—in a comic.
The Versus Issue, November 2011
Under the leadership of Editor in Chief Ingrid Jones, BFA Writing ’24, The Prattler was remodeled into a literary magazine and an online publication. “The publication had been pretty strictly journalistic, and I wanted to shift gears,” says Jones. “I saw The Prattler as a student outlet meant for whatever we wanted to do and say about the world we were experiencing.” Sarina Greene, BFA Writing ’26, captured this new direction in “A Safe Haven for Writers,” a piece in The Dystopia/Utopia Issue about creative writers’ processes throughout the Institute. In Greene’s words, these writers, whose inspirations range from fantasy to cinema, are united in their pursuit to “embody a future that hasn’t been written yet.”
The Dystopia/Utopia Issue, Fall 2023
Explore The Prattler through the years in the Pratt Institute Archives Publications Collection, jstor.org/site/pratt/publications.
Network
Fashion alumnus and costume designer Emilio Sosa was Tony nominated this year for his work on the Broadway production of Purlie Victorious, starring Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young (pictured here), which premiered on PBS’s Great Performances in May. Read Prattfolio’s interview with Sosa on page 44.
Inside looks at work, practice, and collaborations with Pratt alumni.
Behind the Scenes
Broadway costume designer Emilio Sosa on inspiration, work, and practice.
Fashion meets storytelling—Pratt alumnus
Emilio Sosa found his place at this intersection while he was a student and has gone on to make his mark as one of theater’s foremost costume designers. Sosa debuted on Broadway with Suzan-Lori Parks’s celebrated play Topdog/ Underdog and went on to design for productions including The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess; Trouble in Mind; Good Night, Oscar; and Ain’t No Mo’, all of which earned him Tony nominations. He has also worked on films like Spike Lee’s Red Hook Summer and Disney’s Descendants: The Rise of Red—and was a contestant on Project Runway and Project Runway All Stars. Following another season of Tony-nominated design, this time for the play Purlie Victorious, and in the thick of work on Shakespeare and a new musical, Sosa shared highlights from his practice and the growth of his career.
What’s a daily practice that prepares you for your work?
I clean my work area of past projects. I’m naturally a messy worker, but I always need a clean space to start daily, which sets the tone for my day.
What’s a tool you can’t live without?
My iPad. It allows me to work remotely, and I can find time to sketch or return emails while traveling between projects or between meetings.
When you hit a creative roadblock, what’s your tactic for getting unstuck?
I go to the gym. It’s my therapy. It’s calming and it forces me to focus on my wellness, which can often become secondary when working long hours on many projects.
Where do you creatively recharge?
I love being on or near water. The ocean, lakes, rivers, they are my happy place. I always feel better after.
What’s the most inspiring place in NYC for you?
125th Street in Harlem. It’s forever changing. My first apartment was on it, and I remember as a kid my dad drove us from the Bronx to visit his brother who lived on Broadway. It was a rolling movie of sights and sound reflective of the community’s rich culture.
Who’s the first designer you connected with?
Yves Saint Laurent. He was the first French designer to use models of color, and that caught my eye, early in my development. Also, his use of color and art references were incredible.
Who’s a major influence for you today in your work?
Depends on the projects I’m working on. Currently, I’m designing a production of Romeo and Juliet at Harvard and a Muhammad Alibased musical in Chicago, so my brain is in two very different worlds aligned with major icons—Shakespeare and Ali.
What’s a career challenge you’re glad you took on?
My first real job was touring with
the Alvin Ailey Dance Company as the assistant wardrobe supervisor: two things I had not [yet] done at the time. It changed my life creatively and I learned how to design for touring productions, which can present a host of challenges.
Is there a “failure” that turned into a breakthrough?
We’ve all worked on projects that didn’t go as far as we hoped, but in the process you meet great fellow artists, and that’s always the breakthrough. Being able to build and nurture relationships with other creatives is always inspiring.
What’s the best part of working in theater?
How transformative it is.
Storytelling has been with us since the beginning of time, it’s about building a community. Having the opportunity to educate and inspire people is a responsibility that I take very seriously. Audiences will always leave a show changed for the better through the work of countless creatives who are passionate about the art form.
What do you hope people will take away from your work?
I want the work to disappear and the characters and stories to become real. If this is accomplished, then I have done my job.
What piece of advice would you give a young designer, in or out of the theater world?
Say yes to all opportunities. If you’re lacking in an area, educate yourself. Don’t stop learning, and be willing to take criticism and feedback, because it’s always instrumental in helping push you as a creative.
As a mentor, is there a question you always ask your mentees? Do you love it? How committed are you to your career? Theater is tougher than people think. You have to be strong.
What’s a mantra or piece of advice you live by?
We’re all unique and special. Be the best version of yourself and lean into your strengths.
Making Indie Publishing Magic With Dream Labor Press
Doris Liu was stuck: she had posted on social media in search of collaborators for an independent publishing project following graduation from Pratt, where she’d received an MFA in Communications Design, and came up dry. "It surprised me that no one came to me,” says Liu. Turns out, her answer lay back where she started.
A little over a month before the 2023 Detroit Book Fair, Liu reached out to her former classmates Zia Qian, Lihao Zhu, Lexi Xu, and Zhenyu Zhou—all MFA Communications Design ’23—who had been developing books for course assignments and final projects during their time at Pratt. Rather than attending separately, they joined forces and applied for one table together. “Why not just try our best and push it further?” writes Zhu. “So, I suggested that we brand ourselves as a press.”
After a few weeks of last-minute
Distant Flash by Doris Liu
hustling, the group of five secured a table at Detroit Art Book Fair and soon after put together a press website and an Instagram account. Dream Labor Press (DLP) was born.
Self-described as “Chinese female graphic designer-authors primarily based in the US,” DLP integrates bilingual design into their zines and artists books. One such project, by Lihao, is Bilingual Designer Manifesto, a risograph zine declaring the challenges and responsibilities of Mandarin-English bilingual designers. Presented in color-coded versions—Simplified Chinese and English—the manifesto is printed on transparent posters and layered for a bilingual reading experience. “Rather than purposefully stressing the uniqueness of our identities and experiences, this is organically reflected in our work,” writes Zhou.
In Xu’s words, “it’s storytelling that brings people from far away
A set of three photo books about time, space, and sociality that explore the role photographic practice plays in understanding embodied experience.
together.” Her works like Proust Moments (referring to the feeling of being suddenly transported back to the past) and Love from Grandma focus on shared and individual memory. “No matter which part of the world you are from,” writes Xu, “whether rich or poor, young or old, someone very different from me can share the same feeling of having a grandma. I think that’s the power of storytelling.”
Connecting with readers is a major drive for DLP’s practice, and has kept the press motivated to branch out and move forward in the smallpress world. “What excites me about self-published work is the freedom and immediacy it offers,” Xu notes. “It’s amazing to find that the audience resonates with your work and to have the chance to talk with them directly. Studying at Pratt definitely gave me more opportunities to explore different ways of expression.”
Bilingual Designer Manifesto and Bilingual Design 101: Punctuation by Lihao Zhu
A single-sheet print and a newspaper written in Simplified Chinese and English describing the challenges and responsibilities of Mandarin-English bilingual designers.
While the press aims to extend its reach to a wider audience, they have also focused on fostering their readership with a unique community of women of color creatives, Chinese-speaking/reading students, and those passionate about storytelling and fiction-making. For Zhu, this is directly linked to the press’s coming-of-age in the Communications Design MFA, with its emphasis on boundary-breaking thinking and making: “It opened my eyes to gaps in the industry, empowering me to speak for social justice and expand design discourse.”
At the other end of the book fair table, DLP hopes that more people choose to share their own books with the world. “Print out your work,” Qian says. “Don’t hover at the door.”
— carson stachura, mslis ’25
An accordion-bound hardcover book compilation of Zhou’s observations and designs inspired by taking walks, slowing down, and living in the moment.
Left, left to right: Pratt alumni Zia Qian, Lexi Xu, Lihao Zhu, and Doris Liu of Dream Labor Press. Below: books by Dream Labor Press on display at the 2024 Other Islands Book Fair.
Slow It Down: In Praise of Wondering, A Manifesto by Zhenyu Zhou
What’s Inspiring Edel Rodriguez ’94, “America’s Illustrator in Chief”
The first job out of Pratt for Edel Rodriguez, BFA Fine Arts ’94, was at Time magazine. Fast-forward to 2016, when he took a cover commission for the magazine that would spur a series of iconic political illustrations—for Time as well as The New Yorker, Der Spiegel, and more—that earned him the moniker “America’s Illustrator in Chief” (Fast Company). He tells these stories in his debut graphic memoir, Worm, which begins with his earliest memories of Cold War Cuba and his family’s emigration, and traverses his new life and immersion in American culture in Miami, his coming of age as an artist (at Pratt and in New York City), and behind the scenes of his bold, incisive work over the last eight years. With a picture book rendition of his childhood experiences, The Mango Tree (La mata de mango), published this summer, and a French edition of Worm on the way, Prattfolio caught up with the awardwinning New Jersey-based artist-author to get a glimpse of his practice and see what’s feeding him creatively right now.
1.I work in my home studio, so I spend some time each day organizing the space, planning my time depending on deadlines or what I feel like doing that day. I work as both an artist and a writer, so there’s a variety of things to think about and set up for. Drawing is the one activity I always go back to that helps me stay grounded. It’s how ideas are generated. I sometimes go back to some of the drawing materials I’ve used in the past and enjoy finding new uses for them. I like working outside in my yard as much as possible, and drawing on paper is the most portable medium for me.
The things that usually feed my creativity are music, dancing, travel, and art. Whenever I have free time I go see Latin bands in the city or go salsa dancing outdoors on some of the piers along the Hudson River or at bars and clubs downtown. This summer I’m traveling down to Florida and the Bahamas. I grew up down in the Caribbean and I’m always inspired when I’m back in that environment again. I’m also looking forward to [this summer] seeing a number of art exhibits in the city: Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA, Es Devlin’s work at Cooper Hewitt, and Pacita Abad at MoMA PS1, and in the fall, a show of Mexican prints at The Met [Mexican Prints at the Vanguard is open through January 5, 2025].
3.
I always like seeing what The New Yorker, Time, and New York Magazine are doing on their covers. The New York Times for Kids section is exciting; they have a lot of fun with design and illustration, which is great to see. I also like visiting Printed Matter in Chelsea; they have a large selection of handmade zines and artists’ books, a very unique spot in the city.
The last time I visited Cuba, my aunt gave me the shoe brush that my grandfather used to polish my shoes with when I was a kid. She had kept it all these years. It’s very meaningful to me. I sometimes use it to brush off the remnants of pencil shavings on my desk at the end of the day. It’s created a nice connection with my grandfather again. I feel he’s always there. 4.
5.
When I worked on my graphic memoir, Worm, I mostly inked it with one brush [a Princeton Velvetouch Round size 6, 3950R]. It started off as a wide brush, but was whittled down to a few hairs by the end of 304 inked pages. I still use it. I also drink about five espressos a day. I would consider that essential.
6.
I’m working with a fuller and more intense tropical fruit palette, that’s where I’m at right now. Making intense combinations of yellows, blues, reds, purples, and bright pinks come together. It’s a bit harder and more complex but exciting to work on and figure out.
7.
Worm has been translated into French and will be published in Paris in the fall. I’ve been invited to Paris for the book’s release along with a number of book events and a festival in the city, so I’m looking forward to traveling there and sharing my story with French readers. I feel that many of the topics covered in the book, from migration to extremism, will resonate with readers in France as they have here in America. I’m looking forward to listening to the audiences and talking to them about the issues that are currently affecting all of us. We’re also planning an exhibition of my work at the Coral Gables Museum in Miami. [I’m] looking forward to working with the curators and having my first exhibition in my adopted hometown.
Fresh Alumni Design, Books, and More
Artful lighting, visual-packed volumes, colorful adornments— read on for highlights of products and publications by Pratt graduates.
1. Scrimmage Sweater Liv Ryan, BFA Fashion Design ’18
Brooklyn-born and -based designer Liv Ryan has built her brand of clothing, accessories, and more around a self-described exploration of “sculptural shapes, structure, and subtle texture,” using eco-minded materials and processes. Shown here is one piece from a collaboration with sport-ready streetwear brand Scenes NY (scenes.nyc), a knit sweater with relaxed lines, made in Brooklyn from 100 percent deadstock yard. Learn more at livryannyc.com.
2. Agoraphilia on Adult Swim Smalls
Maggie Brennan, MFA Digital Arts ’19
Having illustrated comics for The New Yorker and Fader and debuted her thesis film from Pratt, Our Bed Is Green, at 2021’s SXSW, Maggie Brennan brings her askew vision of the world to streaming with Agoraphilia. As part of Adult Swim’s animated shorts program, Smalls, the short-form series follows Brenda, a donation solicitor for a mysterious nonprofit called “Youth Troupes,” as she searches for meaningful connections through the overstimulating chaos of city life. Watch Agoraphilia on Adult Swim’s YouTube channel.
by
Photo
Tommy Rizzoli
3. Now Is Better (Phaidon Press)
Stefan Sagmeister, MFA Communications Design ’98
The latest book by designer Stefan Sagmeister creates an optimistic view of the present from the materials of the past. Now Is Better collects Sagmeister’s work from a gallery exhibition of the same name, including pieces where the artist inserts graphic shapes and embroidery into 19thcentury oil paintings, blurring the line between artworks and infographics to pose a positive take on human progress. Praised by Print magazine as “an intriguing and thoughtful visual meditation on our daily lives,” the monograph’s release was paired with a clothing line created by Sagmeister that includes data featured in the book. Available at phaidon.com.
4. Dalmartian: A Mars Rover’s Story (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Lucy Ruth Cummins’s new picture book tells the story of an unexpected friendship that grows between a boy and a visitor from outer space— a dog of intergalactic origins. With digitally finished ink and charcoal line drawings, Dalmartian brings together “spontaneous-feeling” illustrations (Publishers Weekly) and joyful storytelling for young audiences and adults alike. Available at simonandschuster.com.
5. Hand-Painted Fruity Scarf
Naomi Clark, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’10
The painter Naomi Clark (@naomisclark) takes a multidisciplinary approach to contemporary art and furniture, stage, and product design, both independently and through her New York City-based studio, Fort Makers. In the spirit of blurring disciplinary boundaries, with this collection of scarves, Clark uses batik silk painting techniques to cast bright, eye-catching fruit across silk charmeuse, each piece a work of wearable art unique from the rest. Available at fortmakers.com; learn more at naomi-clark.com.
6. Mini Wavy Lamp by Wooj Design
Sean Kim, MID ’21
From the creator of the Wavy Lamp—a 3D-printed full-size floor lamp that launched Sean Kim’s home goods brand, Wooj— comes a smaller iteration of their instant hit. Drawing from the form of the comb jellyfish and available in four colors, the Mini Wavy Lamp makes what New York Magazine named the “Best 3D-printed bedside light” even more compact and accessible. Available at wooj.design.
7. Hypnosis Glasses by By Way Of Oya Tekbulut, MID ’19
After finishing her degree at Pratt, Oya Tekbulut followed in her mother’s steps, taking over her jewelry-making practice in Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, and launching the brand By Way Of. With an emphasis on ethical production and global design aesthetics, By Way Of brings a fresh approach to a deeprooted tradition. The Hypnosis Glasses shown here are handblown in Istanbul using the Cesmi Bulbul technique, a practice dating back to the Ottoman Empire. Available at bywayof.com.
8. Labyrinths Earrings by Studio Sophia Sophia Sophia Sophia, BFA Fine Arts (Jewelry) ’09
Founded in 2014 and based out of Binghamton, New York, Studio Sophia Sophia offers small, wearable sculptural accessories created with traditional metalsmithing techniques. These handmade, made-to-order earrings composed of playful spirals—in brass, gold-plated, or sterling silver—come with an option to customize dots of color from a palette of 44 options. Available at studiosophiasophia.com.
9. Artio Floor Lamp by Studio S II Jeremy Silberberg, MFA Interior Design ’19
This recent lighting release by designer Jeremy Silberberg reinvents the traditional standing lamp, covering two connected loops with illuminated fur. Inspired by animal horns, Silberberg told Curbed in a piece that featured the Artio Floor Lamp in his own Greenpoint apartment—that this design “celebrates the unbridled, sometimes humorous nature of the wild.” Available at studiosii.com.
My scholarship means being able to live the life I was meant to live. It is also a source of motivation to be true to my work.
If you are thinking about donating to Pratt, you’d be doing the world a favor. You’d be bringing back a bit of wonder into life through art.”
Make an impact and support the
A gift to Pratt fuels the work of our students. Your generosity can ensure our students receive an experience that promotes their creative and academic success, access to worldclass faculty, and an environment that is unique and cross-disciplinary. Scan the QR code to make your gift online at giving.pratt.edu.
Diego Piña, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’25
Timeless and Innovative
For over 137 years, Pratt’s beautiful campus in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, has been a destination for creative education, equipping our students and alumni to achieve in fields ranging from information sciences to game design to oil painting and sculpture. Pratt strives to educate future creative leaders, providing them with critical knowledge, the ability to think creatively, and the skills necessary to substantially benefit themselves and the world.
Following in the example of our founder, Charles Pratt, generations of alumni and friends have made their mark on Pratt through generous contributions that have sustained our Institute since its founding in 1887. We rely on our current alumni and friends to sustain the future of Pratt.
Pratt is in the final stages of a $500,000 Bequest Challenge to create a groundswell of support for its future.
We invite you to continue building upon Charles Pratt’s legacy and join the Bequest Challenge to secure Pratt Institute’s future. In return for informing us of your future gift to Pratt, the Institute will match up to $10,000 for a current-use gift now. If you do not wish to share the exact amount of your bequest, Pratt will match $1,000 to support an area of your choosing.
Naming Pratt Institute in your estate plan is an extraordinary expression of generosity for educating future leaders in art, design, architecture, and information.
For more information, please contact Rob Danzig, director of planned giving, at 718.399.4296 or rdanzig@pratt.edu or 200 Willoughby Ave, Myrtle Hall 3rd Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11205.
Alumni Notes
Alumni Notes is Pratt alumni news highlights compiled from class notes submissions, newsletters, items shared by faculty and staff, and media mentions.
Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, a new international touring special exhibition of work by Mickalene Thomas ’00, opened at The Broad. Read more on page 59.
Group Highlight
Fashion alumni Emilio Sosa and Paul Tazewell were nominated for 2024 Tony Awards. Sosa, who has previously been nominated for his work on costumes for The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, Trouble in Mind, Ain’t No Mo’, and Good Night, Oscar, was nominated for Best Costume Design of a Play for his work on Purlie Victorious Tazewell was nominated for Best Costume Design of a Musical for his work on Suffs. Tazewell has been nominated for eight Tony Awards for plays and musicals including In the Heights, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Ain’t Too Proud and won a Tony for his work on the musical Hamilton. (The New York Times)
1960s
Richard D. Miller, PE, BME ’61, writes, “As fate would have it, I was shopping at a local market in my now hometown of Henderson, Nevada. I was wearing my Pratt hat and sweatshirt. Next thing I know, I had a voice behind me say ‘Hey, did you go to Pratt?’ I turned around and spent the next 20 minutes with a complete stranger that was a ’76 graduate in fine arts chatting about ‘the good old days.’ It was the first time for both of us encountering someone from Pratt so far from Brooklyn and from so long ago. Great fun. WEAR A HAT!”
Pasquale Pagnotta, BID ’61, was awarded the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who to commemorate his interior design career. Pagnotta and his work have been featured in Newsday’s Guide to Design, Home Entertainment, and Interior Design. Clients of Pasquale’s include Sammy Davis Enterprises Ltd. and MPL Communications/Paul McCartney, Lorne Michaels, Calvin Klein Jeans,
and Eastman and Eastman. He is also a member and treasurer of the Institute of Business Designers.
Judith Murray, BFA Graphic Arts and Illustration ’62; MFA Art Education ’64, writes that she has been working in her Soho studio since 1973 and has created a new piece, Pleasure. Murray has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award for Painting, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her work is in numerous public and private collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Pat Steir, BFA Graphic Arts ’62, had a new series on view at Hauser & Wirth’s West Hollywood gallery. The exhibition, Pat Steir. Painted Rain, featured large-scale works the artist dedicated to the color blue. On the occasion of the show, which ran from February 28 to May 4, The New York Times Style Magazine interviewed Steir on her latest work, her previous career in the New York City welfare department, and her artistic practice. Steir shared that she “only wanted to be an artist. I only wanted to do this work in my life. Nothing else. I saw anything that stood in my way as an inconvenience.” (The New York Times Style Magazine)
Lorraine Badge, BFA Art Education ’69, and Richardson Mackinney, BS Food Science and Management ’69, celebrated their 55th wedding anniversary on June 14, 2024. Before retiring in 2013 from Miami-Dade Public Schools, Badge was a K–8 art teacher in Miami Beach. Mackinney spent several years in the hospitality industry, starting his own business doing yacht repairs, cleaning hulls, and changing propellers. He earned an MS ESE ED and became a special education teacher for homebound students at Broward County Schools, retiring in 2012.
William J. Gallo, AIA, BArch ’69, CEO of Gallo Herbert Architects since 1988, stepped back from his leadership position to transition into an advisory role for his new team. During his career, Gallo has received numerous AIA Awards, publications, and accolades for community service. Gallo shared that he owes “a great deal to his Pratt years and key mentors like Stan Salzman, Bill Breger, Charles Gwathmey, and Mike Brill.”
Kenneth A. Larson (1947–1994), BFA Interior Design ’69, had his exhibition, The Black Matriarchs, on display for the first time in 35 years at the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut. Commissioned in the late 1970s by historian and educator Jimmie Elizabeth (Timmons) Nkonoki-Ward, Larson’s pen-and-ink and charcoal drawings depict women who inspired her. A press release for the
show notes that the exhibition “is a tribute to African American women who are pillars in their families and in their community—women who infuse culture, faith, education, and the arts as a cornerstone of a vibrant community, full of possibility—and in which these Black Matriarchs were exemplary.”
Lorna Ritz, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’69, reports that she recently survived a serious illness and that she is “back to painting [her] best paintings yet.” Ritz, who studied abstraction with Lennart Anderson in the ’60s at the Art Students League, has held teaching positions at Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, University of Minnesota, and Dartmouth College. She was a visiting guest critic at Vermont Studio Center from 1991 to 2013 and is a lead teacher at Mount Gretna School of Art in Pennsylvania as of 2023.
Richard Bettini, BArch ’72; MArch ’73, now semiretired from teaching, has spent most of his architectural career as an educator. After many years of architectural practice, he taught full-time in CUNY’s Department of Architectural Technology. He recently retired from a full-time position at West Essex Regional High School in New Jersey, where he taught STEM pre-architecture/ engineering courses and robotics. Now an adjunct professor at a number of architectural faculties, including Pratt’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, Kean University’s Michael Graves School of Design, and William Paterson’s STEM Program, he is also the author of a completely revised workbook, The Complete CAD Exercise Book.
Douglas G. Campbell, MFA Fine Arts (Printmaking) ’72, lives in Portland, Oregon, and he is professor emeritus of art at George Fox University, where he taught painting, printmaking, drawing, and art history courses for 27 years. He writes that after a 2012 stroke left him with aphasia, a language disorder, he has been able to reconnect with his artwork and poetry. He currently participates in the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire’s Thursday Night Poetry Guild and has published several poetry books since. Learn more about Campbell’s work at douglascampbellart.com.
Elaine Norman, BFA Fine Arts (Printmaking) ’72, had four of her self-published collage books added to the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library. Using The Met’s annual Engagement Book—her calendar of choice—as a starting point, each collage in the series uses elements Norman created, acquired, photographed, or found on the corresponding week of their creation. Numerous public collections include Norman’s work, including the Museum of the City of New York, the Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center.
George Ranalli, BArch ’72, was recently covered in the online journal STIR, a publication focusing on architecture, interior design, and more. The architect spoke with STIR about “his quest to bridge history, context, and innovation continually with his architecture.” Ranalli’s designs have been exhibited by
Seymour Nussenbaum, BA Illustration ’48, was one of three surviving veterans from the US military’s “Ghost Army” to be awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for their heroic contributions during WWII. On the occasion of the honor, awarded at a ceremony on Capitol Hill in March, the activities of the 603rd Camouflage Engineers and similar units—also known as the Ghost Army—were covered by The New York Times and NPR, which highlighted their use of “inflatable tanks, phony uniforms, fake rumors, and special effects to deceive German forces.” Several students in Pratt’s Industrial Camouflage Program, which researched and developed camouflage techniques to support the defense effort, would go on to join the Ghost Army, part of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops defense force. Along with Nussenbaum, among the Pratt alumni who served in the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops were Bernard Bier, Ed Biow, Victor Dowd, Ned Harris, Ellsworth Kelly, George Martin, Irving Mayer, Mickey McKane (Irving Nussbaum), Elmer Mellebrand, Richard Morton, Robert Petrucci, Bill Sayles, Arthur Shilstone, and Bob Tompkins, as noted in a 2020 Pratt news story. Nussenbaum, who was born in 1923, currently lives in Monroe Township, New Jersey. (NPR)
Seymour Nussenbaum ’48, shown here with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Q. Brown Jr., received a Congressional Gold Medal on March 21.
Nancy Grossman, BFA Graphic Arts and Illustration ’62, received the National Arts Club’s Medal of Honor for her contributions to the field of fine arts. As Forbes reported in coverage of the award, Grossman joins previous honorees including Louise Nevelson, Faith Ringgold, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ed Ruscha. “I’m so grateful and fortunate to have this time to still keep learning, to still keep showing, to be collected, to still be relevant and influential after all these years,” Grossman said at the award event in June. “And I’ve lived long enough and worked long enough to not feel like an imposter.” (Forbes)
cultural institutions such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the US Library of Congress, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
B. Robert Johnson, BFA Fine Arts ’73, was part of a trio exhibition titled Marie & Friends with Marie Mastronardo and Richard Arnold at Olive Branch Gallery in Olivebridge, New York. The show was considered a retrospective, highlighting Mastronardo’s hand-built ceramic sculptures, paintings, and drawings over her 70-year career, and Johnson’s work included drawings, paintings, and multimedia sculptures. Johnson was recently among 30 artists selected for the Best of the Mid-Hudson Valley exhibition at the Muroff-Kotler Visual Arts Gallery at SUNY Ulster in Stone Ridge, New York. He currently serves as director of printing and graphic services at SUNY Ulster.
Pat Cummings, BFA Communications Design ’74, contributed a story within a chapter of Fourteen Days, an anthology edited by Margaret Atwood that puts a contemporary spin on the plague novel. Following tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan one week into the COVID-19 lockdown, the 36 North American authors weave together their varied voices to tell a story about community and the spectrum of human experience.
Tobi Kahn, MFA Fine Arts ’74, completed a sculpture commission and opened a solo museum exhibition this year. Kahn created
ALOMH, a meditative sculptural installation, for Jefferson Health Honickman Center in Philadelphia. The solo show, Memory & Inheritance: Painting and Ceremonial Objects by Tobi Kahn, opened on May 16 and is on view at Museum at Eldridge Street in New York City through November 10.
Mark Meyer, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’74, created a new work titled Homage to Hopper and Prada. “I was a photorealist early on but then became an abstract painter,” Meyer writes. “This one was a gift to my wife and very different from my current work.” He currently teaches art history for the United Federation of Teachers—UFT Welfare Fund.
C Bangs, MFA Fine Arts ’75, had work exhibited in a group show titled The Visual Read at the Gracefield Arts Centre in Dumfries, Scotland, from May 18 to June 29, 2024. Her sculptures, painted panels, and holograms are also included in a display case at Duffield Hall on Cornell University’s campus, titled Postcards from Earth: Holograms on an Interstellar Journey, referencing her 2023 exhibition at the Intrepid Museum. Various public and private collections include Bangs’s work, including MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the British Interplanetary Society, New York City College of Technology, Pratt Institute, Cornell University, and Pace University.
Michelle Nahum-Albright, BFA Communications Design ’75, and
her daughter Elizabeth NahumAlbright, BFA Photography ’13, remember longtime Pratt illustration professor Donn Albright, who passed away on June 19. They write, “After Donn listened to a dramatization of Ray Bradbury’s story ‘Mars Is Heaven!’ in 1950, Bradbury and his work became a lifelong passion. Ultimately, Donn would travel to visit Bradbury two or three times a year and over the years become his principal bibliographer. Donn used his talents to create more than a dozen limited-press Bradbury collections that showcased unpublished work. Like Bradbury, Donn’s heart always remained in tune with the child within.”
Kay WalkingStick, MFA Fine Arts ’75, had paintings and works on paper from the mid-’70s exhibited at Hales Gallery in New York. The
exhibition, Deconstructing the Tipi, ran from March 16 to April 27 and featured work that WalkingStick says represents a time when she was “searching for a motif and a process to make abstractions which expressed [her] concerns with Native American History.” Additionally, her work has been shown at the New-York Historical Society, the Shah Garg Foundation, and the 60th Venice Biennale at the Giardino della Biennale, where five of her paintings are included in a group exhibition titled Stranieri Ovunque, on view until November 24.
Steven Bleicher, BFA Fine Arts ’77; MFA Fine Arts ’79, had his graphite and mixed-media work Shadows of Anne Frank featured in an exhibition titled Yom Hashoah at Sig Held Gallery in Nashville. Bleicher is a tenured professor in the visual arts department in the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of Humanities and Fine Arts at Coastal Carolina University. He has worked and taught at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture; SUNY; and Brooklyn College.
Maritza Davila-Irizarry, MFA Fine Arts ’77, had a new work on display from March through May 2024 at the Porch Window Gallery in Minneapolis. The Porch Window Gallery features a box on the interior window at 418 Malvern. The artist has the work lit so visitors can view the piece 24 hours a day. Davila-Irizarry has served as a professor of fine arts at Memphis College of Art for the past 41 years,
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, New York
Nancy Grossman ’62 in her studio, Brooklyn, New York, 2024
acting as department chair since 2012. She is currently the director of the printmaking studio Atabeira Press, located in Memphis.
Phoebe Farris, PhD, MPS Art Therapy ’77, gave a lecture-photography presentation titled Indigenous Photo Power: Personal Reflections in November 2023 at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Humanities Center as part of their On Native Ground speakers series. Cosponsored by the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival, which took place the same week, the talk explores Farris’s photography practice, which looks to document frequently ignored tribes east of the Mississippi River. She was recently published in Cultural Survival Quarterly for her reviews of Natalie Ball’s exhibition Bilwi Naats Ga’niipci and Rhiana Yazzie’s theatrical production Nancy
Bennett Harris Horowitz, BFA Fine Arts ’77, had a landscape painting accepted for a juried exhibition, Far and Wide, at the Woodstock Artists Association Museum (WAAM) in Woodstock, New York, in June 2024. The painting, Virginia Falls/ Downstream View, uses oil paint to depict a running river in a rural
environment. The painting is part of the artist’s Glacier National Park series. Additionally, Horowitz was chosen for a WAAM juried show, The Spirit of Woodstock, which ran from August to October. They selected his piece Folly and the Soldier of Fortune, a large oil triptych.
Mary Rieser Heintjes, BFA Fine Arts ’79; MFA Fine Arts ’85, had her art of welded steel fused with glass included in Resilience in Color and Form, an exhibition by the New York City Branch of The National League of American Pen Women. The show was held through the summer at the Charles P. Sifton Gallery at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. Also included was her 12-foot oil painting on canvas In Search of City Trees and two photographs, Swallowtail Clipper Butterfly in Flight and a photographic print of the drawing of In Search of City Trees
Tom Wright, BFA Illustration ’79, has been posting his art weekly on his social media channels, including Instagram (@solarized69) and Facebook (tom.wright.796). In Wright’s words, this project is “a sort of virtual changing online gallery, if you will,” he writes. “While it’s a pretty common thing to do for many, it beats trying to get work seen in any number of physical spaces.” His body of work consists mainly of portraits of musicians, including Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Bernstein. At the time of this writing, he had recently shared black-and-white illustrations of the musician Steve Albini in light of the musician’s passing in May.
1980s
Marilyn Fox, MFA Fine Arts (Printmaking) ’80, has retired as chief preparator in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum. Her work included microscopic preparation of tiny fossils, fieldwork, molding and casting, micro-CT scanning, and, most recently, preparation of specimens for the reopened museum exhibitions. She has published extensively in her field and has been instrumental in forming a society for fossil preparators, the Association for Materials and Methods in Paleontology, for which she remains the vice president.
Zion Ozeri, BFA Photography ’80, had an exhibition of his photog-
raphy, Jewish Identity, Jewish Diversity, at Columbia University. The exhibition, which showcases “the diversity of modern Jewish life” through black-and-white photographs of Jewish people around the world, aims to “begin an honest conversation about the rich diversity of thought and belief that make up all peoples and cultures.” The show was also replicated at CUNY Hostos, with an opening last March.
Robert Blanton, MFA Fine Arts (Painting/Printmaking) ’81, established the Brand X Editions Archive—named after Blanton’s own New York-based print studio and publisher—at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The archive consists of more than 350 artworks made at
Brand X over nearly five decades. There is also an online database of the archive to facilitate scholarship and study. According to Blanton, opportunities will also be available for scholars to study and view the works in person at the PMA’s print study center, and the museum will mount a large-scale Brand X Editions retrospective in the fall of 2025, accompanied by an in-depth exhibition catalog.
Thomas (Wes) Foley, BFA Fine Arts (Drawing) ’83, writes that he has pursued a dual career as an illustrator and an executive pastry chef for Marriott hotels since graduating from Pratt. He has exhibited in New York City and illustrated for the United States Air Force. His new
work, Petitions, is part assemblage and part construction, using wood, garden tools, and found objects painted in acrylic.
James (Jim) McAuliffe, AIA, BArch ’83, saw the completion of the restoration and renovation of the Philadelphia Inquirer Building in 2022 with the Philadelphia Studio of USA Architects. The project converted the vacant national historic landmark Philadelphia Public Services Building, which now houses the police headquarters, chief medical examiner offices, and the 911 center. McAuliffe and his team renovated more than 460,000 square feet of interior space on 20 floors. The team restored the building’s terra-cotta façade (including its iconic two-story clock) and original lobby, replacing hundreds of windows.
Moses Ros-Suárez, BArch ’83, had a show, Skywide: Mobiles of Joy, at Lehman College Art Gallery from February 7 to May 4, 2024, and a solo installation of mobiles and floor vinyls, SKYSOUL, at the Sugar Hill Museum, from September 2023 to August 2024. The artist also had work included in the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair as part of the New York-based printmaking collective Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA. Additionally, RosSuárez presented printed mobiles, sculptural collages, and murals at Storefront for Ideas, an exhibition and programming space run by the community-based nonprofit organization Immigrant Social Services.
Glen Schofield, BFA Illustration ’83, opened a solo show, Creatures, on June 20 at The Cannery in San Francisco, presented by the Academy of Art University. The show features over 75 new, large-scale illustrations from the veteran video game artist behind such games as The Callisto Protocol and Dead Space Schofield shares that the pieces, which are pen, brush, and ink, and range from two to four feet tall, represent what he’s “been doing [his] whole life as an artist creating characters and creatures.”
Andrew Bass Jr., BFA Communications Design ’85, published Creative Catalyst: A Guide for Students Transitioning into Building a Career in the spring of 2024. Drawing from his teaching experience over the past several years, he created this guidebook geared toward creative students navigating the business of design. Additionally, his work was awarded a National Silver Award, a Regional Gold, and a Silver Award from the 2024 Azbee Awards of Excellence held by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. Learn more about Bass’s work at andrewbassdesign.com or on Instagram (@AndrewBassDesign).
Garrett Burke, BFA Communications Design ’85, will celebrate the 20th anniversary of his coin concept being minted as the California State Quarter, which had an initial launch date of January 31, 2005. Burke’s drawing honoring naturalist John Muir within the Yosemite Valley was one of 8,300plus public submissions, and was selected by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger along with
the secretary of the treasury, director of the US Mint, Commission of Fine Arts, and Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee. Half a billion commemorative coins were minted at facilities in Philadelphia, Denver, and San Francisco. Burke’s website is garrettburke.com.
Tom Grassi, FAIA, NCARB, BArch ’85, has been named a cochair of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY) Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Grassi received the 2024 Design Excellence Award from AIANY for the Recomposure Bench project for United Airlines at Newark Liberty International Airport. With a career spanning four decades in New York City’s both public and private sectors, Grassi has spent the last eight years at HNTB, working on various projects nationwide. There, the company elevated Grassi to an HNTB Fellow in recognition of technical excellence.
Cheryl D. Miller, MS Communications Design ’85, published a new memoir on October 15 with Princeton Architectural Press. In HERE: Where the Black Designers Are, Miller documents the history of the questions, “Where are the Black designers? Where have they been? Why haven’t they been represented in design histories and canons?” while tracing her career development as a designer. Miller established one of the first Black women-owned design firms in New York City in 1984, servicing
corporate communications to a Fortune 500 clientele that included BET, Chase, American Express, Time Inc., and Sports Illustrated.
Seung Lee, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’86, is at the time of this writing on sabbatical from teaching at LIU Post. Lee has traveling solo exhibitions at Wada Garou in Tokyo, Japan, and at Jang Eun Sun Gallery in Seoul, Korea. In an interview with
Images courtesy of the alumni
—— Nicholas Battis ’89, Twisting Red, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 30 inches —— Garrett Burke ’85, California State Quarter for America’s 50 State Quarters
by
Faces of Long Island, Lee shares how, although he was hesitant to show his work in Korea due to his difficulty leaving to immigrate to the US, he found comfort and inspiration in returning. While in Asia, he is also presenting a lecture tour at institutions like Tama Art University and Pusan National University.
Nicholas Battis, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’89, director of exhibitions at Pratt Institute, had his works exhibited in two group exhibitions in the spring of 2024. His paintings, which investigate color, nature, process, the built environment, and the digital age, were shown at George Billis Gallery in New York City and Yupo at Court Tree Collective in Industry City, Brooklyn. Battis’s career has included art making, curating, and consulting. As director of exhibitions, he organizes art and design exhibitions focusing on sustainability, politics, media, and science.
1990s
Carey Jolliffe, BFA Communications Design (Graphic Design) ’91, unveiled the first in a trio of children’s books he wrote and illustrated, titled The Hawaiian Alphabet (Acme Tiki Co.). As described by the author, the book uses “a whimsical retro illustration style, dynamic typography, and a vibrant color scheme” to assist children in learning the 13 letters of the Hawaiian alphabet. More information can be found at hawaiialphabet.com.
Trish (Fitzgerald) Kreiser, Communications Design (Illustration) ’92, celebrated the launch of her debut picture book, Always Together (Capstone), on January 1, 2024. In a description shared by the author, the book tells the story of “two otters who are always connected, always sharing, and always together—until suddenly, they are not. One is left behind, and nothing is the same. A moving story with universal sentiment appropriate for anyone experiencing the loss of someone or something special in their lives, either through death, moving, divorce, loss of friendship, or any other life event.” A portfolio of Kreiser’s work can be found at patriciakreiser.com.
Peter Wachtel, MID ’92, invented a new toy that PetSmart is now carrying. The dog toy, Batter Batter Fetch, from Jazwares and Wham-O, was created with Wachtel’s son, Aaron, and has led to a nomination
view
A new touring special exhibition by Mickalene Thomas, BFA Fine Arts ’00, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, opened at The Broad in Los Angeles in May, and is on view at The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia from October 20, 2024, to January 25, 2025, before traveling to the Hayward Gallery in London. The show, co-organized by the Hayward Gallery and The Broad in partnership with the Barnes Foundation, is the first major international tour of Thomas’s work, featuring more than 80 works by the artist made over the last 20 years, spanning mixed-media painting, collage, installation, and photography. (The Broad)
Photo
Installation
of Mickalene Thomas: All About Love at The Broad, Los Angeles, May 25–September 29, 2024
for Mojo Nation’s 2024 Play Innovator of the Year. Wachtel has taught toy, product, set, exhibit, and graphic design at Pratt Institute, Columbus College of Art and Design, Ai Hollywood, Otis College of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design, MIT, and Adolfo Camarillo High School.
Sharon Krinsky, MSLIS ’93, has returned to her “first love” of artmaking after retiring from her career in publishing. Krinsky has received several awards for her work and has been juried into two significant arts organizations: The National Association of Women Artists (NAWA) and the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. Strongly influenced by the simplicity of outsider and folk art, Krinsky’s techniques range from collage, drawing, acrylic and watercolor painting, and printmaking.
Jean Shin, BFA Fine Arts ’94; MS ’96, adjunct professor (CCE) of fine arts, was featured on WBUR for her project Perch, a sculptural installation composed of repurposed wood located at Appleton Farms in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The sculptures provide a resting place for bobolinks, songbirds that rely on Appleton Farms as a refuge during their annual migration. “Their populations are really dependent on farmers and their hay fields, their pastures—and grasslands are declining all over the world,” Shin told WBUR. “So, it just seemed like the most beautiful story for us to understand more deeply and really appreciate their contribution to the landscape.” (WBUR)
Helen Louise Gorayeb, BFA Art and Design Education ’95, is currently a teacher and tutor of English and math at Huntington Learning Center, following her return to school to attain a master of education in elementary education. During her time as an undergraduate at Pratt, Gorayeb worked as an administrative assistant/office manager to the CEO of a computer consulting company. She began work as a high school art teacher, preschool teacher, and several other positions after graduation. Having traveled extensively to Spain, France, Italy, Bermuda, and Canada, Gorayeb writes, “My motto is ‘stay curious, remain a student, and always smile.’”
Allison Miskulin, MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’96, started her eighth year in private practice and continues to show her work regularly. This month, she was accepted into the juried exhibition Skylands 36, sponsored by the Sussex County Art and Heritage Council in Newton, New Jersey, with her painting White Cuckoo. Miskulin is a licensed professional counselor (LPC), licensed clinical alcohol and drug counselor (LCADC), and art therapist (ATR-BC) with over 20 years of experience in psychotherapy and art psychotherapy.
Hamid Rahmanian, BFA Computer Animation ’96, concluded a North American winter/spring tour of Song of the North, his theatrical adaptation of a Persian epic poem. The performance is a multimedia
production that uses 483 shadow puppets to adapt part of the Shahnameh (Book of Kings). In The Washington Post, which profiled the show, Rahmanian compared the Shahnameh to The Iliad or The Odyssey in Iranian culture. This production expands upon Rahmanian’s previous works on the Shahnameh, including a 600page art book retelling, which he designed and illustrated, with text translated and adapted by Ahmad Sadri. (The Washington Post)
Scott Rummler, MSLIS ’97, launched his start-up, ScalarSight, which uses quantum logic to predict stock and equity prices. He recently received interest from a major investment bank. Despite receiving some skepticism surrounding his initial stock predictions, Rummler writes, “I posted predictions for each day’s opening price for the S&P 500 and Bitcoin on LinkedIn months in advance, and they turned out to be pretty accurate!” Additionally, Rummler wrote an article titled “Scalar Wave Paintings” that was accepted for publication in the journal Leonardo (MIT Press) and is set to be featured in their 2025 season.
Jana Ireijo, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’99, showcased her work Vanishing Pueo in the exhibition Interisland Action, curated by Josh Tengan, at Kahilu Exhibits in Kamuela, Hawai’i, from January to March 2024. Ireijo, who composed the work using wildfire charcoal and other pigments foraged near the gallery, writes that she “washed the mural away to symbolize impermanence, connection, and the need to protect what we love.” Her new NFT Pilina uses blockchain technology, pulling from data on ocean temperatures to create layered images that fade and reappear when Hawaii’s water
temperature rises and reaches optimal levels. “As the art ‘vanishes,’ the constellations shine brighter to guide our way home.”
2000s
Timothy Garside, BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’00, who currently serves as the Department of Aviation Sign Fabricator group leader at Philadelphia International Airport (PHL), received the “Teamwork Makes the Dream Work” award from PHL’s Employee Recognition Program. This August marked Garside’s 20th anniversary with the airport, where he is known for “his teamwork, effectiveness, and transcending expectations . . . The design skills and spirit of collaboration that Garside learned at Pratt Institute continue to serve him well,” said a press release announcing the honor. (PHL)
Jen Pawol, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’00, became the first woman to umpire a Minor League Baseball spring training game since 2007. Aside from umpiring, Pawol is an
Top:
Photo courtesy of Netflix.
Bottom: Images courtesy of the artists
artist and has worked part-time as an eighth-grade art teacher. “For any umpire working in the pro system, this is a big, big deal,” Pawol told AP. “This means so much. It’s the culmination of a lot of innings. I’ve probably put in about 1,000 professional games at this point.” (Yahoo News)
Carrie Osgood, MS Communications Design ’02, published a pair of picture books, Path to the Palace and Escapades in Caves, combining her original imagery with short stories. Both books tell allegorical tales for readers of all ages to set out their own paths and embrace adventure. In a Medium article describing her process, Osgood shares that her books “fit best in the Personal Growth section of bookstores, as they aim to give anyone between the ages of 10 and 110 a warm hug after reading (and re-reading and re-viewing).” Learn more at YourStoryGPS.com.
Brett Purmal, BFA Computer Graphics ’02, was the animation supervisor for Moving Picture Company on their newest Netflix film, Spaceman, featuring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan, and Paul Dano. His other films include The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, King Kong, Captain America: Civil War, Dolittle, and Clifford the Big Red Dog. Purmal has won two Oscars for Best Visual Effects on Avatar and King Kong and an Academy Award Special Achievement for the VR experience Carne y Arena. He has worked in feature film, gaming, VR, AR, forensics, television, and teaching for the last 20 years.
Aja Cohen, BFA Fashion Design ’05, recently launched her athleisure brand, Transcendent Active, a line of clothing sustainably made in Los Angeles using recycled materials, which Cohen says serves “an underserved community; a modest athlete.” Before Transcendent
Maryam Turkey, BID ’17, won the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Design, a $50,000 award for using mixed media to create surfaces and sculptural elements that reference man-made structures and organic elements. The award is one of the Vilcek Foundation’s prizes in the arts and humanities, awarded annually to build awareness of immigration’s role in enriching intellectual and cultural life in the United States. The foundation notes that Turkey’s ethos is “deeply rooted in questioning and commenting on the patriarchal system,” and that her work “repurposes and reimagines architectural elements like concrete blocks and pipes as idiosyncratic furniture and unconventional planters.” Speaking with the Vilcek Foundation, Turkey shared how her “journey as an immigrant informs my work in many ways . . . Most of all, it gives me the drive to achieve anything I put in my mind.”
(PR Newswire)
Active’s launch, Cohen designed for Aeropostale, Converse, and Macy’s. Having completed 200 hours of yoga teacher training, she currently teaches corporate yoga for Betterspaces at the Glenpointe in Teaneck, New Jersey, while managing her new line.
Chrissy Angliker, BID ’06, opened her third solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery on February 10, 2024. The show, titled See Through, centers on the artist’s paintings of
cut flowers, which Angliker refers to as “severed from their source, brought indoors as poignant reminders of abundant fields beyond.” The artist’s newsletter notes that Angliker’s “current body of work literally and figuratively addresses that transformative process in that its genesis was grounded in the loss of a loved one.” (artist’s newsletter)
Billy Cotton, BID ’07, started a new architecture firm, Cotton
Maryam Turkey ’17
—— Brett Purmal ’02, behind the scenes of Spaceman with Adam Sandler
Jana Ireijo ’99 washing away her mural Vanishing Pueo
Allison Miskulin ’96, White Cuckoo, 2023, 20 × 20 inches
Thoene Korolev (CTK). In a profile in Architectural Digest, the project is referred to as “a sustainability-driven architecture and project management practice,” and an extension of Cotton’s ongoing inquiry into “what it means to build a special house.” One of the partners, Architecture alumnus Ilya Korolev, also attended Pratt. Speaking with Architectural Digest, Cotton explained that his working relationship with Korolev developed organically, and the two have worked on numerous client projects over the past decade. (Architectural Digest)
Eric Wrenn, BFA Fine Arts (Graphic Design) ’07, was profiled in The New York Times. The minimalist designer is known for his iconic work with clients spanning the fashion, art, design, and music industries. Speaking to the Times, Wrenn shared, “I try to give someone a
design that says something about their brand, but that also doesn’t say too much . . . The idea is you say something without saying anything.” Wrenn was the design director of Artforum from 2014 to 2020 and has worked with brands such as Eckhaus Latta, Helmut Lang, and Supreme. (The New York Times)
Vicky Chan, BArch ’08, won the AIA 2024 Young Architects Award. His firm, Avoid Obvious Architects, has been recognized with 55 international design awards for their innovative projects. His passion is to use codesign with the community and stakeholders to achieve better sustainability and well-being. The projects collectively help 500,000 people every year.
Michael DelleFave, MArch ’08, was promoted to studio director at RODE Architects, a Boston-based,
collaborative design and architecture firm. A press release from the firm notes that this new role was developed especially for DelleFave and was “born out of his passion for design and mentorship.” DelleFave has served in several roles in the industry over the last 17 years, and in his new role, he will work closely with designers and other talent throughout the staff to ensure that “the firm’s portfolio continues to meet a high caliber of design . . . pushing a process that has consistently delivered strong, concept-driven work.”
Karina Sharif, BFA Fashion Design ’08, recently showed her multidisciplinary artwork at Gallery 495 in Catskill, New York. The exhibition, Karina Sharif: A Dream Embodied, was her first solo show and featured a selection of her paper constructions. The artist, who completed a residency with the Brooklyn-based Worthless Studios, discussed her latest projects and approach to art for a profile in i-D magazine. Additionally, Sharif’s piece titled Seat #1 was selected as a permanent addition to the Ganni store on Mercer and Grand Streets in Soho. (i-D)
Salman Toor, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’09, had a solo exhibi-
tion, No Ordinary Love, at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum. The show was “conceived as an enhancement of a traveling exhibition of recent paintings (2020–2022), curated by Dr. Asma Naeem of the Baltimore Museum of Art, [that would] contextualize Toor’s art by installing it in dialogue with relevant pieces from the museum’s stellar permanent collection.” Toor’s paintings utilize European portraiture traditions to feature people of color in settings from which they have been historically excluded. Toor has exhibited internationally and in New York, where he had a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 and 2021. (Rose Art Museum)
2010s
Sharon Itkoff Nacache, MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’10, runs a private art therapy practice, Co-Create Art Therapy, that specializes in perinatal mental health. Itkoff Nacache partnered with the Whitney Museum of American Art and the NYC Health and Hospitals Arts in Medicine department to run integrative arts-based wellness workshops for hospital employees across the five boroughs. “I’ve recently presented my work on creative resilience skill-building at the NYCMER conference at Columbia University and BrainMind Summit in NYC,” she writes. “As a mom of a two- and sixyear-old myself, this work continues to nourish me!”
Zoe Norvell, BFA Communications Design ’11, launched INeedABookCover.com, a website helping self-published authors find professional cover designers, in 2023. Norvell began her book-cover design career at Simon & Schuster and Penguin Books before going freelance in 2015. Over the years, she has designed more than 2,000 book covers for clients of all sizes and has expanded her services to include typesetting/book interior design. INeedABookCover.com boasts a growing gallery of nearly 3,000 covers by contemporary designers, positioning Norvell as a champion of her peers. Her platform has become a resource for book cover designers and art directors alike, offering trends, articles, and inspiration.
Adrian Volz, BFA Communications Design (Graphic Design) ’11, published an independent research and design project, Archiprint: The
——
Salman Toor ’09, Mommy, 2021, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 inches —— Adrian Volz ’11, Archiprint: The Architectural Issue at Trident Booksellers & Cafe in Boulder, Colorado
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
Architectural Issue. The newspaper-style, 20-page publication combines “impactful examples of historic modern architecture” with graphic design, highlighting international architectural movements, typography, and film. It is now carried across five US bookstores, including McNally Jackson and Printed Matter in New York City, as well as William Stout Architectural Books in San Francisco. Digital copies are available on Volz’s website, adrianvolzdesign.com.
Liz Waytkus, MS Historic Preservation ’11, was interviewed for Madame Architect, discussing her time at Pratt, her wide-ranging career, and her approach to historic preservation. In the interview, she considers that to “save architecture of the 20th century, especially with sites that are misunderstood and often disliked by the public, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach.” Waytkus is the executive director of Docomomo US, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the documentation and conservation of buildings, sites, and neighborhoods of the modern movement for nearly 25 years. (Madame Architect)
Anthony Acock, MFA Communications Design ’12, is chair of the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Communication Design at Cal Poly Pomona. He met Dylan Smith, BFA Fine Arts (Printmaking) ’10, at a Pratt alumni event in Los Angeles and went on to hire him as an adjunct to teach an advanced illustration course. Reflecting on the experience,
On June 6, The Black Alumni of Pratt hosted its inaugural BAP Summer Social. The much-anticipated gathering, with alumni from the newest graduating class and across generations convening at Pratt’s Foundations Lab, marked BAP’s first alumni social event since the pandemic. BAP celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2020, marking the group’s flourishing since it was founded in 1990, by senior students representing a range of disciplines, with a mission “to identify and advance scholastic and professional opportunities for Pratt students and alumni of African and Latinx descent.”
Acock shared that his “takeaway is that immediate friendships from shared connections from the Pratt community [emerge] even from different years. The fact that the alumni group for Pratt in Los Angeles is doing cool things [brings] folks together in meaningful ways,” Acock writes.
Katherine Duclos, MFA Fine Arts (Painting and Drawing) ’12, was the subject of a short film made by LEGO, highlighting her use of the building blocks in her artwork to express ideas about neurodivergence. In the video, Duclos shares how she began working with the blocks as a creative medium while
playing with her three-year-old son, who was diagnosed with autism and loved to play with them. A statement from the company notes, “Katherine’s relationship with color and her unique use of bricks is a great inspiration to continue pushing the boundaries of creativity and play—that building with LEGO
Photo by Dahlia Dandashi (top).
Photo courtesy of the designer
Allison Thornton ’93 (left) and Deepa Shanbhag ’13, with Sigfrido Benitez ’74 (center), at the Black Alumni of Pratt Summer Social.
bricks can come to life in a million different ways.” (LEGO)
Laura Henriksen, MFA Writing ’12, released her debut full-length poetry collection, Laura’s Desires, published by Nightboat Books. A diptych of two formally distinct long poems, each approaching various pop-cultural artifacts as sites of feminist analysis, from deep-dives into hit ’90s singles like Selena’s “Dreaming of You” to heroines of cult classic TV and films like Twin Peaks’s Laura Palmer and Variety’s Christine.
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, MFA Communications Design ’15, debuted Time Owes Us Remembrance, an art installation she created as
part of Weaving Our Stories, the US Embassy and Consulate in Thailand’s celebration of the 190th anniversary of US–Thai diplomatic relations. Phingbodhipakkiya’s work is a large-scale woven piece exploring this international relationship and the important role textiles play. In an interview with Thai PBS, Phingbodhipakkiya shared that her “favorite thing about this piece is how so many techniques from across the United States and Thailand come together to weave this beautiful monument, when people brush up against each other and really create together.” (Thai PBS)
Ray Fontaine, MID ’16, is the founder and principal designer at Bywater Branding Service, which focuses on coastal issues in New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana. Fontaine and her fiancé, Christo Martin, won the Best in Creative Reuse award in the Salvations Salvage Design Competition, an annual challenge in which makers create functional objects from found materials. Under the name Hot Trash, the duo submitted The Range Lamp, the first lighting design they had ever made together. The competition is hosted by the Green Project and held in New Orleans. Fontaine also taught Visual
Communications for Advocacy at Tulane School of Architecture in the bachelor of design program from spring 2022 to spring 2023.
Michael Golub, BID ’16, has worked for the last five years with The Sea Monkey Project, a social enterprise creating ocean plastic solutions and education in Malaysia. He designs products and injection molds for the project and its partners, developing work handmade from 100 percent upcycled plastics. “My combined bachelor of industrial design and minor in sustainability from Pratt Institute helped shape my career, focused on creating positive social and environmental impacts through design,” Golub writes.
Mallory Zondag, BFA Fashion Design ’16, created a large moss rug commissioned by Amalia MesaBains for the artist’s traveling retrospective, Archaeology of Memory, organized by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 2023. The show was on view at El Museo del Barrio in New York City this past spring and summer before moving on to the San Antonio Museum of Art, where it is up until January 12, 2025. Zondag writes that she “made this piece entirely by hand through wet felting and latch hooking, techniques [she] was introduced to at Pratt by Roxanne Eklund in [her] textiles courses.”
Mari Kroin, BArch ’17, received an Independent Projects Grant from the Architectural League of New York and the New York State Council on the Arts for her project Subway-Color-Archive (S-C-A). The S-C-A maps the layered elements of MTA platforms as the 8th Avenue Independent Subway (IND) stations between 207th Street and Jay Street–MetroTech approach their centennial. With assistance
from Mike Tully, a current graphic design faculty member at Pratt, Kroin plans to disseminate her research in print form about the painting (and repainting) of subway columns along the IND 8th Avenue line. She is seeking additional recipients and feedback, and copies can be requested at subway-color-archive.com.
Cosmic Kitty (Hannah Yukon), MFA Writing ’18, founded Liberatory Learners, an online interdisciplinary play space that uses Minecraft, music, movement, film, and vegan culinary arts as a learning tool to develop research, literacy, critical thinking, and public speaking skills. Describing her work, Yukon writes that by “inviting students to question their own history, we begin to investigate the ways we have held ourselves back as a society when it comes to creating a world without violence, torture, and cruelty.”
Isabelle Brourman, MFA Fine Arts (Painting and Drawing) ’19, was profiled in The New York Times, which highlighted her ongoing and highly expressive courtroom
Images courtesy of alumni
sketch series. At the time of this writing, Brourman was sketching the New York civil fraud trial of former US President Donald J. Trump, and she previously sketched the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard trial. Describing the intention of her practice, Brourman shared that she “wanted to bring something unregulated into such a regulated space.” (The New York Times)
2020s
Miriam (Mira) Etingof, BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’20, also known as Mira IRL (In Real Life), founded Chill Mag with her best friend, who writes under the pen name Finn DeNeuf, in February 2023. Etingof writes that they are both “passionate artists and writers who wanted to create a platform that publishes work from creators who refuse to be governed by hustle culture and the ‘starving artist’ mentality.” Chill Mag celebrates artists and writers worldwide, connects them, and amplifies their voices. They publish two archival-quality issues per year with different thematic focuses and host events featuring art, literature, and performance. Etingof writes, “Be chill; read Chill Mag!”
Rob Redding, MFA Fine Arts (Painting and Drawing) ’22, recently
had his work highlighted in New Criterion, a monthly art review, and was featured on the cover of Consciousness Magazine as the “Master of Commentary and Canvas.” Additionally, Redding’s most recent book, Smeared, was a #1 Amazon Kindle best seller in the Art Reference category. Alongside these accomplishments, Redding spoke at Pratt for LGBTQIA+ History Month’s Artist Spotlight: Art in Activism, and was part of the group exhibition There Is a Certain Slant of Light, which featured the work of Redding along with other alumni of Pratt’s MFA Fine Arts program.
Mehmet Kaan Çapar, MArch ’23, received the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award at the Turkish Consulate General in New York, presented by Consul General Reyhan Özgür and Education Attaché Şamil Öçal. Çapar, who studied at Pratt as a Fulbright Master’s Scholar, worked as a facade consultant at Buro Happold for the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The Center, a $465 million project, has recently opened its doors to the public.
Sylvia Chen, BID ’23, was honored at the German Design Council’s one&twenty competition at Milan Design Week. Her team’s electric cargo scooter was among 21 winning competition designs selected by the Foundation Council for Design. The scooter utilizes three wheels to assist in transporting everyday loads throughout cities and other urban areas. The competition supports young designers who work with an eye toward sustainability and inclusivity. (Designboom)
Sally Kim, BFA Art and Design Education ’23, is represented by IMUR Gallery, where she is also a curator. Kim unveiled her first solo exhibition, Confetti, upon graduation and curated and showcased the group exhibition Bodies of Grace, Souls of Beauty in March 2024. Kim had a group exhibition in June 2024, Tradition, Identity, and Future
—— Ray Fontaine ’16, The Range Lamp —— Miriam (Mira) Etingof ’20, issues of Chill Mag —— Qinyan “Doris” Liu ’23, Distant Flash —— Michael Golub ’16, designs for The Sea Monkey Project —— Mehmet Kaan Çapar ’23 in the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation at the American Museum of Natural History —— Mari Kroin ’17, detail from Subway-Color-Archive
Narrative, at Salmagundi Art Club in Greenwich Village. Her artworks are displayed on Artsy and are part of the Turkish House’s collection. Kim teaches visual arts at Primoris Academy, a private school in Westwood, New Jersey.
Qinyan “Doris” Liu, MFA Communications Design ’23, produced an independent publication project, Distant Flash, which was the competition winner in the Communication Design category of the Type Directors Club’s 70th annual competition (TDC70). This work was originally her graduate thesis and capstone project, consisting of a three-volume photobook set and a thesis book. It will travel to eight cities worldwide as part of the TDC70 exhibition.
Catie Poneck, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’23, had an exhibition titled The Weaker Vessel at Mercury Project, an event space and gallery in San Antonio, Texas. The exhibition ran from May 3 to May 20 and was Poneck’s first solo show since graduating from Pratt. The show featured work inspired by Greek kraters and vessels, which she found inspiration from while studying abroad at the Lorenzo De Medici Institute in Florence, Italy.
nikki terry, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’23, was accepted to the 2024 Openings Artist Summer Residency in Lake George, New York. She recently acquired representation from Brandt-Roberts Galleries in Columbus, Ohio, where her work was featured in March. She was also featured in the annual
Summer Group Exhibition at the Anita Rogers Gallery in Tribeca, which ran from July to August. Describing her work, she says that her “paintings honor the struggles of Black women healing from the denial of suffrage that benefited other people and not ourselves.”
Daiwen Mila Wang, BFA Fine Arts (Jewelry) ’23, was selected for inclusion in the So Fresh + So Clean exhibition by Ethical Metalsmiths. A piece from her 2023 thesis collection, Glass Vitamin Necklace, is featured for using responsibly sourced materials in the design challenge, highlighting artistic decision-making that prioritizes social, political, and environmental sustainability. Discussing her work with Ethical Metalsmiths, Wang notes, “These materials are often forgotten, but they will be saved every time I [am] about to throw them away.” (Ethical Metalsmiths)
Submission guidelines: Pratt alumni, we want to know what you’re up to, and so do your fellow graduates. Send your updates on work and life to classnotes@pratt.edu. Notes may be up to 75 words in length. Please include your full name, degree or program, and graduation year. Submissions will be edited for length, clarity, and style. Image submissions should be high resolution (300 dpi at 5 × 7 inches).
Pratt Institute Remembers Those We Have Recently Lost
BFA Advertising Design and Visual Communication ’71
Robert A. DeRose
BS Food Science and Management ’72
Barbara King Paxson
MFA Fine Arts ’72
James M. Crawford
BFA Communications Design ’73
Susan Levitz
Film (1972–1973)
Anna E. Novikoff
BFA Communications Design ’73
Arthur P. Rice
BFA Fine Arts ’73
Edward Turanchik
BFA Interior Design ’73
Edward Askins Fine Arts (1974)
John P. Fillo
BECE ’74
George W. Hayes
BID ’74
Joan Elizabeth McLachlan
MLS ’74
Lois Fitzpatrick
MLS ’75
Eric Morad Nejadian
BArch ’75; MS Urban Design ’75
George P. Rutkunas
BEEE ’75
Karen L. Berryman
MLS ’76
Barbara A. Burger
MLS ’76
James P. McNally III
MFA Fine Arts ’76
Lewis Tanner
MFA Fine Arts ’76
Charles Colliflower
MS Art Education ’77
Mark D. Bright
BFA Illustration ’78
Robert H. Flanagan
BFA Art Education ’78
Meryl Taradash
MFA Fine Arts ’78
Bess Moran
BFA Art Education ’79
David Baranowski
BArch ’80
Claude van Lingen
MFA Fine Arts ’80
Anne Marie Michael
BArch ’81
Russell Blue
BArch ’84
Lynn D. Bobowick
MFA Fine Arts ’84
Jean Matthiessen
MFA Fine Arts ’85
Sister Maria Martineau
MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’86
Bruce Robertson
BID ’86
Anna Sanko
BID ’95
Gerardo Castro
MFA Fine Arts ’97
Austin F. Lawther
MPS Design Management ’09
Faculty and Staff
Donn Albright
Longtime professor of Undergraduate Communications Design
Read the remembrance from Michelle Nahum-Albright ’75 and Elizabeth Nahum-Albright ’13 on page 56.
Edward DeCarbo
Retired longtime faculty member and interim chair of History of Art and Design
Jean Hines
Longtime librarian at Pratt Manhattan Library
Nadia Merzliakow, MLS ’74
Retired longtime director of the Office of International Affairs
James Louis Moroney, MFA Art Education ’67
Retired longtime professor of Fine Arts
Richard C. North, BME ’58
Retired longtime professor in the School of Engineering Mechanical Engineering Department and the School of Architecture Undergraduate Architecture Department, and dean of engineering, Distinguished Teacher 1991–1992
Gaetano Pesce
Former faculty member
Gus Rohrs
Retired professor and former department chair of Interior Design
Gerson Sparer
Retired professor of the Department of Mathematics and Science
Through June 2024 pratt.edu/those-we-have-lost
Past or present: Where do you creatively refuel, open your mind, enrich your senses? Where have you found professional support, or information and ideas?
WHAT’S YOUR GO-TO BROOKLYN SPOT?
What place would you recommend to someone in your field who’s new to the borough?
Email us at prattfolio@pratt.edu, or scan the QR code to view our map, learn more about the places we’ve already pinned, and share your recommendation.
Look inside.
LEGEND
Mapping Pratt in Brooklyn
BROOKLYN—
where generations of artists, makers, and innovators have honed their work Pratt and beyond. An incubator of creativity, ideas, and action. Home to thousands of Pratt alumni who continue to shape its cultural, physical, and community landscape. In this issue of Prattfolio about Pratt people, experiences, and connections, it felt fitting to visualize this.
In the map opposite this page, we’ve pinpointed places across the borough with a special link to Pratt: Places where Pratt alumni run galleries, businesses, and spaces that foster arts, culture, and scholarship. Hotspots where creatives and professionals find inspiration and resources, including Pratt’s campuses and affiliated locations.
This nonexhaustive highlight of Brooklyn’s creative heartbeat is just the beginning. Share your pin suggestions with us for our map at pratt.edu/prattfolio /pratt-brooklyn-map, and possible future iterations.
Pratt Institute is situated in Lenapehoking, the traditional and unceded homeland of the Lenape, past, present, and future.
ALUMNI FOUNDED/LED
1 ARMADA
Cory Watson and Jason Golob, both BArch ’11
2 BASE CERAMICS
Catalina Parra, MS Urban Environmental Systems Management ’13
3 BOND HARDWARE
Dana Hurwitz, BFA Fashion Design ’12
4 BIEN HECHO ACADEMY
Angie Yang, Industrial Design alumna
5 CURIOUS JANE
Samantha Razook, MID ’05
6 CW&T
Che-Wei Wang, BArch ’03
7 DEAR FRIEND BOOKS
Anna Sergeeva, MSLIS ’22
8 DIVISION DESIGN AND FABRICATION
Brandt Graves, MArch ’09
9 FOUR & TWENTY
BLACKBIRDS
Emily Elsen, BFA Fine Arts ’03
10 FRANCA
Jazmin de la Guardia, BFA Fine Arts ’14, and Sierra Yip-Bannicq, BID ’13
11 GOTHAM TAXIDERMY
Divya Anantharaman, BFA Fashion Design ’05
12 L&L
Leigh Mignogna and Liz Turow, both MFA Communications Design ’13
13 LIV RYAN
Liv Ryan, BFA Fashion Design ’18
14 MAKELAB
Manny Mota, BID ’02, and Christina Perla, BID ’14
15 MAROON SAUSAGE CO.
Howard Allen, MPS Design Management ’05
16 NEW YORK CREATIVE THERAPISTS
Nadia Jenefsky, MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’99; Drena Fagen, MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’02
Visnja Popovic, MS Art and Design Education ’08; Kelly Valletta, BFA; MS Art Education ’08
26 TXTBOOKS
Robert Blair, Rose Wong, Kurt Woerpel, all BFA Communications Design ’14; Nichole Shinn, BFA Fine Arts ’14; Thomas Colligan, BFA Communications Design '15
27 VAN ZEE SIGN CO.
Will Van Zee, BID ’12
28 WOOJ DESIGN
Sean Kim, MID ’21
CULTURAL & CREATIVE
Illustration by Yeji Kim
Pratt Institute is one of the core partners of the future New York Climate Exchange on Governors Island and an organization in residence, with space at Nolan Park Building 14, the site of research and programming including events organized by Pratt’s Center for Climate Adaptation.
73 RESEARCH YARD
Bringing together Pratt’s research activities, the Research Yard at the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a hub for research centers, including the Pratt Center for Community Development (40), Provost’s centers, and accelerators and showcases the work of faculty, students, and staff each spring at the annual Research Open House.
Two creative hubs adjacent to Pratt’s Brooklyn campus are sites of MFA programs in art and design: In 2024, Pratt’s graduate facilities in Fine Arts and Photography moved to Dock 72 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Northeast of the Brooklyn campus, the Pfizer Building is home to Pratt’s new MFA in Fashion Collection + Communication as well as studios taking on advanced graduate-level research from the School of Design and the School of Architecture.
Dock 72: 1 Dock 72 Way
Pfizer Building: 630 Flushing Ave, 7th Floor
71 PRATT MANHATTAN CENTER
Located just south of the Chelsea arts district, Pratt Manhattan Center is home to Pratt’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies, School of Information, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, and more.
72 PRATT MUNSON
Pratt’s extension campus in upstate New York, where students in specific art and design programs can start their Pratt studies, is part of the campus of Munson, the arts
with a renowned museum in downtown Utica.
About the Cover
Yuyan Huang, MFA Digital Arts (Interactive Arts) ’24
Every spring semester, Pratt Shows highlights graduating student work across the Institute through events on campus and beyond. Here, at the Department of Digital Arts Art and Technology MFA/BFA 2024 exhibition, held at One Art Space, a contemporary art gallery in Tribeca, Eunbin Nam, MFA Digital Arts (Interactive Arts) ’24, wears an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset to interact with Yuyan Huang’s piece. Read more about Pratt Shows and other ways we experience Pratt on page 18.
by Megan Proctor, BFA Photography ’25
Opening
Photo
spread: Autumn on Pratt’s Brooklyn campus. Photo by Tejas Setlur, BFA Film ’26
