Prattfolio Spring/Summer 2023

Cover Story

“The Stars Will Guide You on Your Journey”

A Fashion Collection Infused with Ancestral Power

To create her thesis collection, Lost in Translation, several looks from which appear on this issue’s cover, Lyric Caramto, BFA Fashion Design ’22, delved into the images, stories, and language of her family, with roots in the Philippines, to investigate questions of identity and understanding across generations and cultures. In this Q&A with Prattfolio, she shared some of the background on her creative process and how she hopes the collection could inspire understanding.

What inspired you to create this collection around the theme Lost in Translation?

The name “Lost in Translation” comes from the loss of meaning in words and stories when translating between two languages. I grew up speaking both Ilocano (a Filipino dialect) and English at home, but I lost my fluency for Ilocano by the time I was in third grade. When my parents would ask me a question in Ilocano, I would be able to understand them, but I would only be able to answer in English. Speaking broken Ilocano was most frustrating when trying to understand the stories my great-grandma would retell, because someone would always have to translate—and I was never sure if I was getting the full story or just a summarized version of a summary.

In the beginning stages of my collection, I remember finding a photograph of my maternal grandfather, who passed away before I was born, and wanting to know more about him. I began asking my family for photographs and stories they had from their upbringing, looking for sentiments that I could translate into textiles. I juxtaposed traditional Filipino silhouettes with American fashion construction elements from the late ’60s, which was the time period my reference photos were taken in the Philippines. By putting these two references together, I was embracing what it means to keep ancestral power alive while in pursuit of the American dream.

What are some of the stories you were thinking about when coming up with the pieces for the collection? What do those stories represent to you?

I took a lot of inspiration from photographs that were shared with me by my parents and my extended family from their childhood. I also referenced a lot of wedding photos/stories from my parents and their parents. To me, these photographs represent love, sacrifice, and familial protection—all things that were gifted to me by my family that have shaped me into the person I am today.

What do you hope people who view (or wear) the looks in this collection will take away from the work?

As many children of immigrants have experienced, I was never really able to learn about my own culture in school. But the deeper I dove into exploring Filipino culture, the more purpose I felt as a designer and a storyteller. Making this collection was the closest I had ever felt to my family, and the closest I had ever felt to myself. I hope that people will see how the power of language influences everything around us—our clothes, our actions, our sentiments. We are all just trying to understand each other.

Lyric Caramto’s models, back cover to front, left to right: Shelby Lee, BFA Digital Arts (3D Animation) ’22; Sophia Han, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ‘23; Alyssa Bermejo, BArch ‘24; Asilbek Akmalov, BID ’23. Photos by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22

What did you learn in the process of creating this collection that you’ll carry forward into future work?

I wanted to go into this collection with the intention of being as sustainable as possible. Though it’s virtually impossible to be 100 percent sustainable, there were many ways to be eco-conscious that I explored in the making of sourcing dead stock, vintage fabrics, and piña cloth (Filipino fabric made from pineapples) my favorite technique was dyeing some of my fabrics with flowers that I helped to grow in the Dye Garden. I would love to explore more sustainable dyeing tech niques in my future work.

On the knit dress specifically (below left like to share a little about the process behind this knit? Where did you find inspiration for the motifs on the dress?

This is a Fair Isle knit that I created a pattern for and knit on the flatbed-knitting machine. The motifs and symbols in the patterns come from traditional Filipino tattoos, which all represent a different meaning. The symbols I chose loosely translate to “your ancestors are protecting you” and “the stars will guide you on your journey.”

There were a lot of labor-intensive textiles in this collection that took me months to complete. Because of the nature of my collection, each look is representative of a person in my family. By spending time with each garment, it felt like I was spending time with the family member it represented.

8

Family Album

With the Publication of Last Day in Lagos, Marilyn Nance, BFA Communications Design ’76, Revisits the Roots of a Practice and a Career of Imaging Black Life

20

Move First

Elissa Queyquep White, Visiting Professor of Dance/ Movement Therapy, an Originator of the Field, Shares the Fundamental, Transformative Power of Dance across Generations

30

The Threads That Connect Us

Pratt Alumni and Faculty Explore Community and Heritage through Weaving

38

Illuminating a History of Action

An Interdisciplinary Research Initiative Brings Visibility to the Pratt Community’s Historical Work toward Equity, Access, and Just Futures

Departments

3 Letter from the President

4 Practice

With the project One Lovely Hour, Assistant Professor of Industrial Design Amanda Huynh considers mealtime as a form of care for elders

6 Studio City and Regional Planning, Historic Preservation, and Urban Placemaking and Management students reimagine Brooklyn’s Lefferts Historic House

42 News

45 New and Noteworthy

48 Class Notes

62 In Memoriam

64 Spotlight

The Pratt Seal, from Concept to Critique

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President Frances Bronet ( fifth from left ) with Renae Govinda, MFA Performance and Performance Studies ’19, Program Manager, The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies ( second from left ); Daniel Wright, Associate Professor of Math and Science ( fourth from left ); and middle schoolers from Fort Greene Prep at the Research Yard during Research Open House 2023. Photo by Sam Stuart

Foundations for Creating the Future

“The present life of the young is an outline of the future.” Charles Pratt, just over a year after establishing Pratt Institute, delivered these words to some of our institution’s earliest students. In his address, he emphasized the progressive values that influenced him as he launched this grand project—satisfaction in work, the power of helping others, and how actions today set a blueprint for a life and the world to come.

This past academic year, Pratt Institute marked 135 years of educating creative leaders to shape that future. At a milestone such as this, it is natural to reflect on the foundations of the work we do and cultivate at Pratt. When the first class of 12 drawing students assembled in 1887, the country was in the midst of rapid industrial development and technological change, and Pratt would offer a pathway for individuals from all backgrounds to participate in fields that transformed life as their predecessors knew it.

Since then, generations of students have come to Pratt to hone the unique skills and sensibilities necessary to engage with emerging modalities and media, to collaborate and problem solve, to meet the pressing issues of the day. Each has drawn its own set of outlines, articulated, challenged, and iterated on by the next. Our students today are forging new frameworks, new origins that will determine what’s next, based on command and critique of models of the past.

This year at Pratt, we have been excited to lead and collaborate on endeavors that lay the groundwork for new generations of ambitious, imaginative young people to establish their practices while deepening our involvement in our New York City communities.

Pratt has continued its partnership with Bank Street College of Education and the NYC Department of Education to launch Design Works High School in fall 2023. Located in downtown Brooklyn, the new high school will lay the foundation for secondary students to have profound impact through creative fields that Pratt has long defined, with a curriculum that draws on codesign thinking, creative expression, and social justice.

This spring, Pratt launched the Research Yard at Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNY). Just steps from our Brooklyn campus, the Research Yard is home to the majority of Pratt’s academic centers and research accelerators as well as fabrication labs and other spaces that support the creative economy (read more on page 42). Students from Design Works High School and the BNY STEAM Center will soon work with our Pratt research community to codesign innovations that can meaningfully address real-world problems.

Meanwhile, on Governors Island, we are thrilled to be a core partner on the team selected to develop the New York Climate Exchange, a research and educational hub poised to establish New York City as the global leader for the most pressing issue of our time: climate change. This will build on Pratt’s foundation of work on Governors Island, adding to a nexus of research and innovation that draws from our community-engaged, participatory design processes and our history of developing sustainable solutions to advance environmental justice (read more on page 44).

Another major international initiative Pratt led in March was Condensations: Designing In Water, helmed by Chair of Graduate Architecture and Urban Design David Erdman, with Research and Strategic Partnerships, for the UN 2023 Water Conference and New York Water Week, examining how design and the built environment intersect with issues of permanent climate change and adaptation, with a specific focus on some of the most dense and vulnerable areas on the planet.

Though the challenges of our time are in many ways different from those that defined the era of Pratt’s founding, a throughline remains. To our incredible alumni, faculty, staff, and students: you are part of this lineage, pushing the boundaries of artistic expression and critical inquiry, redefining the form and impact of the environments we dwell in, and improving the tools and systems that enhance lives every day. Pratt continues to be a place where artists and creative professionals, visionaries and systems thinkers, collaborators and questioners find fertile ground, infused with a history of social responsibility, inspired making, and community action, to write the next chapters of our collective story.

—Frances Bronet, President

Practice

Design, at R&D

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

fessor of industrial design at Pratt crafted meal, specially designed

same budgetary, medical, and and then translated into molds and

slipcast by an Ontario fabricator.

The feedback from the dinner, along with data the designers gathered during a workshop at the Dementia Lab conference in Belgium last fall, will inform Huynh and Lee’s continued research. reflects many concerns at the heart of Huynh’s design practice, which touches on social design, food, community, . After the dinner, she said, it became clear how much hosting threads through her

work as well, including her teaching practice: “Making sure that people are welcomed, have everything that they need, have a literal seat at the table, feel comfortable participating, and have the ability to feel heard—it is the only pathway I see to creating a just future in design: addressing difficult, urgent issues in ways that are accessible to the people we design for.”

Read more at pratt.edu/prattfolio /one-lovely-hour

Photos by Stephen Attong

Studio

Collaborative Futures at Lefferts Historic House Advanced Studio for City and Regional Planning, Historic Preservation, and Urban Placemaking and Management

How can reimagining a historic space help communities to heal and to shape their future? Pratt Institute students in one advanced studio offered jointly by the master’s programs in Historic Preservation and Urban Placemaking and Management explored this last fall as they worked on a project to activate Lefferts Historic House in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park for neighbors and new audiences. Their work would confront the realities of the house’s colonial past alongside the ongoing dispossession affecting communities in the surrounding area and position the site as a space to support healing for those in the local community whose lives have been affected by racial, cultural, and economic injustices for generations.

The studio, taught by Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE) Adjunct Associate Professor Beth Bingham, MS City and Regional Planning ’10, and Adjunct Professor of Interior Design Jack Travis, built on GCPE’s ongoing work at Prospect Park with Prospect Park Alliance. With Prospect Park Alliance as their community partner, the interdisciplinary group of 17 students— from City and Regional Planning, Historic Preservation, and Urban Placemaking and Management—collaborated to research, analyze, and interpret the complex history of the 18th-century structure, built by Black

Opposite, top to bottom : photo by Katie Kwok, BArch ’23; rendering of glowing void space at night, GCPE Joint Historic Preservation–Placemaking Studio and Evan Tuten, MS City and Regional Planning ’23; rendering of Flatbush Avenue fence murals, GCPE Joint Historic Preservation–Placemaking Studio and Diego Rivadeneira, MS Historic Preservation ’23. This page : photo by Katie Kwok ( left ); plan of potential Susu Space layout, GCPE Joint Historic Preservation–Placemaking Studio and Diego Rivadeneira

enslaved people for a privileged family on Native American land, and consider how a clearer understanding of that history could lead to changes that benefit the present-day community.

The Lefferts Historic House takes its name from the Lefferts family, who were early Dutch settlers to the region, unceded land that was inhabited by the Lenape people before the arrival of the Dutch. The Lefferts family were also slaveholders.

The house, which was moved from its original location on nearby Maple Street in 1917, is situated on the east side of Prospect Park on Flatbush Avenue, adjacent to the neighborhoods of Prospect Lefferts Gardens, East Flatbush, and Crown Heights, a crucible of gentrification and increasing housing pressures, particularly for today’s Afro-Caribbean residents.

Designated a New York City Historic Landmark in 1966, the house, as a museum, has been programmed to reflect the colonial life of the Lefferts family, but Prospect Park Alliance, which jointly manages the site with the Historic House Trust of New York City, has been working to reconsider the house’s story and its role in the community.

This context would inform the students’ proposals for design interventions that could play a part in “reimagining what the house could be, to recognize its role as a site of slavery, and tell its story in an innovative, inclusive, and forward-thinking way,” as Megan Maize, MS Historic Preservation ’23, said during the group’s presentation at Super Saturday, GCPE’s culminating event showcasing student projects at the end of each semester, last December.

For the exploratory phases of their work, throughout the fall semester, the students embarked on a series of site visits to the house and park and conducted research and analysis on the area and its people from precolonial times to today. They also held conversations with planning, heritage preservation, and community engagement experts as well as, crucially, community members. Through that process, the students uncovered community members’ desires for representation, experiences that empower and celebrate humanity, and a more welcoming environment in relation to the site.

The design interventions the group developed address the urgent need for community care while honoring the origins of the place and the Lenape and enslaved people whose stories are embedded there.

“We not only propose a way to reintroduce the house to the community,” said Robyn Stebner, MS Urban Placemaking and Management ’23, “we also create another level of engagement that can foster local stories of triumph and inclusion.”

Their recommendations included rethinking the function of the house as a community-programmed space. For one project, Susu Space, the team drew inspiration from esusu, an AfroCaribbean community-based savings and loan system—representative of the power of community-organized systems—to develop a plan for a house layout and design features to support workshops, a marketplace, and more.

The group also considered how artwork could shape a welcoming environment and encourage reflection, from murals at the entrance of the park, to sound installations on the house

grounds, to cuboid frames installed in locations around the house and park to demarcate “lost spaces,” or missing pieces of history like Indigenous landmarks.

The group’s recommendations also included educational programming and a cultural-heritage engagement plan that involves descendents of enslaved people who lived at Lefferts House and people of Lenape ancestry.

To bring closure to their work, the group committed to reporting back to all of the communities they connected with in their research, they said in December. But they emphasized that the overall work is ongoing, and in their observation, there is no single next step. Their most important recommendation for Prospect Park Alliance: to sustain community outreach, and continue to invite new perspectives and opinions to the conversation.

“As a site with a tangible historic legacy located within a major public space in a diverse, dense neighborhood in a prominent city,” the group said in their final report, “Lefferts House presents an opportunity to set a powerful precedent for the ongoing engagement between such a site and its surrounding community.”

Read more about the projects at pratt .edu/prattfolio/lefferts-historic-house.

Students: MS City and Regional Planning Ayah Alruwais ’24, Amelia Clark ’23, Jerome Nathaniel ’23, Christopher Streat ’24, Evan Tuten ’23, Felix Zamora ’23; MS Historic Preservation Ethan Brown ’23, Mahnoor Fatima ’23, Tara Hopp ’23, Megan Maize ’23, Katherine Pioch ’23, Diego Rivadeneira ’23, Alison Weidman ’24, Jeremy Ziegler ’23; MS Urban Placemaking and Management Clay Grable ’23, Alexander Lipnik ’23, Robyn Stebner ’23

FAMILY ALBUM

With the Publication of Last Day in Lagos, Marilyn Nance, BFA Communications Design ’76, Revisits the Roots of a Practice and a Career of Imaging Black Life

Interview by Jelani Bandele ’87 and words by Jean Hartig

Photos by Marilyn Nance ’76

Above left: Distinguished Elder Queen Mother Audley A. Moore at Lagos airport. In the background are artists Charlotte Richardson-Ka (left) and Wadsworth Jarrell (right).

Above right: Fela Kuti at the Afrika Shrine, Lagos

Marilyn Nance’s bags were packed. A Canonet, a Miranda Sensomat, film for 1,500 frames. A T-shirt screen printed “Okra Is an African Word,” a design collaboration with a friend. A letter declaring “You’re here as a photo technician,” the ticket to press credentials on site. Twenty-three years old and just months past her graduation from Pratt Institute, Nance was fully equipped for a life-changing project when she prepared to board a flight to Lagos, Nigeria, in January 1977.

She was bound for a highly anticipated international gathering with captivating ambitions—to gather a world of Black and African culture in one place for four weeks. Years in the making, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, known as FESTAC ’77, would commence on January 15, 1977, attracting participants from 54 African countries and the diaspora. She would serve as the North American Zone’s official photographer.

While back home, American audiences were immersed in the landmark lineage-spanning television event that was Roots, 1 Nance and her fellow travelers were participating in an experience that Nance likens to “an African Olympics/Biennial/Woodstock.” FESTAC ’77 reflected a kaleidoscope of origin stories linked by ancestry and the effects of colonialism, enslavement, and inequity, meshed with dreams for the future and the flourishing of the Pan-African spirit.

Some 17,000 writers, artists, musicians, intellectuals, and other creators of culture were present, and the shape and complexity of what happened on those 29 days would later be revealed in their work—like Jayne Cortez’s poem “Firespitters (FESTAC 77),” Audre Lorde’s poem “Sahara,” and Wole Soyinka’s essay “Festac Agonistes.” Alongside them, Nance’s photographs would become an unparalleled visual record of this sprawling, complex event—spanning dazzling stadium-scale pageantry and

behind-the-scenes preparations, luminous performances and intimate exchanges, under the auspices of the official event and offsite.

Nance’s book, Last Day in Lagos, published last fall by Fourthwall Books/CARA, for the first time presents a collection of those images, selected from the 1,500 Nance made at the event.

Originally slated for a two-week stay in Lagos, Nance skipped the first contingent’s flight home and photographed the full festival and beyond, over the course of five weeks. Moving through FESTAC village and around the region, guided by a list of each day’s happenings and her own curiosity and intuition, Nance captured the lived experience of FESTAC, its jubilant ceremonies,

1 The miniseries adaptation of Alex Haley’s 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family aired on January 22, 1977.

“I think my graphic design skill goes into the way in which I compose an image. Some people just put their fingers on the shutter, but I can actually see the image that I want, and then I’ll wait for it to show up.”

Opposite: FESTAC ’77 opening ceremony: photographer Ted Pontiflet greets his friend artist Abdul Rahman on the field of the National Stadium. Above: The National Theatre, Lagos

artistic expression, people connections, inner workings, and roving movement from the proximity of a fellow participant.

Her direction didn’t come from an assignment or journalistic objective, but something more instinctive, and deeply felt. “For me, FESTAC was this site of mutual fascination. Everybody was fascinated with everybody else. Everyone participated. So for me, it was all about imaging joy,” Nance told Oluremi C. Onabanjo, editor of Last Day

in Lagos, in an interview published in the book. The images serve as more than documentation, rather a portal to the specific vibrations of this moment in time. “She has created something true and important that goes way beyond the bounds of photojournalism,” artist Julie Mehretu says of Nance in her foreword to the book. “From the inside, she rendered the Black radical imaginary of an incredibly ambitious, international, Afro-futurist, diasporic Pan-African arts and culture festival.”

Above: Nigeria FESTAC ’77.

Right: FESTAC ’77 opening ceremony: Nigerian family queues to enter the National Stadium

Nance arrived at FESTAC with another Pratt alumna and dear friend, Sharon “Ajuba” Douglas, BID ’75 (1953–1996), to whom Nance dedicated Last Day in Lagos. Their journey might have never happened had it not been for Nance’s persistence, and perceptiveness.

Years earlier, both had been accepted to the North American contingent as exhibiting artists. Nance’s submission was a photograph of her grandmother at a kitchen table, and Douglas was to show a font, Grafikan Systems, that she had designed. As festival plans changed—from the time Nance applied in 1974, the festival, once slated for 1975, had a series of postponements in response to political events in Nigeria and the pace of preparations—so did the size of the contingent, and Nance and Douglas both received word that they were cut from the list. But Nance discovered a side door.

“I was at the Institute of New Cinema Artists, and I heard two of the instructors, two male instructors—I eavesdropped—talk about how FESTAC was looking for technicians,” she told fellow alumna Jelani Bandele, alumni engagement manager for The Black Alumni of Pratt, in an interview for Prattfolio on the Brooklyn campus last December. “So Ajuba and I reapplied. Both of us were supposed to be exhibitors, and we reapplied as technicians. We didn’t take no for an answer,” and, she added, “whatever I wanted for me, I was like, Ajuba, come on!”

When Nance and Douglas traveled to FESTAC, it was a new chapter in an alliance cemented at Pratt, over hours of working side by side, sharing time on Pratt’s in-demand Photostat machine and working side by side in friends’ apartments. They collaborated on a series of T-shirts that they sold at the African Street Festival on Claver Place in Bed-Stuy. (That series included the shirt reading “Okra Is an African Word” that Nance would bring to Lagos.) And they had fun.

Their creative and sisterly bond came with the usual share of dramas but was magnetic above all. “We used to fuss and fight,” Nance remembered, laughing. “I said, when I get to Africa, I’m not staying with you—and we wound up in one place.” And there they are back in the States, in a 1978 photo by Dawoud Bey, selling postcards Nance made from one of her FESTAC photos at the Third Annual Lewis H. Michaux Book Fair at The Studio Museum in Harlem. It’s relationships like this that Nance encourages students to nourish: “It’s really important when you’re in school to work with your friends.”

That connective potential is what first drew Nance to Pratt. Before enrolling as a student, she knew the Institute from gatherings and performances held on and around the Brooklyn campus. Having grown up in the Farragut Houses, a little more than a mile and a half from Pratt on the western border of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, during her high school years, the campus was a social and cultural hub. “Pratt was known for having community events,” she said, recalling one particularly epic three-day jazz festival put on at Higgins Hall, organized in part by Ogundipe Fayomi, BFA Sculpture ’73, that featured, among others, Alice Coltrane playing the harp. “I felt included, I felt like I was a part of it,” she said. “I came to Pratt knowing that history and being a part of that continuity of involvement with the community.”

“From the inside, she rendered the Black radical imaginary of an incredibly ambitious, international, Afro-futurist, diasporic PanAfrican arts and culture festival.”

FESTAC ’77 opening ceremony: onlookers and photographer

Nance had come to Pratt Institute after studying for a year at New York University as a journalism major, finding she could move more fluidly among her interests in art and design at Pratt. She majored in graphic design after considering architecture but felt unhindered from exploring across fields, and she found her interdisciplinary mindset echoed among her peers.

“My first friend at Pratt, Patricia Miller [BS Environmental Science ’78; BCE ’79], started in painting, and she left in engineering,” Nance said, recalling also how Ajuba Douglas had started in graphic design (in fact, Douglas designed the logo for The Black Alumni of Pratt, still used today) and graduated in industrial design. “No matter what our training was, you could take it and pour it into anything else.”

To pursue her range of interests, alongside her design studies, Nance took part in University Without Walls, a Pratt program that facilitated independent study. Through the program, she took printmaking at The Studio Museum in Harlem with the artist Valerie Maynard, who would become a lifelong mentor, and joined a documentary photography course taught by Pratt professor Alan Newman, who would also have a significant influence on Nance’s direction as an artist.

It wasn’t Nance’s first foray into photography—a photo workshop at Farragut Houses Community Center had been her first instruction in the subject, and at Pratt, she had taken Photo 101 with David Freund—but Newman’s class and what came out of it would be transformational.

After having her in that course, Newman asked Nance to join a cohort of student photographers he oversaw in Pratt’s Public Relations Photo Studio. Nance recalled how she and peers like John Milisenda, BFA Integrative Studies ’75; Nina Prantis, BFA Photography ’76; and Lynn Saville photographed events, student work, graduations, public-relations moments like check signings, and campus construction like the building of the ARC.

“That’s where I became a photographer,” she said of the Photo Studio. “The thing that made me a photographer was the 24-hour access that I had in the Pratt Studios photo lab. I could come in there anytime and do my own work. Of course I did Pratt’s work too, but I had complete access—we all had complete access—to the facilities. My time at Pratt made me a photographer.”

It was more than hours in the lab, though, Nance continued. Newman’s approach in the Photo Studio also forever shaped her practice. “He was just . . . gracious,” she remembered. “He would tell me about other photographers—‘your work reminds me of this’—and so it was like a photo course, really.”

Nance considers Newman one of her mentors, though she didn’t realize the extent to which his early guidance had influenced her until some 40 years later, when she visited him at the National Gallery of Art, where he was overseeing digital media. “He introduced me to his staff, and he didn’t say, ‘This is Marilyn Nance. She used to work for me.’ He said, ‘We used to work together,’” Nance recalled.

“For me, FESTAC was this site of mutual fascination. Everybody was fascinated with everybody else. Everyone participated. So for me, it was all about imaging joy.”

Reception at US Ambassador’s residence: (left to right) David Stephens, Oghenero Akpomuje, Frank Smith, and Valerie Maynard

Nance also credits Newman for having exposed her to the record-keeping practices she has come to be lauded for, and which enabled her work on Last Day in Lagos Every contact sheet is named, numbered, and dated. Every image Nance has ever shot has a file number, and materials are organized in boxes whose locations are meticulously recorded on a spreadsheet. “It’s a system that I adopted based on my work at Pratt in the Pratt Institute Public Relations Photo Studio,” she said.

Nance’s photo practice grew from there, while she was still a student, and she began taking on work. “I thought, I have the skills, I can do this anywhere,” she recalled. “I was used to being published because I had been published

at Pratt,” in Pratt Reports and Prattonia, the yearbook. In 1975, she started photographing for The Village Voice, under fellow Pratt alumni Gil Eisner and Sylvia Plachy, BFA Illustration ’65.

By the time Nance graduated from Pratt, she could have taken a number of paths. “I had studied art direction. I had studied copywriting. I had studied graphic design,” Nance said. She chose photography.

Nance’s design studies at Pratt have fed her practice. “I think my graphic design skill goes into the way in which I compose an image,” Nance reflected. “Some people just put their fingers on the shutter, but I can actually see the image that I want, and then I’ll wait for it to show up. You actually

create the image by knowing in advance what’s going to happen, or feeling what’s going to happen, and then you just wait for it to happen. It’s almost like meditation.”

Her words of wisdom for those waiting behind the lens: “Just hang in there, because the photograph is not really what’s outside—it’s what’s in you that you’re expressing. What you want to happen is for someone to look at the photograph and feel the same way you felt when you made the photograph. It’s not about the event—I looked at my images [from FESTAC] and I have photographs of . . . nothing happening,” Nance said, laughing.

“The stuff going on is in the head, or in the heart. If you’re waiting for somebody to do something, the somebody to do something is you.”

Even as she would go on to work in advertising and as an educator, Nance continued to build her body of photographic work, making images that capture the essence of Black life on a closely observed, human scale—work that is now in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Library of Congress, and others.

Above: Nigerian Protocol member, Black Music.

Left: Airport embrace (left to right): Linda Evans, Balogun Ron Love, Charles Abramson, and Charlotte Ka. Opposite: Miriam Makeba performing in Tafawa Balewa Square

Of late, Nance has been particularly invested in sharing her work with a younger audience, extending the continuum of knowledge and culture exchange that was central to the ethos of her time as an emerging artist, from her earliest participation in civil rights actions, to her involvement with fellow young artists and elders in the Black Arts Movement. This principle comes to bear in her lifelong project of making and showing images of the Black experience, what Nance has called “a giant family album.”

For Nance, communication among generations is critical to carrying creative work forward. “We had an information economy that was about sharing,” she said, recalling her time as a young artist. “I think it may be a little different now, but I’m a throwback, and I still share information, especially with young folks.” Her biggest piece of advice for those coming up behind her: “Talk to old folks.”

Nance’s meticulous record keeping is a way of ensuring that information—friendships and connections, actions and events, moments in time—is preserved, and able to be found.

In 2014, Nance initiated the project of revisiting her work from FESTAC ’77. She worked with visual artist Valerie Caesar to digitize all of her contact sheets from FESTAC and make high-resolution files of the negatives, which Nance then used to make reference prints.

Her participation in cross-generational conversations was central to bringing those images to fresh light and Last Day in Lagos into being. In 2016, Nance was presenting her FESTAC images with Caesar and Valerie Maynard, coalescing three generations of mentorship, at the Black Portraiture[s] III conference in Johannesburg. It was there that she connected with curator and arts scholar Oluremi C. Onabanjo, who recognized the potential in the work immediately. “Remi, I’m going to let you discover me,” Nance joked with Onabanjo, she told New Yorker writer Julian Lucas in an interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour earlier this year.

She would go on to work with Onabanjo as her editor and collaborator on Last Day in Lagos, resulting in a volume lush with imagery, history, critical observations, and bibliographic references—as Nance herself said, “It’s a textbook. It’s a testimonial. It’s an art book. It’s a photobook.” (It was shortlisted for the 2022 Aperture Photobook Awards for first photobook.) It is a chronicle of just five weeks of the artist’s life that offers a window into the past, present, and future, her own and that of the collective.

Now, beyond the book, a more complete picture of FESTAC ’77 continues to unfold, through Nance’s diligence. In 2022, as part of the Magnum Foundation Counter Histories cohort, Nance began the FESTAC Memory Project, to collect names, narratives, and images that add

Above: Last Day in Lagos. Right: Walkin’

new dimension to the story of FESTAC ’77, and to tell that story in different ways. Building off her initial slideshow concept for the project, for example, Nance commissioned Caesar to produce five short films with images from the festival. This year, with the support of the New York State Council on the Arts, Nance will continue to develop the project in the public realm.

All of this work has been 45 years in the making. Why hadn’t the world taken an interest years ago? In the interview with Lucas, Nance redirects the question to the historians, the publishers, the cultural gatekeepers.

“I guess there was no investment in celebrating Black joy,” Nance remarked. “I had to wait until a new generation came.”

Jelani Bandele received her degree in Clinical Nutrition from Pratt’s School of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 1987 and is the alumni engagement manager for The Black Alumni of Pratt.

Jean Hartig is the director of editorial for Prattfolio

Move First

ELISSA QUEYQUEP WHITE, VISITING PROFESSOR OF DANCE/MOVEMENT THERAPY, AN ORIGINATOR OF THE FIELD, SHARES THE FUNDAMENTAL, TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF DANCE ACROSS GENERATIONS

PHOTOS by JARROD ANDERSON

IN A WARMLY LIT SPACE, LAUGHTER IS IN THE AIR AS the first ethereal strains of Grover Washington Jr.’s “Just the Two of Us” emanate from a record player. People begin to move through the room, though some are slow to rise from their seats along one of the walls.

“Would you care to join me?” asks Elissa Queyquep White, extending a hand to a seated man at the end of the row. “Come on in.”

The 12 participants in this videotaped dance therapy session, held as part of a day treatment program at a clinic in New York’s Westchester County in 1986, settle into a cadence of steps on the beat, shifting side to side, focusing on the motion of their feet. White, a dance therapist, moves along with them, picking up nuances in their movements and adding them to her own, encouraging them to add in a twist, then a snap, then open up the space around them with arms floating outward. They connect eyes and reach out to one another, link hands and rotate heads and shoulders in circles, each movement slowly built on top of the last, all to the rhythm of the music. By the last saxophone solo, they have arrived in a state of being different from the one in which they had started.

The rhythmic movements have prepared the participants, or patients, to move as members of a group, to establish trust, and offer the therapist, in this case White, a chance to assess where each of them is emotionally. As the recorded clinical session progresses, with White’s guidance, participants touch hands and shoulders, lean against one another to feel resistance and their weight in space, and slowly break away.

This therapeutic practice is built on the premise that movement can unlock patients’ connection to their physical state of being—their height, width, strengths, and sensitivities—and allow them to experience feelings in a more expansive way. It draws on dance’s expressive potential and taps into “the spirit of being human” as White, one of the defining figures of the dance therapy field who has been on the faculty of the Dance/Movement Therapy Program at Pratt Institute since 2004, put it in a conversation at Pratt last fall.

White began her career as a dance therapist and dance therapy educator in the 1960s, following a career in dance performance that extended back to her childhood. At that time, dance therapy existed as a discrete practice within psychotherapy that had been growing in demand within psychiatric institutions but did not yet have an organized professional structure around it. Along with fellow practitioner Claire Schmais and psychologist Martha Davis, White established the first master’s program in dance/movement therapy, at Hunter College in New York City, developing a curriculum shaped by their clinical experience in dance therapy and research and education around the movement of the body in relation to the mind, combined with a shared commitment to using dance in service of others. White, Schmais, and a handful of fellow practitioners from across the country also established the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA), in 1966, and White would go on to serve as ADTA president from 2002 to 2006.

Having taught a number of Pratt alumni who have gone on to join the faculty as well as Chair of Creative Arts Therapy Valerie Hubbs, White’s influence at Pratt runs deep, connecting current and future practitioners and educators to the foundations of their field. Erin Holmes, MS Dance/Movement Therapy ’10, visiting instructor for the Advanced Seminar I and II in Dance/ Movement Therapy at Pratt, calls White her godmother,

and shared in a conversation last fall that many others do the same.

Cheryl Clark, MS Dance/Movement Therapy ’19, visiting instructor of Studies in Movement Behavior I and II at Pratt, expressed a similar sentiment, and reflected on the depth of perspective White brings to her students. “Elissa Queyquep White is a living treasure,” Clark wrote in an email. “Elissa is one of those links to the primary source. Elissa herself, in writings, acknowledged the fact that throughout history, dance has been used to mark significant aspects of the life cycle. . . . What appears to have changed is the attitudes of the practitioners of mind in the West, who began to wake up and see that the body was as key to expression as words were. This places Elissa at a very important moment in the development of the field.”

PRIMARY SOURCE

While, as a result of White and her colleagues’ efforts, the profession gained an organizing structure in the mid-1960s, the roots of dance therapy practice go back further, with several individuals developing methods for using dance as healing in the early to mid-20th century. These practices were birthed out of modern dance, with its focus on “dance as a means of expression of human events,” as White described it in a 2004 interview in American Journal of Dance Therapy (AJDT ). Their deeper lineage dates back to prehistory, in communities’ use of rhythmic movement to bring one another together at moments of significance: “Throughout history, people have expressed themselves through moving together to a common rhythm,” White and Schmais wrote in a 1970 article, “Introduction to Dance Therapy,” published by the Congress on Research in Dance and later republished in AJDT

Several of those early practitioners served as mentors to White and her fellow ADTA founders, forerunners including Mary Whitehouse and Alma Hawkins in California, Liljan Espenak, Elizabeth Polk, and Blanche Evan in New York, and, in Washington, DC, Marian Chace, widely recognized as the originator of dance therapy as a formalized practice. A trained dancer—who was part of Denishawn Dance Company, the trailblazing modern dance troupe— and then dance instructor who shifted her focus from the dance technique to the dancing person, Chace was asked to “teach” patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, DC, and that teaching resulted in the formation of the first dance therapy program, in the 1940s. Chace would go on to be one of White’s principal influences. It was with Chace’s blessing that the ADTA was established, and she became the ADTA’s first president.

The ADTA was a means of bringing those disparate practices into conversation. “We all felt that we needed to talk about what we were doing,” White said, emphasizing that it was about more than bringing unity to a profession. “Most of us were involved in civil rights. We understood what a cause was, and we understood how important it was to talk to each other.” (White’s own parents were politically active union organizers who instilled her with the value that “your life had to do with . . . making sure other people had a life,” as she said in the AJDT interview.)

The shared vision of the ADTA founders: “To conquer the world with dance therapy!” White said, with her characteristic humor. But in earnestness, it was about creating change from a place of movement, and making

Dance/movement therapy draws on dance’s expressive potential and taps into “the spirit of being human,”

Elissa Queyquep

they are.”

Their mission, White explained, would come with its share of challenges: “It took us a long time to understand that dance in our society holds a very specific, rigid place—like performance. When we started talking about what we were doing, people were afraid, and you could actually physically feel them moving back from you.”

Fortunately for White and her close collaborator Claire Schmais, in their professional practice, they had an ally in Israel Zwerling, MD, then director of Bronx State Hospital, a community-psychiatry advocate whose approach was paving the way for more expansive therapeutic practices in an institutional setting. As newly practicing dance therapists, White and Schmais had

under Zwerling. He hired White as Bronx State’s first dance therapist and offered encouragement as she began the dance therapy program at the hospital, which started with introducing the program to nursing staff.

White recalled that first meeting with 40 charge nurses. She and Schmais came into the room, quickly introduced themselves, put on a Motown record, and immediately started moving, prompting the group to do the same.

By the time the movement session ended, they had arrived at a place of commonality. “Once they sat down, because of the way they were feeling, they didn’t feel exposed or that we were looking at them in a different way,” White remembered. “They could talk about what they experienced. So we said, we would like to work with the

White’s influence at Pratt runs deep, and many of her former students, including a number of Pratt faculty, call her their godmother.

and understanding came through movement. White would go on to work with psychiatric residents training at the hospital as well, thinking that once they entered practice, they may be hiring dance therapists themselves and would benefit from firsthand experience. By the time White left Bronx State, the hospital had hired fivefull-time and three part-time dance therapists.

White and Schmais’s experiences at Bronx State, and as board members of the ADTA, underscored the demand for organized training for dance therapy practitioners. Together, with Davis, they applied for and won a grant from the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH, Experimental and Special Training Branch), to establish what would be the first master’s program in

the field, at Hunter College. It would set the standard for professional training in dance therapy.

BUILDING BLOCKS OF A PRACTICE

When forming the program at Hunter in 1971, White and Schmais gave language and clarity to principles learned in their work with dance therapy vanguards Marian Chace and Irmgard Bartenieff. Both studied with Chace at different times in the early 1960s and came together in a follow-up course Chace held for practicing dance therapists in 1964. They deepened their alliance in Bartenieff’s first class at the Dance Notation Bureau, where they studied in Bartenieff’s “effort” program, which taught principles

participants. So we’re not imposing a feeling on someone. We’re pulling it out through the warm-up, through ‘picking up,’ through the embodied feeling of it, and then we’re giving it permission and structure and guidance to really further the expression and exploration.”

Another principle is symbolism: “Use of imagery provides empathic support and acceptance to develop and clarify the expression,” Hubbs said. Schmais and fellow dance/movement therapy originator Sharon Chaiklin offer an example in a chapter they coauthored in the The Foundations of Dance/Movement Therapy: The : “To help a patient who is holding back anger, the therapist may suggest the image of chopping down a tree. The strong, direct movements required by this activity may bring to the surface feelings

The fourth principle has to do with the therapeutic relationship. For White, the essential concept of this relationship derived directly from her training with Chace. “Marian used to say that we work with the healthy part of the patient,” White said. “Marian was very clear about being respectful with the people that she worked with. patients. She felt that they were people first. And that was very impressive.”

This approach made its mark on Hubbs as well. “The therapeutic relationship is about engaging the human, the person, not the diagnosis, not the pathology, not the problem, not the shortcoming, not the weakness, but rather the healthy part, the humanity,” Hubbs reflected. “It’s human based, strengths based, it facili-

In White’s teaching, tapping into those strengths begins with the student understanding their own, through the language of dance. The first course she taught with Schmais was “an introduction to dance therapy using effort-shape movement analysis,” said White, referring to the system developed by Laban and taught by Bartenieff in the US. “We felt that if you’re going to be doing this business, you should know how you’re moving, what your strengths are, and how to use your strengths to do things that you’re not comfortable doing.”

A NURTURING MODEL

“I think one of the most impactful things from Elissa’s teachings was being in sessions, in class sessions with my peers, and learning to work and facilitate sessions with my contemporaries,” said Hubbs. “It changes who and how you are in terms of a person who’s in relation-

To reinforce those relationships, White’s teaching approach incorporates a critical method she learned from working with choreographer Liz Lerman, Critical . Used across disciplines, the process aims to help artists and makers (as well as educators) think about works in progress, through a critical dialogue. White adapted this for dance/movement therapy, involving therapists, or therapists-in-training, and their colleagues/classmates (referred to here as observers) in a dialogue around a movement session.

In four steps, both the therapist and the observers respond to a movement session, with the process guided by a facilitator, who sits with the therapist through the steps. First, prompted by the facilitator, observers point out what they liked in the session, and the therapist listens.

ELISSA WHITE (third from left); Professor JOAN WITTIG, founding director of Pratt’s Dance/Movement Therapy Program; first-year graduate student HELEN ROETS; Visiting Instructor VERONICA RIVERA, MS Dance/Movement

Therapy ’09; Chair of Creative Arts

Therapy VALERIE HUBBS; first-year graduate student

TIRA O’CONNELL; and first-year graduate student

BREANA

LOCHRIE were photographed in a dance/movement therapy session for this story.

Then the therapist asks questions, and observers answer in direct response to the questions, with no suggestions for changes or opinions that deviate from the questions. Third, observers ask neutral questions—questions without an embedded opinion—and the therapist responds. Lastly, the therapist has the option to invite or decline opinions from the observers, and with permission, observers share their points of view.

“It puts you in the process of learning and thinking rather than, I should have done this differently or you’re right, I should have . . . I’ll go practice it that way. It takes that bitterness off of it,” White explained. This contrasts with the dance training that many of her students have experienced before coming to dance/movement therapy.

Hubbs agreed. “It opens the students to self-reflection. It engages them in thinking about what they’ve done in a way that’s not so potentially punitive. Ideally, if they engage in this and develop that skill, when they’re in the session with the actual patients, they’re practicing that skill.”

This approach, Hubbs said, positions therapists to succeed in an environment where they need to observe, act, and reflect at the same time—“simultaneously seeing and responding in movement, to express and communicate feelings through movement, to be aware of themselves and sensitive to other dancers,” as White and Schmais put it in the Hunter College master’s program book.

This method of critique can also help loosen categorical thinking that, in a clinical setting, can stifle the therapeutic process. “There’s no right or wrong. Because as soon as you get into that mindset, everything you do is wrong,” White said. “I always tell students, dance therapy is like a detective story. You have no idea what’s going to happen when you go into a session. If you think you know what’s going to happen, then you’re not doing dance therapy.”

BRIDGING FOUNDATIONS AND FUTURE

Since White began practicing at a time of burgeoning community psychiatry, much in the mental health care landscape in the United States has changed, from the structure of care systems, to the cultural and social context that influence the way care is delivered, to developments within psychiatric fields. Meanwhile, rising out of the challenges of the current moment, need and demand for mental health care are as strong as ever, and the body continues to be a focal point in conversations around the health of the mind.

“We’re in a critical moment in time where we’re looking at evolution,” said Hubbs. “We have to better understand what the younger generations are valuing. And also look at what we teach, why we teach it, and how we teach it, and hopefully bridge those things.”

For Holmes, whose research links principles from dance/movement therapy’s foundations and African dance theory, White is part of that bridge. “She’s representing the foundation, and I say, I’m the eternal remix,” Holmes said. “I’m always seeing something and saying, I’m going to do it like this, I’m going to do it my own way—but I have her support.”

In her scholarship, Holmes relates White’s collaborator Claire Schmais’s Eight Healing Processes to the Seven Senses developed by Mama Kariamu Welsh, a foundational figure in African dance studies who established the contemporary African dance technique Umfundalai Holmes connected with Schmais as a result of White’s encouragement, which Holmes says resonated with one of her core values, maintaining relationship with ancestors. “It was a reminder to connect to the person that is influencing your work, which is what I emphasize to everyone, coworkers, colleagues—your culture is part of you,” Holmes said.

Holmes continues: “I feel like this field is changing in a way that now there’s people that look like me, physically—Black women are coming into this field and saying, There are these other approaches. There are these other ways of viewing things. There’s more of a cultural aspect being accepted within the field, or that we’re bringing in. Elissa is one of the grandmothers of having this be an organized profession. But then also, Elissa is somebody who will acknowledge that there are healing processes that come through different cultures. People have been using these tools before, but now there’s a system in place for people to use movement as a healing process.”

Indeed, White, who identifies as biracial—she is Filipino and Russian Jewish—and her collaborators were intent on diversifying the field from the start. In that seminal NIMH grant that helped them establish the first master’s program, they requested stipends to support students of color as well as low-income students in attending.

For Cheryl Clark, too, White’s teaching and contributions to the field provide a foundation from which to grow: “You need to know the seed in order to know the whole organism as it is,” Clark said. “But Elissa is more than history. She remains very much in the present interacting and cocreating with her classes as she did as a dance/movement therapist. She urges her students to investigate their self-knowledge through active embodiment. I continue to learn from her wisdom.”

PRATT ALUMNI AND FACULTY EXPLORE COMMUNITY AND HERITAGE THROUGH WEAVING

By Annabel Keenan

I wasn’t thinking about family heritage,” says fashion designer Emily Ridings, BFA Fashion Design ’18. “But the more we shared the practice, I realized how special it is to continue a creative tradition.”

When she was working toward her BFA at Pratt in 2017, the then rising senior found inspiration in her grandmother’s baskets. The practice that had surrounded her since childhood added a new dimension to her approach to fashion and she began incorporating basket weaving into her designs.

With the help of her grandmother, she learned to push the boundaries of her materials and techniques, working with natural fibers like seagrass, bamboo cane, and reed to make objects, including baskets, vases, and jewelry. For her thesis collection, she created her most dramatic design yet: an oversize

hoopskirt. With her grandmother’s guidance, she wove the piece from bamboo reed, using unexpected items like a mini trampoline, a trash can lid, and chicken wire to hold the heavy materials during the process. The piece landed her a commission to work with fashion brand Brother Vellies on a woven, nature-inspired Met Gala outfit for its founder, Aurora James, a year after graduating, and she has gone on to build her weaving practice full time at her Lexington, Kentucky, studio.

Ridings’s story is a reminder that the traditions around us can provide inspiration at any point. While she was a student, Ridings found the space to explore her grandmother’s influence and personal history with a new perspective outside her home in Kentucky. “I spent a lot of time at Pratt exploring my roots, forming a new appreciation for the crafts that I grew up around, but with the curious and innovative approach that the institution fostered,” she says. “My

“When my grandmother and I started weaving together,

Opening spread: Isa Rodrigues, visiting assistant professor of fashion design, Piscina, 2021, handwoven, painted cotton warp and silk, cotton, and linen weft, 44 x 33 inches.

Photo by Lynn Hunter

Left and above: Woven pieces by Emily Ridings ’18, including the woven skirt that made an impression on Pratt’s runway in 2018. Photos by Cassie Lopez

work is a combination of southern and city influences, rooted in tradition while always thinking about how I can reinterpret the discipline.”

Ridings’s experience is one example of how Pratt artists and designers in fields ranging from fashion to art education are drawing on historical and familial sources to inform their work and innovate, with weaving, in its relationship with traditions and its symbolism, representing connections to personal and collective stories.

Isa Rodrigues, visiting assistant professor of fashion design, has been working with textiles and weaving for over a decade. “I had been making with fibers and textiles since I was five, mostly embroidery, crochet, and knitting, taught by my grandmothers as a way of spending time ‘being busy,’” Rodrigues says. “But I only had an abstract idea of weaving and how woven fabrics were made. I connected with the process while

I was in college, and I was immediately interested in how my body interacted with the loom and the motion of weaving, and how I could connect with those who practiced weaving before me.”

The act of weaving created a bond with people and place, a throughline even as culture shifted. Rodrigues’s family is from southern Portugal, an area with a rich tradition of linen weaving though the practice has waned in recent generations. Her grandmother, she says, recalls a large loom in her own grandmother’s home. “No one in the family picked up weaving after her. In fact, there are very few weavers still practicing in that region. It makes me happy that I’m carrying on the craft,” says Rodrigues.

Those early seeds of creativity led Rodrigues to study textile conservation in college and provided the foundations of her career as an artist and educator with a focus on weaving and dyeing. Alongside her art practice and teaching, Rodrigues is also a founding member of the Textile Arts Center in Gowanus, Brooklyn; director of textile fabricator 505 Textiles; and a consultant on Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden.

Rodrigues is interested in ancestral textile techniques and materials, as well as their intimate connection with the history of humanity and our relationship with the natural world. Recent projects have centered on water both as a subject and a creator, with works that include a hand-pleated, indigo-dyed silk garment exposed to the elements of the sea in Portugal and a silk, cotton, and linen piece (Piscina, show at left as a work in progress) woven with “pools” that evoke light on water and its accompanying sensations of home and belonging.

Opposite: Work in progress, as Rodrigues paints the warp process for Piscina, 2021.

Photo by Isa Rodrigues

Above: Rodrigues in her studio, 2021. Photo by Lynn Hunter

Right: Detail of Waves Studies 1–3, 2018, by Isa Rodrigues, handwoven, triple layer, with bamboo, linen, and monofilament, 12 x 14 inches. Photo by Isa Rodrigues

In the classroom, Rodrigues approaches teaching as a way to provide designers with the tools to connect more deeply with their heritage and better understand the world around them, viewing art education as a form of empowerment.

“Textile objects can be archives,” she explains. “They store histories and memories in the materials, colors, motifs, and techniques. Textiles contain information about culture and society, as well as personal, emotional information. I also think of art education through making as a means of preserving material culture. Being trained as an art conservator, I believe in the importance of preserving and displaying objects so we can continue learning from them. Some of these stories are only accessible when you know more about the process, about the material.”

Like Rodrigues and Ridings, Tessa

Kramer, MA Art and Design

Education ’22,

began working with textiles when she was young. She learned weaving from her mother and sewing from her grandmother. Kramer’s formal education in weaving came later in life, when she was in college. As she continued to explore the practice, Kramer drew a connection between weaving and communitybuilding, which became the subject of her master’s thesis at Pratt.

She notes how common phrases like “the fabric of our community” link the two ideas: “When explaining weaving and community to young people, the idea that everyone plays a part and that together we can become stronger is something that clicks. We support each other, just like the warp and weft in weaving.”

Through her studies at Pratt, Kramer taught a local fourth grade class. As part of her lessons, students worked together on a collective project that resulted in a vibrant three-foot-tall weaving. Students chose from a variety of colorful materials, including yarn, ribbon, feathers, and tulle, to weave using a cardboard loom.

The materials and the artifact were embedded with the individual and collective expressions of the nearly 60 students who contributed to its creation. “Objects, items, and fabric carry meaning and associations, which can stand in for a larger idea or place. Weaving is a way of storytelling,” says Kramer.

Left: Detail of Tectonic by Tessa Kramer, woven cotton and wool yarn. Photo courtesy of the artist Opposite: Weavings made by students from PS270 as part of Ana Codorean’s Weaving Threads project. Photo by Ron Hester

Ana Codorean, MA Art and Design Education ’22,

also explored these ideas in a project she developed involving Pratt-area elementary school students. Called Weaving Threads: Natural Dyes at the Intersection of Art and Science, the five-lesson unit included students from PS270 in Clinton Hill, who visited Pratt’s Textile Dye Garden to learn about elements of weaving and textile creation, including cultivating plants for natural dyes and exploring the motifs, colors, and techniques used by different Indigenous communities. Codorean worked with Rodrigues on various lessons for the project.

Codorean’s family is from Romania, and the country’s tradition of weaving and embroidery—used to create clothing and for decorative purposes—has influenced her creative practice from early on. She was drawn to textiles for their ability to hold encoded stories, something she passed on to the students who participated in Weaving Threads.

One lesson, planned with Rodrigues, explored facets of weaving’s history as a tool for communication. The class looked at quipu, a pre-Columbian record-keeping system that uses knots to convey information, and the symbolism of colored stripes in Indigenous textiles. (Codorean’s project also delved into the origins of those colors, highlighting native plants and natural dye processes in lessons that related material and place.)

From Codorean’s own culture, abstracted motifs of trees, animals, and flowers are common and hold various meanings. Trees represent life, for example, and wheat represents the bounty of harvest.

“Because of the structural nature and technical limitations of weaving, images and ideas are translated into simplified symbols. I love seeing the repeated motifs that different cultures use to tell stories. In my own work, I incorporate symbols from my culture, as well as abstracted interpretations of nature,” says Codorean. “I think it’s interesting that cultures have similar symbols for similar stories or ideas, showing a larger connection or common interest among people around the world.”

With weaving as part of their practices, these Pratt artists and designers show how a technique with a rich history can reveal connections to distinct but linked aspects of material culture, offering a new lens through which to understand the stories that shape us personally and collectively, and inspire us to shape our work. They share connecting threads to a network of weavers across generations and cultures, including the future creators they have helped to encourage.

ILLUMINATING A HISTORY OF ACTION

By Andy P. Smith, BFA Writing ’04

An interdisciplinary research initiative brings visibility to the Pratt community’s historical work toward equity, access, and just futures.

Pratt, a particular ethos of concern for social justice, the quality of civic life, and community care is palpable, woven through student projects, faculty research, the work undertaken by the Pratt Center for Community Development, and connecting back to some of the Institute’s founding values. Every new contribution to the long effort for change adds to a continuum, though some milestones haven’t made it into the institutional retrospectives, timelines, or archives, pointing to the need for more inclusive histories. An interdisciplinary initiative called Preserving Activism intends to address those absences, shedding light on the deeper story of that throughline, making the history of advocacy and action at Pratt publicly accessible.

Preserving Activism began in 2019 as a proposal funded by the Strategic Plan Oversight Committee (SPOC) grant awarded to Academic Director of the Historic Preservation master's program and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment Vicki Weiner, with collaborators Professor of Art and Design Education Heather Lewis; Visiting Assistant Professor of Art and Design Education and Historic Preservation Rebecca Krucoff; and Associate Professor of Interior Design Keena Suh. Their intention was to “tap into the pedagogies and values-driven research methods of the Historic Preservation, Art and Design Education, and Interior Design graduate programs” in which they teach, says Weiner. The team soon expanded to include Pratt’s Virginia Thoren and Institute Archivist and Visiting Assistant Professor Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez and User Experience Librarian and Visiting Assistant Professor Nicholas Dease. Currently, long past the initial funding period, Preserving Activism continues to evolve as a hub for collaborative, interdisciplinary researchers—students and faculty—who are focused on the history of activism both within Pratt and extending out to the surrounding community.

One early project initiative is an ongoing, multidisciplinary graduate course, Preserving Activism Beyond and Between Pratt’s Gates. Initially offered in the spring of 2020 by the Historic Preservation and Art and Design Education programs and taught by Lewis and Krucoff, the course, like many others, was disrupted by the pandemic. Instead of engaging the public through a physical, public event, as originally intended, students shifted their public history exhibition to the web, exhibiting their research and findings in a digital presentation that launched the first iteration of the Preserving Activism website. Separately, Preserving Activism graduate assistants and Pratt Archives graduate assistants collaborated to organize another digital showcase, Protest at Pratt: Student Activism Then & Now, made available through the Pratt Institute Archives and Special Collections’ Online Exhibits portal.

Even through the challenges of the past three years, Preserving Activism took off. The team received an Impact Award at the 2021 Research Open House and a Taconic Fellowship grant in 2022, which has helped expand their research. According to Lewis, “It grew into something larger, with much more close collaboration, cross-discipline, cross-school. And the results are a website, exhibitions, continuing research, historical research, oral history research, and more direct collaboration between the library and Preserving Activism.”

Last spring, as COVID restrictions subsided, Preserving Activism collaborators showcased their work in a public space—in an exhibition on Myrtle Avenue, which has been closely connected to the Pratt commu-

nity through the Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership (MABP). Titled A Hidden History of Pratt’s Summer Youth Programs, the exhibition was based on student research from the Beyond and Between Pratt’s Gates course, and included images from a set of photographic contact sheets by Pratt alumnus Marc Weinstein, BFA Photography ’74, that were preserved in Pratt’s archives. These photographs by Weinstein—images of young people painting, sculpting, working with video cameras, and showing their creations on Pratt’s campus and at cultural locations around the city—shed light on a nearly forgotten program for local school children in Central Brooklyn in the early 1970s. The images prompted the students and faculty of Preserving Activism to delve into the lesser-told history of Pratt’s summer youth programs.

According to Fontánez Rodríguez, “Students were activating records and at the same time creating new historical records for the archives.... It was a perfect-jumping off point for collaborating and thinking of the archives as something very inclusive.”

The 2022 exhibition paved the way for the project to imagine future public presentations. A recent collaboration has been with Foundation Expanded: Myrtle Avenue Public Projects (a Pratt program, also initially supported by Pratt strategic funding, that connects student and faculty work with the public at Myrtle Avenue Plaza in collaboration with MABP). A public exhibition, Elevated Voices: Elders Speak of Transportation Access, was installed in the windows of Khim’s Market at Myrtle Avenue Plaza this spring, presenting Suh and Lewis’s recent project on the accumulated history of discriminatory policies and practices in transportation access, examined through oral histories of elder community members who live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, and Fort Greene.

Meanwhile, the collaborators’ work continues to be accessible digitally, with a new website, preservingactivism.org , recently launched, intending to bring these stories and more to life for a broad audience.

“The new website, preservingactivism.org , will give more flexibility, not just pictures and text: interactive experiences, timelines, pushing boundaries, and experimenting with archives and images,” says Dease.

Suh adds, “As we discover projects and research, we’re hoping that we can offer a public, shared platform for these. That is something we would like to build upon, to try to consolidate all this [work], so that it becomes an accessible repository and resource.”

Looking to the future, Weiner sees ongoing momentum for the research and storytelling that will grow in that space. “We’re very excited to bring students, faculty, activists, and other collaborators together to join us in uncovering and highlighting the many layers of history of activism at Pratt and in the Pratt communities.”

“Students were activating records and at the same time creating new historical records for the archives.”

Photo © Marc Weinstein / marcweinsteinphotography.com

PRESERVING ACTIVISM AT A GLANCE

A look at some of the research areas

Preserving Activism projects are exploring.

Student Activism Then and Now

Archives graduate assistants Miranda Siler, MSLIS/MA History of Art and Design ’22, and Nicole Marconi, MSLIS ’21, collaborated with Preserving Activism research fellow Amber Colón, BFA Communications Design ’23, to create the Pratt Libraries’ first digital exhibition, Protest at Pratt, in 2020. The exhibition details student activism at Pratt spanning the late 1960s and early 1970s—from their participation in the International Student Strike against the Vietnam War on April 26, 1968, to community initiatives organized by the Black Student Union, including workshops to introduce local high school students to the college admissions process. (Image: the April 8, 1969, cover of The Prattler.)

Pratt Institute: A Social Experiment

This project by Anisha Kar, MS Historic Preservation ’21, explores Pratt’s 1887 founding and early history with a particular focus on founder Charles Pratt: his ideals, philosophical perspectives, connection to Progressivism, and the values that guided his vision for Pratt, and that continue to influence the Institute today. Drawing on resources from Pratt Archives that include Charles Pratt’s diary, memorandums, and speeches, this research showcases Pratt as an advocate and champion of inclusive education: “I want to found a school that shall help all classes of workers, artists, apprentices and homemakers, and I wish its courses conducted in such a way as to give every student practical skill along some definite line of work and at the same time reveal to him possibilities for further development and study.” (Image: Pratt Institute High School, circa 1894.)

The Black Student Union

Drawing on oral histories from Pratt alumni, research by Kaitlin Millen, BFA Art and Design Education ’19; MS Art and Design Education ’20, takes an in-depth look at the origins of Pratt’s Black Student Union (BSU), their publication Drum (a 1973 cover of which is shown here), and the demands the organization put forth in 1972 that championed change on campus and beyond. As part of Preserving Activism’s mission to make these stories public, this project’s digital presentation includes the recorded and transcribed oral history interviews of Pratt alumni Pat Cummings, BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’74; Connie Harold, class of 1975; and Larry Provette, class of 1972, among others.

Pratt’s Youth Programs

Arresting images by Marc Weinstein, BFA Photography ’74, of local young people building rockets, making art, and exploring cultural hotspots like the Studio Museum in Harlem ignited Preserving Activism researchers’ investigation into the lesser-told history of Pratt’s summer youth programs. Weinstein had worked with the programs’ founder, Horace Williams, BFA Fashion Design ’70, an alumnus and Pratt staff member, to document the early ’70s programs. In 1973, it was Williams who joined with fellow activists in the Black Student Union to demand a more diverse faculty and student body, a revamped curriculum, and summer programs open to young people in Central Brooklyn. This research culminated in a photography installation—in collaboration with Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership— across seven Myrtle Avenue storefronts in spring 2022.

Urban Renewal

Maps; streetscape photographs; an oral history with city planner Ron Shiffman, BArch ’61; MS City and Regional Planning ’66, cofounder of the Pratt Center for Community Development; and other materials, compiled by Rofidah Alhumaidi, MPS Arts and Cultural Management ’22, help clarify the City-sponsored urban renewal plan of the 1950s and ’60s that significantly impacted and forever changed both Pratt’s campus and the surrounding area. What was the background of this urban renewal plan? Who were the key players involved? How did that activity shape the activism era that followed? These are just some of the questions this area of Preserving Activism research aims to address. (Image: view of Ryerson Street during the demolition of townhouses, 1958.)

Transportation Equity

Research being undertaken this year by faculty members Heather Lewis (Art and Design Education) and Keena Suh (Interior Design), in collaboration with community partner 7Cinema, highlights the 1969 removal of the Myrtle Avenue El, the 1970s fiscal crisis’s effects on public transportation, and the impact of the BQE on community life. The project, Long Memories of Material Injustices: Central Brooklyn Elders Speak about Inequitable Transportation Access, which received the support of a Taconic Fellowship from the Pratt Center for Community Development, includes oral histories documented by 7Cinema—where Pratt graduate Alan Minor, MS City and Regional Planning ’18, is a partner—and unconventional archival practices related to memory, to capture the accumulated history of discriminatory policies and practices around transportation. An exhibition of this work, Elevated Voices: Elders Speak of Transportation Access, was on display at Khim’s Market on Myrtle Avenue earlier this spring. (Image: dismantling of Myrtle Avenue Elevated tracks near Pratt’s Brooklyn campus, circa 1969.)

All images, exclusive of Pratt youth programs and Myrtle El photos, courtesy of Pratt Institute Archives. Photos of Pratt youth programs © Marc Weinstein / marcweinsteinphotography.com. Photo of Myrtle Avenue El, William Gedney Photographs and Writings, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University

Research Open House Returns to In-Person at the New Research Yard and Recognizes Innovative Projects Research from more than 50 projects, groups, and centers was shared at the 2023 Pratt Research Open House (ROH) held on March 10. Launched in 2018, ROH annually features groundbreaking research by students, faculty, and staff from across disciplines. This year marked a return to a public in-person event and celebrated the debut of the new Research Yard in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a dynamic space that will be an ongoing hub for the research eco system at Pratt.

Organized by the Office of Research and Strategic Partnerships in the Provost’s Office, ROH showcases the innovation, collaboration, invention, and investigation that take place yearround at Pratt. This year’s ROH awards honored some of these projects that are advancing ideas, problem-solving, and solutions in their fields.

The Aqua Sacs project was recognized with the Sustainability Award for its representation of the importance, possibilities, and future of sustainability. Its project team includes Pratt faculty member Cindie Kehlet, acting chair of the Math and Science Department, as principal investigator, with Helio Takai, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Karol M. Murlak, professor of industrial design, as coprincipal investigators. Jon D. Chorover, head of the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Arizona, and George John, a professor with the Research Foundation of the City University of New York, are also co-principal investigators on the team.

The Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Network (DPOE-N) presented by Anthony Cocciolo, dean of the School of Information, received the Impact Award for its advancement of digital preservation across

the country. Recently receiving significant funding from the Mellon Foundation, DPOE-N supports digital preservation education and outreach in libraries, archives, and museums throughout the United States. It was initiated by the Library of Congress in 2010 and, in 2018, transitioned to the School of Information and New York University’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation (MIAP) program. This March, it hosted a digital preservation workshop for cultural heritage professionals at the University of Puerto Rico.

The River Pool at Beacon and Its Civil Rights and Environmental Movement Origins, led by Meta Brunzema, adjunct associate professor in the Graduate Architecture and Urban Design program, was honored with the Innovation Award, which recognizes research with a unique approach to its process. Working with student researchers Melina Lawrence and Dylan Almonte, Brunzema is investigating the activist origins, design iterations, and legacy of the River Pool in Beacon, New York. Brunzema designed the free-of-charge public swimming pool, which opened in 2008, addressing the inequity of swimming opportunities, particularly for African Americans. The research on the pool concentrates on this context as well as the modern environmental movement as it relates to the Hudson River. This research was recently awarded a 2023 DEI Research Seed Grant Award from Pratt Institute’s DEI Subcommittee on Faculty and Staff Retention and the Office of the Provost’s Research and Strategic Partnerships division.

The Start-Up Power Award went to the Co-Housing Center led by Lawrence Blough, professor of undergraduate architecture; David Burney, academic director of Urban Placemaking Management; and Deborah

Gans, professor of undergraduate architecture. The award honors research that has the greatest potential to become a successful start-up. The Co-Housing Center is focused on supporting the creation of a School of Architecture Housing Research Center by discovering and writing grant applications related to housing futures in urban contexts. This Housing Research Center will bring together projects led by a diverse group of faculty in collaboration with experts in the field, to develop solutions to the country’s housing crisis.

The People’s Choice Award went to Cephalic Structures, an ongoing design research project of Greg Sheward, MArch ’18, visiting assistant professor in the School of Architecture and interim production facilities manager, and Jason Vigneri-Beane, associate professor of undergraduate architecture. Their research explores robotic printing fabrication processes for vessels designed to hold water, soil, plant life, and more. The project examines how eco-materials and environmental sensing technologies might be integrated into these small-scale structures, all with a minimal footprint and potential ecological benefits.

Beyond ROH, the Research Yard will continue to be a site of advanced research, made a reality with the backing of several key supporters. “The Research Yard could not have been built without the generous support of the New York City Council, the Brooklyn Borough President, and the State of New York,” Vice Provost for Research and Strategic Partnerships Allison Druin said. The Research Yard was made possible also by a $1,000,000 grant from the IDC Foundation, awarded to Pratt in 2022. The funding supports Research Yard initiatives including the IDC Research Accelerator Hub, a space for expanding partnerships and connections.

at the Research Yard: (left to right) Yuanyang Teng, BArch ’13; Alison Ayres, AOS Graphic Design ’85; Susanna Briselli, BFA Art and Design Education ’67; Andre Herzegovitch, BFA Communications Design (Graphic Design) ’89; Charles Boxenbaum, BArch ’66; and Allen Spector, MS Communications Design ’14. Photos by Sam Stuart

“Our research explores important new paths for community development, climate innovation, the future of jewelry, K–12 design thinking, and so much more . . . The Research Yard will continue to house the advanced research activities developing solutions to real-world problems.”

—Allison Druin, vice provost for research and strategic partnerships

Pratt on Winning Proposal for Governors Island Climate Center

Pratt Institute is a core partner on the team that was selected through a two-year competition to develop a world-class climate center on Governors Island. Stony Brook University will lead this team that includes Pratt Institute, Georgia Tech, Pace University, University of Washington, IBM, BCG, and Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES) to create a nonprofit organization: The New York Climate Exchange. The news was announced on April 24 and covered by The New York Times and other media outlets.

“We are so excited to be part of ‘The New York Climate Exchange,’ an initiative that resonates deeply with Pratt Institute and our longstanding partnering with local communities to address the critical issues facing us today and tomorrow,” said Pratt President Frances Bronet in a news release. “For years, we have been leading research on Governors Island and are looking forward to expanding our scope as part of The Exchange’s network of community and industry collaborators.”

With its diverse coalition of partners, Governors Island will become home to a first-of-its-kind international center for developing and deploying research, teaching, and community engagement to address the global climate crisis. Pratt will be part of a world-leading research and educational hub that will establish New York City as the global leader for the most pressing issue of our time: climate change.

With unprecedented resources combined with diverse stakeholders, The Exchange will support climate justice and equity for those most impacted by climate change.

Alumni and Students Share a Meal and Conversation in New Program

A new program from the Office of Alumni Engagement is offering students the opportunity to gather in small groups with alumni in their fields for a conversation over a meal. Dinner with Six started in December 2022, inviting undergraduate students to network in an informal environment and ask questions about transitioning from studying a discipline to making it a career.

The first Dinner with Six was hosted by Vincent Celano, BArch ’93, at Celano Design Studio Co., his interior design and architecture firm in Flatiron. Six undergraduate architecture students joined for an evening that began with a tour of the office with

Celano and his team, in which they were able to talk one-on-one about their work before they sat down together for a meal.

More Dinner with Six events are being planned in the New York City area to foster connections between current and future Pratt alumni. Alumni interested in hosting a Dinner with Six are encouraged to email alumni@pratt.edu.

More Headlines

Trustee Emeritus Bruce Newman ’53 Names Schutte Plaza with $1M Gift to Pratt: Named for Dr. Thomas F. Schutte, one of Pratt’s longest-serving presidents, the Schutte Plaza is the latest in Trustee Emeritus Bruce Newman’s long history of Pratt support.

Legends Gala Raises Vital Funds for Student Scholarships That Support

Diversity: The celebratory evening, held in person for the first time in three years last November, honored Arem Duplessis, Phyllis Lambert, and Mickalene Thomas as creative icons.

Sixth Annual Design Symposium

Examines Sustainable Innovation: The event, held on November 30, 2022, at the Asia Society in Manhattan, joined design leaders in a discussion on environmental issues and inaugurated the Marc Rosen Excellence in Sustainable Packaging Scholarship.

Former Cannoneers Return to Campus for Alumni Basketball Game: The annual event, paused during the pandemic, also recognized 1972 alumnus Larry Provette for his support of athletics and alumni connections.

New Graduate Program Focuses on Transforming Fashion: The MFA in Fashion Collection + Communication, launching in fall 2024, will lead the way in a rapidly changing industry, welcoming creative leaders in a diverse range of fashion practices, including designers, curators, performance artists, theorists, and educators.

For more on these stories and the latest updates from Pratt, visit pratt.edu/news.

PLUS: Take a Ride on the Pratt Transit Art Tour: Make your NYC commute an art crawl with a map of mosaics, glasswork, sculptural installations, and more by Pratt faculty and alumni.

The annual Alumni Basketball Game returned to the Brooklyn campus in February. Photo courtesy of Pratt Athletics

Renovated Yankee Pier leading toward a new public plaza and new mass timber academic and research buildings at the Exchange. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

This spring, CW&T, the Brooklynbased design practice of Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy—winners of the 2022 National Design Award for Product Design from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum— released a fresh iteration of their milestone-marking timepiece, Time Since Launch. A pull of its pin at the pivotal moment sets the clock in motion, for 2,738 years—and now, electronics upgrades allow the device to run for 150 of those on its original batteries. V2 also features a new design for the LCDs, which show days, hours, minutes, and seconds since the special event. Available at cwandt.com

Last spring, Donni Davy, Emmywinning makeup artist for HBO’s Euphoria, launched her brand Half Magic Beauty. The vegan, crueltyfree line is designed for wearers to create their own unique looks, with “something for maximalists, minimalists, and everyone in between,” according to Harper’s Bazaar. Bestselling products include Glitterpill, a sparkling eye paint; Face Gems, all-day-wear adhesive adornments in iridescent and neon colors; and Light Trap, a two-tone highlighter with universally flattering champagne or violet base shades. Available at halfmagicbeauty.com

From designer, artist, and educator Richard Poulin comes this richly illustrated deep dive into the life and work of Rudolph de Harak—the first monograph on the influential midcentury modernist graphic designer, who was also an adjunct professor of communications design at Pratt during the 1960s and 1970s. With an introduction by Tom Geismar, Poulin’s book surveys de Harak’s explorations of abstraction, geometry, and color and his application of “rational simplicity” as a design principle across his wide range of work. Available at thamesandhudson.com.

Since last fall, Mónica Santos Gil has received a Forbes 2023 30 Under 30 nod for her innovative use of natural textiles, had her brand’s Ludlow Street shop shouted out in New York Magazine, and launched an exclusive design for MoMA’s design store. This high-contrast shoulder bag from Santos by Mónica is fabricated using leather made from cactus leaves, harvested in Mexico through a process that preserves the life of each plant. Available at store.moma.org. Other styles can be found at santosbymonica.com

1. Time Since Launch V2 by CW&T Che-Wei Wang, BArch ’03, Adjunct Assistant Professor of Undergraduate Architecture

4. Cactus Leather Bag by Santos by Mónica Mónica Santos Gil, BID ’15

2. Half Magic Light Trap Doniella Davy, BFA Photography ’10

3. Rational Simplicity: Rudolph de Harak, Graphic Designer (Thames & Hudson) Richard Poulin, BID ’77

With this 10-sided lightbox-style lamp, Spain-based designer Miguel Leiro gives a playful nod to classical architecture. Leiro developed the onyx and plexiglass lamp with Meddel, a design firm in Segovia, Spain. The piece, along with other furnishings in Leiro’s Triclinium Collection—named for the ancient Roman dining room— is the fruit of the designer’s use of an applied-history methodology in his practice. The collection was showcased in Paris earlier this year at Maison&Objet, where Leiro was recognized with a Rising Talent Award. Learn more at migueleiro.com.

Can the objects we create teach us about nature’s design? In his new book, Haresh Lalvani brings together decades of his pioneering experiments in form and formmaking, inspired by natural phenomena that generate form and speculating a future in which matter, encoded with shape information, shapes itself, echoing biological processes. Lalvani’s work comes to life across 200 pages of color illustrations in this volume, which holds appeal for not only architecture professionals and students, but those in the fields of mathematics, science, technology, and art as well. Available at routledge.com

6. Coding, Shaping, Making (Routledge/Taylor and Francis) Haresh Lalvani, MS Architecture ’72, Professor of Undergraduate Architecture

5. Doric Chop Lamp Miguel Leiro, BID ’16

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Class Notes

Class Notes is Pratt alumni news compiled from alumni submissions, items shared by faculty and staff, and media mentions. Send your updates: see page 60 for submission guidelines.

1940s

Lilian Thomas Burwell, Art Education, who studied at Pratt from 1944 to 1946, was featured in the New York Times story “ The Tom Brady of Other Jobs” (December 24, 2022), which highlighted her ongoing work as an artist as well as her impact as a teacher. In 2021, at age 93, she had her first solo gallery exhibition in New York City, Lilian Thomas Burwell: Soaring, at Berry Campbell Gallery. She is also the subject of the recent documentary Kindred Spirits: Artists Hilda Wilkinson Brown and Lilian Thomas Burwell. (New York Times)

1950s

Roberta Edelman, BFA Illustration ’56, is now retired and has lived in Florida for the past 27 years, following a long career as a comic book inker for Harvey and Marvel Publications. Some characters she worked on were Richie Rich, Care Bears, and Strawberry Shortcake. Over the years, Edelman also did illustrations for greeting cards and magazines and exhibited watercolor and pen-andink paintings in group shows. These days, Edelman has been working on box rooms with themes like “antique shop” and “Christmas toy store.” She would love to hear from classmates at artandflowers07@gmail.com.

Pearl (Lutzker) Seymore, Certificate, Interior Design ’56, writes “I went to Pratt thinking I was going to study residential design! The study of commercial interiors just blew me away!” Her first job was sorting fabrics at Michael Saphier Associates before she moved into a 20-year career in office

furniture design and sales. In 1979, she set out on her own, establishing Pearl Seymore Design Associates, a two-person firm that took on projects ranging from refurbishing Atlantic Aviation at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport to moving ADT from 1 World Trade Center to a 155,000-squarefoot office in Parsippany, New Jersey. Seymore retired in 1989 and, at 95, continues to bask in the memories of a wonderful career.

Henry Sanoff, BArch ’57; MArch ’62, was recognized for his professional contributions by Woxsen University in Hyderabad, India, which established a named chair professorship in architectural design in his honor.

Ann Gillen, BFA Illustration ’58, was featured in The New York Times, in a story on her numerous public artworks published on the occasion of her recent solo exhibition, Toward Civic Art. The show, up at Polina Berlin Gallery this past winter, presented, as writer Max Lakin said, “a neat entry into the philosophical ideal of art as

a public good that undergirds her efforts.” The story described Gillen as “a total product of the city” whose mother had studied at Pratt before her. She went on to complete 30 public, private, and corporate commissions for sites across the city including Lincoln Center, CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the sidewalk outside 909 Third Avenue.

1960s

Gregory S. Dinallo, BID ’62, recently published Bridge of Lies (Open Road Media). The novel follows a Russian reporter on the trail of a story that leads him to Washington, DC, and a plot to destroy the Capitol. Dinallo is the author of New York Times notable book Red Ink, among other novels.

Edward Vollmer, BFA Advertising Design ’62, coproduced an exhibition, The Silvermine Art Colony 1908–1922, that ran through April at the New Ca-

Miniature room by Roberta Edelman ’56

naan Museum and Historical Society in Connecticut (nchistory.org). The exhibition included paintings and sculptures by members of the Silvermine Group of Artists, an art colony founded in 1908 in the area called Silvermine, in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Vollmer and his colleague also wrote and designed a 24-page publication about the history of the colony, which they found to be among the most important Connecticut colonies in the first quarter of the 20th century.

Bruce Hannah, BID ’63, professor emeritus of industrial design, was honored with an Individual Achievement Award in the 2022 Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) Awards in September. The IDSA award citation quotes Pratt MID alumna Yvette Chaparro, now assistant professor and director of the MFA in industrial design program at Parsons School of Design: “He is certainly an important part of the history of industrial design, the teaching at Pratt Institute, and the industry as a whole,” Chaparro says. “His voice continues to be relevant to this day.” (idsa.org)

Patrick Reynolds, BFA Advertising Design ’63, an artist, illustrator, and historian, of Willow Street, Pennsylvania, recently retired from doing weekly comic strips for the past 46 years. Throughout his career, Reynolds created illustrated stories in cartoon form on the history of the US, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and the Washington, DC, area, for newspapers, books, television, and

magazines. Flashbacks, featured in the Washington Post for the past 31 years, was his last major series. He is still actively working in his studio putting together books based on these comic strips. For more information about his work and studio visit redrosestudio.com.

Aviva Gold, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’64; MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’76, author of Painting from the Source (HarperPerennial) is working on a movie based on her book The King Who Sang the Song of the Grandmother

Kathleen Migliore-Newton, BFA Fine Arts (Painting and Printmaking) ’64, was invited to lend two paintings in 2022 to the American Embassy in Vienna, Austria, through Art in the Embassies. The paintings are of people in public spaces, specifically the subway in New York City. “I believe the work’s celebration of diversity, connection, and movement represent our culture and society,” Migliore-Newton writes. The paintings will be on display for two years. In 2021, six of Migliore-Newton’s subway paintings were featured on kiosks throughout New York City through #ArtOnLink for two weeks, including a piece titled Conversation The backlit effect on the images, Migliore-Newton notes, enhanced the brilliance of the colors.

Vincent DiGerlando, BFA Visual Communications ’65, writes, “Just before the pandemic, I had the opportunity to create a one-man show in Wall, New Jersey, titled NOW & THEN.” The exhibition was composed of 60 years of DiGerlando’s art and photography, consisting of childhood drawings, high school artwork, Pratt assignments, and design projects along with more recent artwork, all of which is included in DiGerlando’s book Art Is My Life. Also featured in the show were photographs from his publications Mind Visions and Conceptual Realities.

David Lloyd Maron, Architect, PC, BArch ’65, recently opened a New Jersey office in Englewood. “A current preservation project is saving a magnificent Civil War–era house, and relocating it to a public park a mile away,” Maron writes. “To achieve this, the house will be sliced into five sections, trucked to the park and reassembled by a team of skilled craftsmen. The building will then serve as home to the Englewood

Historical Society, the Englewood Environmental Commission, and allied users.” More information can be found at englewoodhouse.org. Other New Jersey projects include Hackensack Riverkeeper, Bergen Family Center, and Bethany Church.

Carol Ann Genziano and Donald Shomette, both BFA Advertising Design ’65, have just celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary. Genziano, a historic landscape designer, has retired as head of mapping and graphics at the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Shomette, CEO of Cultural Resources Management of Dunkirk, Maryland, and a marine archaeologist, historian, and author of a score of books on American and European maritime history, urban development, and archaeology, will be the subject of an upcoming National Geographic documentary on his search for, discovery, and excavation of the intact remains of the flagship of the United States Chesapeake Flotilla, the USS Scorpion, lost during the War of 1812. His forthcoming book, Siege: The Canadian Campaign in the American Revolution, 1775–1776, published by Heritage Books, Inc., will appear in 2023.

Rosalind (Lipson) Sedacca, BFA Fashion ’67, announced her 16th commemoration of International Child-Centered Divorce Month in January 2023. Sedacca is a divorce and coparenting coach and founder of the Child-Centered Divorce Network. Every year throughout January, divorce and parenting experts around the world provide complimentary resources, including ebooks,

Bridge of Lies by Gregory S. Dinallo ’62 ( bottom ). Kathleen MiglioreNewton ’64, Conversation , 2018, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches

videos, coaching sessions, and more. All the free gifts are designed to help parents protect their children before, during, and long after divorce. During January, Sedacca invites parents and divorce professionals to access these powerful tools at www.divorcedparentsupport.com

Lorna Ritz, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’69, exhibits at the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City. She writes, “my paintings are directly informed by the impressionists/abstract expressionists. I best express my most passionate realities (the story beneath ordinary everyday life things), producing on canvas much of what people feel when they get religious. I tightrope my way into a painting without a net underneath, allowing the paint to guide me through. I look for spatial relationships right away; the color finds the shape, creates the volume between colors.” Ritz’s website is lornaritz.com

1970s

Vincent Campisi, BS Building Science ’70, was interviewed for the podcast Inspiring People and Places: Architecture, Engineering, and Construction, hosted by BJ Kraemer. Campisi is a licensed professional engineer in nine states and has his national certification from the National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying. Prior to his retirement in 2012 after 50 years as a partner and chief bridge engineer for a 2,000-person firm with more than 30 offices in North America and overseas, Campisi formed his own firm and now provides forensic engineering and expert witness services to many state departments of transportation, the federal government, and foreign governments.

Fred Moore, BFA Fine Arts ’72; MFA Fine Arts ’77, had a retrospective showing 50 years of his work in Chelsea last fall.

Lisa Lyman Adams, BFA ’73, had work in Rediscover the Known, a group exhibition at Stonington Gallery in Stonington, Connecticut, last fall.

B. Robert Johnson, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’73, has for more than four decades been director of printing and graphics at SUNY Ulster, leading a small team of creative marketers with entrepreneurial backgrounds. The academic and public relations materials they design include print, digital, and 3D wayfinding signage, using the branding/identity guidelines Johnson developed for the college. The college was recognized with several awards at the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations Regional Conference District 1 in October 2022: gold for the new admissions packet, silver for SUNYUlsterSupports.me, and bronze for a microcredentials radio ad. Meanwhile, Johnson continues his fine art practice, with work featured in a group show last year.

Julie Joslyn (Brown), MPS Art Therapy ’74, released her 11th studio album, Demolition of Wisdom (Fang Records), with her avant-jazz duo Iconoclast. Iconoclast (Julie Joslyn: alto saxophone, violin, live electronics, vocals, and Leo Ciesa: drums, keyboards, grand piano, vocals) has been performing and recording since 1987 and is internationally recognized for its boundary-challenging

compositions, unique instrumentation, and high-energy performances. Their website is iconoclastnyc.com.

Abby Goldstein, BFA Fine Arts ’74, curated the exhibition Street Design Manual, on display at Ildiko Butler Gallery at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus from November 28th, 2022, to February 28, 2023. The exhibition highlighted the NYC Department of Transportation’s groundbreaking role in the evolution of New York City’s roadways. Goldstein also had work included in the exhibition Field Notes: New Work by 6 Painters at Metaphor Projects in Brooklyn, on view from December 3, 2022, to January 22, 2023.

Alan Rado, BFA ’74, is presently an adjunct professor in the School of Communications at Loyola University Chicago. Courses include Principles of Advertising, Intro to Creative Concepts, and Intermediate Advertising Design. Rado recently published a 200-page book on a trip to France titled Paris Provence Knockers Knobs

Clockwise from top left: Lorna Ritz ’69, Eyes That Tell the Hands How to Move , 2022, oil on canvas, 48 x 38 inches. Abby Goldstein ’74, Joyous abandon , 2022, acrylic on hand-painted paper, 9 x 6 inches. Paris Provence Knockers

Knobs by Alan Rado ’74. Julie Joslyn (Brown) ’74 ( right ) with Leo Ciesa, as Iconoclast

Bessie Mae Kelley, who studied art at Pratt in 1910 and 1911, has received fresh recognition for her early-20th-century animation work, taking her place among the trailblazing animators who originated the art form. Animation scholar Mindy Johnson recently unearthed materials that shed light on Kelley’s story, positioning Kelley as the earliest known woman to hand-draw and direct animated films. This past December, Johnson presented the first public screening of two restored short films by Kelley at the Academy of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles: Flower Fairies, completed in 1921, and A Merry Christmas, from 1922. Kelley’s body of work includes contributions to Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series, the cartoon series Colonel Heeza Liar, and a short with characters from the comic strip Gasoline Alley. She also worked on Paul Terry’s Aesop’s Fables—a series that inspired Walt Disney—notably designing and animating a mouse couple, Roderick and Gladys (later renamed Milton and Mary), that predate Disney’s famed duo. Johnson’s book “The Only Woman Animator”: Bessie Mae Kelley & Women at the Dawn of an Industry is forthcoming in summer 2023. (NPR, The New York Times)

C Bangs, MFA Fine Arts ’75, has had work included in two exhibitions in 2023. The first opened in February at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum and runs through August. It includes Bangs’s holograms, sculpture the holograms were made from, and paintings that include holograms. The exhibition includes Alpha CubeSat, a small spacecraft developed by a team at Cornell University, with lenticular images of the holograms and work by the Cornell Aerospace Engineering group; at the time of this writing, Alpha CubeSat was set to be launched from the International Space Station in 2023. Bangs’s other exhibition, On the Waterfront, opened at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition space in Red Hook in March.

Tony Cucchiara, MSLIS ’75, the longest-serving faculty member in Pratt’s School of Information, retired from teaching at Pratt in December 2022. Cucchiara had taught INFO 625 Management of Archives and Special Collections since 1996. As Dean Anthony Cocciolo wrote in a farewell post in the School of Information newsletter, Cucchiara “connected archival theory to practice for decades, taking students to his workplace archives (first at Brooklyn College, then GreenWood Cemetery) to work on processing, preserving, documenting, and making available historical records.”

Akel Ismail Kahera, BArch ’77, published The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). Kahera’s

Bottom: The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power by Akel Ismail Kahera ’77

Opening title card for Flower Fairies by Bessie Mae Kelley, one of two surviving films that are the earliest hand-drawn animated films animated and directed by a woman. © Manitou Productions

, BFA

Environmental Design ’75, was inducted into Interior Hall of Fame in December 2022. Wiggins, who is managing executive, studio creative director TPG Architecture, was celebrated for her more than 30 years of work as an interior designer along with her leadership and advocacy for diversity and inclusion within architecture and design. This was the latest honor for Wiggins, who has been recognized for her corporate interiors projects with clients such as Assured Guaranty, DZ Bank, IEX Group, and Lexington Partners—accolades that include Best Interior Designer: Corporate Interiors in the 2020

Interior Design Best of Year design awards. In 2021, Wiggins was inducted into the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) College of Fellows, the IIDA’s highest honor for its professional members. In a profile in Interior Design on the occasion of the Hall of Fame induction, Wiggins recalled her beginnings as a designer: “At Pratt, I realized I could shape space and continue to enjoy the fruits of what fine art offers, and even apply some of those principles to interior architecture.”

book extends Foucault’s analysis Of Other Spaces and “the ideological conflicts which underlie the controversies of our day [and] take place between pious descendants of time and tenacious inhabitants of space.” This book uses Foucault’s framework to illuminate how mosques have been threatened in past, with examples ranging from the Cordóba Mosque in the 8th century, to the development of Moorish aesthetics in the United States in the 19th century, to the clashes surrounding the building of mosques in the West in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Mark Nisenholt, MFA Fine Arts (Printmaking) ’77, was inducted into

the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts on November 26, 2022, joining 700 diverse Canadian cultural producers. His work includes etching, painting, drawing, assemblage, collage, mixedand multimedia, and most recently photography and digital art. In 2011, his work won a national juried competition for public art at Prince Arthur’s Landing in Thunder Bay, Animate the Journey to the Edge of the Pier. In 2019, Mark was honored with the City of Thunder Bay Arts and Heritage Lifetime Achievement Award for 40 years of contributions as professor/administrator at Lakehead University, artist, and volunteer. His website is mnisenho myportfolio.com

Mavis Wiggins ’75. Photo courtesy of TPG Architecture

Bottom: Mark Nisenholt ’77, digitized self-portrait, 2022

Cathey Billian, MFA Fine Arts ’78, had work included in Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at MoMA. Billian’s piece, Taking Risk (1981–1982), recalls a commission for Creative Time’s Art on the Beach project. Also of note, Billian had a solo show at One Martine Gallery in White Plains, New York, of etched photographic works on metal, Musicians and Their Instruments

Mary Rieser Heintjes, BFA Fine Arts ’79; MFA Fine Arts ’85, was accepted into the arts organizations 14 Sculptors, Inc., and the National League of American Pen Women, New York City Chapter. With these organizations, she became involved in four art shows: Awaited Awakening at the Belskie Museum of Art and Science in Closter, New Jersey, with the National League of American Pen Women (fall 2022), and, with 14 Sculptors, Inc., Anomaly at Azarian McCullough Art Gallery at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, New York (fall 2022); FIRE: HAIKU at the Norwalk Art Space in Connecticut (spring 2023); and Blossom at the Leonia, New Jersey, Sculpture Park (June 2023).

1980s

Diane Lechleitner, BFA Fine Arts (Printmaking) ’81, won the 2021 Foreword INDIES gold award for general adult fiction for her first novel, Faron Goss (Green Writers Press).

Robert E. Beach, BArch ’82, had his architectural design for the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial in Fairfax County, Virginia, recognized with a Merit Award for Design Excellence in the 2022 James M. Scott Exceptional Design Awards. The project was also honored with a Community Enrichment Award in the NAIOP Focus on Excellence 2022 Best of NAIOP Northern Virginia Awards.

Michael Gerbino, BFA Communications Design ’82, has retired from teaching at Pratt and is concentrating on his business—Archigrafika, an environmental graphics firm—and his photography. Last summer, Gerbino had a new book published by Visual Profile Books, 20 Years of Calendars: Street Scenes and People, which highlights his photography from the streets of his native New York City and cities and towns he has visited around the world over the past two decades, drawing from photos originally showcased in desk calendars Gerbino has produced each year.

Matt Magee, MFA Fine Arts (New Forms) ’83, was featured in an interview with Interior Design in November, on the occasion of his fall 2022 exhibition It’s All About You

at Standard Space gallery in Sharon, Connecticut.

Moses Ros-Suárez, BArch ’83, had a solo show, Joyfully Present In Our Dual Cultures: Disfrutando En Nuestro Dos Culturas, at Gold Wing Art Gallery in New York City, from November 7, 2022 to January 27, 2023. The exhibition was curated by Regina Gradess and featured poems by Elddry Castillo.

Mikel Frank, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’84, was awarded an Artist’s Support Grant for 2023 by the Arts & Science Council of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the North Carolina Arts Council. He will be using the funds to advance his ekphrasis project with poet Judith Christian. The goal is to publish a book. In 2021, Frank was selected by a jury to be part of ArtPop

Charlotte Street Gallery. One of his works was displayed on billboards and newsstands in and around the Charlotte area.

Jan Christopher Porinchak, BFA ’85, completed a series of natural-history illustrations for the Town of Riverhead, Long Island. The five paintings illustrate the unique animals, plants, and ecosystems found on eastern Long Island and will be used as part of trailside signage adjacent to the EPCAL Recreation Trail to educate the public about the biodiversity of the region and encourage stewardship of natural resources. Porinchak, a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, has created similar images for clients including SeaGrant, NOAA, Cary Institute of Ecosystems Studies, Cornell Cooperative, Regional Plan Association, and others. Porinchak is in his 25th year of public school art teaching at the Jericho Schools.

Andrew Reach, BArch ’86, was commissioned by the Cleveland Public Library in partnership with Land Stu-

dio to create a 10 x 30-foot art wall for the South Brooklyn neighborhood branch of the library as part of its See Also public art initiative. His work QUADRATALUX will be up for one year. See Also, which takes its title from a library term for “look here,” brings temporary works of art each summer to the Eastman Reading Garden at Cleveland Public Library’s main branch and murals to neighborhood library branches throughout the city.

Randy Richards, BFA Communications Design ’87, runs Randy Richards Design Group (RRDG) in Noank, Connecticut, and also pursues a fine art career. He reports that in 2021, RRDG won more awards than any other independent firm or agency in the US from Graphic Design USA. Richards writes, “I’m proud of the nine awards we won but am more proud that we were able to help many of our customers have their best years ever during COVID and some very difficult economic times.” He has also recently received awards for artwork shown at Mystic Museum of Art in Connecticut and Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts.

Philip J. Consalvo, AIA, BArch ’88, founder of PJCArchitecture, was profiled last fall in Crain’s New York Business. The feature focused on his path to success and love of the arts, including his 17 years spent as an actor with the Metropolitan Opera, which helped him develop his practice. The small community of the Metropolitan Opera brought him a number of jobs, projects that ranged

from working on chorus members’ apartments to building out the headquarters of the theatrical wardrobe union, Local 764. “It morphed into this amazing sort of marketing connection to really help build my career,” Consalvo told Crain’s

Barbara Clarke Ruiz, BFA Fashion Design ’88, became the first Black woman to partner with Kohl’s on a design capsule collection. Her activewear designs for Kohl’s were covered last fall by WAVY, Black Enterprise, and Women’s Health.

1990s

Jeffrey B. Livingston, RA, NCARB, BArch ’90, joined Spiezle Architectural Group, Inc., an employee-owned, award-winning, full-service architectural, interior design, landscape architecture, and planning firm, as director of campus architecture. Livingston formerly served as campus architect/director of design at Rutgers University and most recently at New Jersey City University. Livingston’s architectural background spans over 30 years in higher education, pharmaceutical/biotech, R&D, and manufacturing. Livingston’s previous work on the Indiana State University Power Plant won awards from the Midwest Construction project of the year, Industrial; Midwest Construction Top Indiana Projects; and the BKD Build Indiana Award. In his time off, he is an avid builder of harpsichords and clavichords.

Clockwise from top left: Mikel Frank ’84, work for ArtPop Charlotte Street Gallery. Andrew Reach ’86, QUADRATALUX . Illustration by Jan Christopher Porinchak ’85

Pascale Sablan, AIA, NOMA, LEED AP, BArch ’06, was inducted as president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) in October 2022, receiving the presidential staff and purple pin at NOMA’s annual conference in Nashville. Sablan is an associate principal at Adjaye Associates, the 315th living African American woman registered architect in the US, and, as she noted in her induction speech, “an activist architect who works to advance architecture for the betterment of society and bring visibility and voice to the issues concerning women and BIPOC designers.” Sablan is also founder of Beyond the Built Environment, an organization that addresses inequities in architecture. In 2021, Sablan was awarded the AIA Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for her advocacy efforts and was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows, the youngest African American to reach that honor in the organization’s history.

Andrew Thompson, AIA, NOMAC LEED AP BD+C, BArch ’91, received the New Jersey Architect of the Year Award in 2021 from AIA New Jersey. In October 2022, Thompson was elevated to the National Organization of Minority Architects Council. He is serving as the first vice president of AIA New Jersey in 2023. As the Passaic County architect, one of his projects with the county, the renovation and restoration of Lambert Castle in Woodland Park, won the New Jersey Historic Preservation Award.

Amy Sands, MFA Fine Arts ’95, received a McKnight Fellowship in printmaking at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in 2022. It concluded with a solo exhibition at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in January and February 2023. Sands also has a solo exhibition, focusing on Scandinavian handwork, at the Osterøy Museum in Norway through August 2023.

Bottom: Amy Sands ’95, Astra V

Pascale Sablan ’06, photo by National Organization of Minority Architects and 4thFlr

Lalena Fisher, MFA Fine Arts ’97, wrote and illustrated her debut children’s picture book Friends Beyond Measure: A Story Told with Infographics, which was published by HarperKids on February 28, 2023. The character Ana diagrams everything she and Harwin have in common; she timelines their adventures, and graphs their differences. When Harwin learns she is moving, Ana tries to map out a plan to cope with her feelings. “A uniquely told story that will delight all readers,” declared School Library Journal in one of several starred reviews the book has received. Friends Beyond Measure can be found through most booksellers.

Eric Araujo, BFA Fine Arts ’99, had an exhibition of recent sculpture, What’s he building in there? An exercise in

humility, on view with ChaShaMa in New York City from November 18, 2022, to January 6, 2023.

2000s

Doug Parry, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’00, and former Pratt Fine Arts Department instructor, recently published his first graphic novel, regular: A Bartender Remembers, featuring drawings of former regulars, employees, and celebrities from the Cedar Tavern in New York, where he tended bar while in graduate school. Parry, now an associate professor of fine arts at DigiPen Institute of Technology in Redmond, Washington, exhibited all 32 drawings at Lorimoto Gallery in Ridgewood, Queens—owned by Pratt alum and former Fine Arts Department instructor Nao Matsumoto, MFA Fine Arts (Sculpture) ’00—in August 2022. Parry is currently working on a documentary about the final years of the Cedar Tavern.

Paul R. Paradise, MSLIS ’02, was named a finalist for the 2022 Killer Nashville Claymore Award, Best Investigator category, for the manuscript “Truth Is Always Changing,” selected from hundreds of submissions. Killer Nashville is a writing convention and competition for mystery writers. Paradise traveled to Franklin, Tennessee, in August 2022 for the award ceremony.

Mizuko Yamaoka, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’02, received the third biennial University of Pittsburgh Japan

Documentary Film Award for her film Maelstrom, which tells the story of Yamaoka’s life transformation after a car accident that damaged her spine. The award was given by the Japan Council of the University of Pittsburgh and SCREENSHOT: ASIA, a project from University of Pittsburgh’s Film and Media Studies Program and the Asian Studies Center, and Maelstrom streamed at the 2022 SCREENSHOT: Asia Film Festival. The film was also part of the Tokyo Documentary Film Festival 2022 in December.

Michele (Marino) Kelly, BFA ’03; MS Art and Design Education ’03, celebrated entering her 20th year of teaching visual art education at a Brooklyn K-8 school at the start of the 2022–2023 school year. Kelly has also been the lead liaison and coordinating ambassador for the District 22 Visual Arts Ambassador program for the past several years.

Timothy Veske-McMahon, BFA Fine Arts (Jewelry) ’04, had a piece, Lump BrE (2010), recently acquired by RISD Museum. Veske-McMahon is an associate professor and graduate program director for jewelry and metalsmithing at Rhode Island School of Design.

Jawaher Al Bader, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’05, was awarded the 2022 Art and Design Educator Award by RISD Alumni. (Al Bader received her BArch from Rhode Island School of Design, and she also holds BFA and PhD degrees.) She is currently a faculty member at Kuwait University, College of Architecture, in the Department of Interior Architecture and Visual Communication Design.

Arthur Hutchinson, BArch ’05, received the NAACP Community Legacy Award for his mural design Harriet Tubman: Her Life in Freedom. The 26 x 61-foot mural was unveiled in a ribbon-cutting ceremony last September in Auburn, New York, the city where the abolitionist, activist, and freedom pioneer spent more than 50 years of her life. The design features scenes of her life as a self-emancipated woman, including Tubman as a leader of the 1863 Combahee River Raid, a nurse during the Civil War, an active participant in the women’s suffrage movement, and an older woman in the apple orchard she cultivated at her home.

Corkie Bolton, BFA Fine Arts (Jewelry) ’07, founder of Metalsmith

Doug Parry ’00, Cheers Willets! , 2019, ebony pencil on paper, 30 x 22 inches ( top ). Arthur Hutchinson ’05, Harriet Tubman: Her Life in Freedom , Auburn, New York

metalsmithsociety.com), recently published the book Metalsmith Society’s Guide to Jewelry Making

Nora Gomez-Strauss, MPS Arts and Cultural Management ’08, assumed the role of assistant director of digital content at the Whitney Museum of American Art in September 2022, after 11 years at Public Art Fund serving as director of digital strategies. In her role at the Whitney, she heads digital content strategy and production, video, and social media.

Vicky Chan, RA, AIA, LEED AP, BEAM Pro, BArch ’08, brought his undergraduate thesis, Aquatic City, to completion as a built project, combining farming and urban design. His finished project, K-Farm, has won several awards, including urban design and sustainability honors awards from AIA Hong Kong. K-Farm is the first smart farm to serve the public by making farming fun, educational, and scientific.

Olga Lysenko, BFA Interior Design ’08, and James Scully, BFA Communications Design ’08, debuted Burning Gotham, an audio fiction soap opera set in New York City in

1835 (burninggotham.com). The series premiered on November 27, 2022, and was named a 2022 Tribeca Audio Premieres Official Selection.

Elizabeth Meggs, MFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’08, was one of 20 Americans selected from across the country

by NASA to be an on-site observer of humankind’s first-ever test of planetary defense, NASA’s DART MISSION spacecraft-asteroid collision, on September 26, 2022, at the observation deck at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Meggs will be developing paintings and other creative work inspired by this historically significant event in forthcoming years. Updates are available on her websites, elizabethmeggs.com and meggspaintings.com, as well as social media at @elizabethmeggs and @meggspaintings.

2010s

David Anderson, BArch ’10, received a 2022 NYCxDESIGN Award for his project Groundwork in the Residential Transformation category. Design finalists were hosted and winning projects announced at the NYCxDESIGN week opening party at PENN1 on May 10, 2022.

Giselle Carr, MPS Design Management ’12, founded Stardust LifeCentered Design, the first practice of its kind in the Caribbean, in 2020, at the start of the pandemic. Seeing the opportunity to encourage and foster design as a catalyst of economic, social, and ecological value, the Stardust team created *details, a speaker series addressing issues and solutions in the region and beyond by pairing practitioners from spheres of influence

Vicky Chan ’08, K-Farm

Elizabeth Meggs ’08 at the Johns Hopkins

Applied Physics Laboratory

Nick Higgins, MSLIS ’08; Leigh Hurwitz, MSLIS ’13; and Karen Keys, MSLIS ’07, along with their Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) colleagues Jackson Gomes and Amy Mikel, were named Library Journal’s 2023 Librarians of the Year, in recognition of their work on BPL’s Books Unbanned initiative— honored “for their efforts to ensure free access to books for young people who want and cannot get them, and to raise awareness of the current threat to intellectual freedom and the harm it causes.” Books Unbanned, launched in 2022 amid rising book challenges in the US, provides free ebook access to teens and young adults across the country. As of this January, Library Journal reports, Books Unbanned had issued some 6,000 Brooklyn Public Library

ecards to teens in every US state, DC, and Puerto Rico, with almost 52,000 checkouts. A story detailing the team’s process for developing Books Unbanned and their ongoing work on the initiative was featured in Library Journal, written by fellow School of Information alum Lisa Peet, MSLIS ’14, who was recently named executive editor of the publication.

that have synergy, inflection, or confluence. The series has featured Pratt Institute faculty Mary McBride, Yutaka Takiura, and Lily Urmann. More information can be found at stardustnature.com/details.

Maria De Los Angeles, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’13, has returned to her graduate alma mater, the Yale School of Art, as a full-time critic and assistant director of painting and printmaking. She also had a residency at the Anderson Ranch in Aspen

this year. Adding to her portfolio of public murals, including works in Glen Ellen, California (2021), and at Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital (2022), De Los Angeles will install a new mural at Santa Rosa Junior College this year. At the time of this writing, her work was on view at We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Heather Sterman-Ashley, MLIS ’13, held a 13-year tenure as an archivist

for the Paramount (formerly Viacom/ MTV Networks) media library before transitioning into the user experience field in 2018. Sterman-Ashley applied their UX skills, along with their previous library experience, to contract roles assisting user-research teams at RR Donnelley and HelloFresh. They joined Webflow as the company’s full-time user-research coordinator in March 2022.

Haruka Aoki and John Olson, both MS Communications Design ’14,

Courtesy of Library Journal, photo by Matt Carr

published their first children’s book, Fitting In (Sky Pony Press).

Bryce Barsten, BFA Digital Arts (3D Animation) ’14, and Lingbo Tong, signed their music project Chinese American Bear to China’s largest indie record label, Modern Sky, in 2022. They also embarked on their first West Coast tour in November 2022 and were featured in Vogue China in December 2022. They’ve been featured in dozens of editorial playlists and H&M’s official in-store playlist, and on BBC Radio 6. Barsten writes, produces, and engineers the music, and creates all the visuals as well.

Alex Catalano, BArch ’15, began his professional career with New York City–based Morris Adjmi Architects following graduation. His portfolio includes large-scale residential and commercial developments includ-

foot, 10-story tower in NoHo, and 360 Bowery, 21 stories of full-floor luxury office suites. Catalano is now a registered architect, and in May 2022, returned to his hometown of Boston to join Catalano Architects, a boutique residential architecture firm. He credits Pratt for inspiring him to theorize about what architecture can become and how he can turn those forward-thinking ideas into reality in the studio.

Tamara Townsend, MSLIS ’15, was recently granted tenure at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago, where she serves as department chairperson. Townsend is also serving on the Library Enhancements Transition Committee for incoming Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias.

Miguel Leiro, BID ’16, was recognized by Maison&Objet’s Rising Talent Awards at the January 2023 edition of the international trade fair for interior design held in Paris. This year’s awards were focused on designers in Spain, where Leiro’s practice is based, in Santiago de Compostela. The award citation noted that Leiro “moves with ease between the industrial and artisanal spheres, and the pieces he produces blend function with an innovative creative stance.” At Maison&Objet, Leiro presented new pieces from his Triclinium Collection, which

represents an ongoing design project and methodology initiated in 2017 in Rome, Italy. Leiro’s website is migueleiro.com.

Han Qin, MFA Digital Arts ’17, had a solo exhibition, Home Land Nature, last fall at Gallery North on Long Island and participated in a group show at Untitled Art Fair in Miami with Lonely Rocks

Mary Lempres, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’18; MID ’23, was honored with the Method Renaissance Changemaker Award, which recognizes pioneers in sustainable design. An event to celebrate the Renaissance Awards was held in Florence and covered by Vogue.

Joshe Ordonez, MPS Design Management ’18, founder and CEO of Airpals (airpals.co), received funding from the Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund last summer to develop her B2B software and logistics company. The fund provides founders $100,000 to help grow their businesses as well as hands-on support from Google.

2020s

Madison Wilds Burger, BFA Photography ’20, and her team, ChiTownBio, won the Biodesign Sprint 2022 in the nonstudent category last fall for their project, Sprouted. Together, the team developed a snack bar, made from indigenous crops, including paw paw berries, as part of an initiative to promote urban gardening in abandoned Chicago lots.

Eric Trenkamp, MA Media Studies ’20, Assistant Chair of Film/Video, had his monograph Race, War, and the Cinematic Myth of America: Dust That Never Settles, published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2022. The book explores the evolution of the ever-changing image of white superiority in American cinema from the earliest silent Westerns, through decades of war films, and up to the modern-day comic book genre. It was also selected for the 2022 Pratt Research Open House.

Sabrina Brokenborough, Jasmine Bryant, and Lara Darling, all BFA Fashion Design ’21, were featured in a New York Times story covering the 2022 New York State Sheep and Wool Festival and the young designers finding inspiration at the fiber arts fair. Vogue also highlighted Brokenborough’s experience at the event as well as her striking hand-crocheted outfit, which she designed based on 1830s garments.

Sarah N. Kanu, BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’21, invited by Tim O’Brien, illustrated a piece for Time magazine’s TIMEPieces Genesis Collection Build a Better Future. Referencing Black female quilt and fine artists, Kanu’s collage represents three themes to take into a liberated and thriving future: growth, rest, and play. The work highlights knowledge ever-present in Indigenous communities and pays tribute to Black artists, caregivers, and community workers.

Madelen Nyau, BFA Fashion Design ’21, was named a Council of Fashion Designers of America Launch Pad Program Fellow, for her brand T1tan Studio. The program awards microgrants and mentorship to three BIPOC female founders of earlyphase brands. (cfda.com)

Frankie Brescia, BFA Digital Arts ’22, had her animated film Lovie Dovie named Best Animation at the 2022 SF Queer Film Fest and the 2022 Lovesick Film Festival in Jersey City. Last year, the film was also screened at FilmOut San Diego LGBTQ Film Festival, Long Beach QFilm Festival, and Fringe! Queer Film Fest in London, among other venues. (@prattdigitalarts)

Mariame Kaba, MSLIS ’22, was named a 2022 Freedom Scholar by the Marguerite Casey Foundation, recognized for extensive work on prison abolition. Kaba is the founder and director of Project NIA , a grassroots abolitionist organization focused on ending youth incarceration, and leads the initiative Interrupting Criminalization with fellow researcher Andrea J. Ritchie. Kaba is the author of the New York Times bestseller We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Haymarket Books, 2021), among several other titles that offer support and tools for repair, restoration, and moving toward a future beyond incarceration.

Submission guidelines:

Pratt grads, we want to know what you’re up to, and so do your fellow alumni. Send your updates on work and life to classnotes@pratt.edu. Notes may be up to 100 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 5x7 inches).

Collage by Sarah N. Kanu ’21 ( top ). Race, War, and the Cinematic Myth of America: Dust That Never Settles by Eric Trenkamp ’20

Timeless and Innovative

For 135 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 game design and landscape architecture 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 midst of a $500,000 Bequest Challenge to create a groundswell of support for its future.

We invite you to build 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 during this time.

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.

In Memoriam

Pratt Institute remembers the community members we have recently lost, through February 2023.

Frances Prudence Fitzgibbon Aarts MLS ’72

Walter P. Allspach Jr. attended, Architecture

Michael H. Ankuda BArch ’79

Kristine Battersby attended, Interior Design

Jory W. Berkley BFA Communications Design (Illustration) ’03

Marti Ann Berkowitz BID ’77

Alexandra Zayac Bilyard Certificate, Advertising Design ’46

David Blumenthal MID ’98

Clionike Bradley Certificate, Industrial Design ’52; BID ’53

Donald J. Bussolini BArch ’75

David B. Casey BFA Advertising Design ’66

Maryalice Cassidy MSLIS ’01

John Joseph Cavalieri attended, Advertising Design

Christopher Clay BArch ’89

S. Jeanne Daley attended, Home Economics

Roy B. Davis Jr. MS Fine Arts ’67

Mary Stella De Silva MSLIS ’98

Paul Deesen BID ’54

Paul Deinzer BFA Art Education ’56

May “Toady” Dembowski BFA Advertising Design ’56

Anton Egner BArch ’52

Mary J. Ellis BS Home Economics ’49

Janice Barney Evans MFA Fine Arts ’81

Suzanne Kawa Evans attended, Fine Arts and Graphic Design

Jack P. Falco attended, Graduate Architecture

Robert Anthony Farinella attended, School of Engineering and Science

Maurice Foley BFA Art and Design Education ’54; MID ’62

Edward W. Forman BME ’53

Rod Gailes Visiting Assistant Professor of Film/Video

Alfredo Garibay MArch ’10

Wilma Gawthrop Certificate, Interior Design ’41

William Germer Jr. BArch ’60

Richard G. Gervase MEE ’73

Pamela Kramer Gibbs attended, Advertising Design

Joan Ginsberg BFA Advertising Design and Visual Communications ’73

Gerard Gorman BIE ’73

Henry Gribbon Certificate, Electric Technology ’54

Carl Harbart BFA Interior Design ’57

Barbara “Babs” Harris retired longtime Administrative Secretary of HEOP and Undergraduate Architecture and supporter of the Black Alumni of Pratt

Richard H. Hilsinger BCE ’51

Marguerite A. Houseworth MFA Fine Arts ’89

Harvey Jacoby BArch ’60

Leanne Margaret Harris Jaworski MLS ’69

Mari Schaus Kaestle attended, Foundation Art

Bertram Kalisher attended

Margot Bernheim Karp MLS ’69

Kenneth Kim MFA Computer Graphics ’00

Alex V. Krakovitz BE (Architectural) ’73

Lucian Krukowski MS Art Teacher Education ’58, former faculty member of the Art School and chair of Foundation

Frank R. Kuhn BME ’50

Jeffrey Martin Kustal BEE ’62

Edward L. La Mura BArch ’60

Stephen A. Lamb BS Building Science ’67, former faculty member of Construction Management and Facilities Management

Doris Latham MLS ’68

Barton H. Leit BFA Advertising Design ’60

Julianna Lembeck Certificate, Costume Design ’47

James Lesko MFA Fine Arts ’96

Jong S. (Mark) Lim MFA Fine Arts ’97, longtime School of Design faculty member

George Lois attended, Advertising Design

Lee Lorenz BFA Illustration ’54

Nils E. Luderowski BFA Interior Design ’71

Michele A. Martin MSLIS ’05

Jeanne D. McKiernan Certificate, Food Management ’49

Robert McKim Certificate, Industrial Design ’51; BID ’58

Walter B. Melvin BArch ’65

William J. Miloscia BCE ’62

Jack Minkoff retired longtime professor of Social Science and former chair of Social Science, dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and provost

Robert Mock BArch ’50

Elizabeth M. Morris attended, Costume Design

Virginia Lee “Sally” Hardesty Moss certificate, Advertising Design ’46

Gordon Lewis Neale MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’82

Yvonne Parkes Certificate, Interior Design ’52

Philip Pearlstein former faculty member of the Art School

Frank E. Peteroy BID ’61

Joseph “Skip” Piatti BFA Communications Design ’72

James Polshek Doctor of Fine Arts (Hon.) ’95

Anthony Potulicki Associate of Mechanical Technology Design ’63

Joan Query Certificate, Costume Design ’49

Edward Rach attended, Advertising

Anita R. Rosen Certificate, Illustration ’46

Joseph Ruffo BFA Graphic Arts and Illustration ’63

Federico Ruiz BFA Art Education ’79

Steven Samet attended, Graphic Design

Lenore “Lee” Sanders attended, Home Economics

James L. Sawyer BArch ’73

Rudolph “Rudy” Schindwolf BEE ’51

Lois Schine BME ’47

Arlene Adams Schuyler attended, Foundation Art Constance Riva Wain Schwartz attended, Illustration

Doris A. Sery BFA Illustration ’53

Harriet Shapiro Shane attended, Advertising Design

David G. Shea BS Food Science and Management ’71

Richard W. Simpson BFA Advertising Design ’58

David Sivakoff BFA Interior Design ’57

Arnold Skolnick BFA Advertising Design ’58

Florence J. Smith Certificate, Dietetics ’39

Leonard Soned BFA Advertising ’66

Gregg S. Sonnenfeld BArch ’85

Lillian A. Stevens BFA Merchandising and Fashion Management ’73

Jo Ann Stolley MLS ’61

Edith Hope (Jackson) Talbert attended, Illustration

Martha A. Cesery Taylor BFA Art Education ’72; BArch ’78

Leon F. Tirsch attended, Fashion Design

Bernice “Tooty” (Mayer) Ulanoff certificate, Advertising Design ’46

Victoria Vebell adjunct assistant professor in the Associate Degree Department of the School of Art

Charles L. Vickers attended, Art School

Herbert Vollman BArch ’67

Donald I. Walley Certificate ’52, BFA Advertising Design ’53

Judith Geisler Watts attended, Graduate Library Science

Norman Weiss MS Chemistry ’67

Carole Milda Kennedy Wiedmann BFA Fashion Design ’58

Alisa Wiles AOS Graphic Design ’84

Darron G. “DG” Wilson BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’94

Ronald Wolsky BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’89

Evelyn S. Yee BFA Graphic Arts ’67; MPS Art Therapy and Creativity Development ’80

Steven Zapton MFA Fine Arts ’73

pratt.edu/those-we-have-lost

The brief: “A simple design which would cover the general features of the Institute,” with emblems to highlight the new institution’s educational ambitions in literature, science, art, labor, and skill. In 1887, Pratt Institute founder Charles Pratt outlined his wishes for an institutional seal in a letter to Walter Scott Perry, the first director of the School of Fine and Applied Arts, initiating a design collaboration.

Perry’s interpretation, an early sketch of which appears above, would present the breadth of Pratt’s disciplines beneath a rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge, representing “one of the world’s

great achievements in scientific and perfected technical and labor construction, and also... symbolic of the far reaching influence of Pratt Institute, stretching out from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and beyond.”

It would have enduring power— but not without critique.

Earlier this year, Prattfolio visited Pratt Archives, where Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez, Virginia Thoren and Institute Archivist at Pratt Institute Libraries, guided us through objects and materials from the Memorabilia Collection. On the heels of the visual identity refresh recently undertaken by Pratt Creative Services, we were

especially curious about versions of the Pratt logo that appeared on many items, so Fontánez Rodríguez also shared records from the Charles Pratt Papers related to another Institute mark: Pratt’s seal. Not only were there the original sketches but pages of critical appraisal, notably from graphic design heavyweight W. A. Dwiggins, who even took it upon himself, in 1936, to pre sent several annotated iterations.

Electronic Resources Librarian Matt Garklavs digs into Dwiggins’s feedback in a recent post on the Pratt Libraries blog, Iron and Glass, also highlighting the analysis of alumna Sandra Brannon, MS Communications Design ’84, whose

master’s thesis centered on a seal redesign. Graphic designer and alumnus Paul Rand weighed in as well, taking it upon himself to re-create the seal after having received an honorary degree adorned with it in 1996, Pratt’s Director of Creative Services David Frisco remembers. Nevertheless, Perry’s original design remains in use today.

While the seal’s formal qualities have sparked critique across generations, its heritage may be part of its charm. Where could its origins, combined with Pratt’s iterative spirit, take the seal in the future?

Read more at pratt.edu/prattfolio.

Sketch of Pratt Institute seal design, circa 1887, from the Charles Pratt Papers, courtesy of Pratt Institute Archives.

The Pratt Seal, from Concept to Critique

A symbol of the Institute with lasting power has also inspired its share of design feedback over the years.

My

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, ensures access to world-class faculty, and an environment that is unique and cross-disciplinary. Scan the QR code to make your gift online at giving.pratt.edu.

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.”

Diego Peña, BFA Fine Arts (Painting) ’24

Make an impact and support the next generation of Pratt students.

Lyric

Looks

Photo by Caroline Cramer, BFA Photography ’22