alumni profiles
Aidan O’Connor ’08
MFA History of Decorative Arts and Design
Nina Chanel Abney ’
07
MFA Fine Arts Nina Chanel Abney finds her own swift success in the art world hard to believe. After seeing Abney’s bold, beautiful work at the Parsons Fine Arts Thesis exhibition, representatives of Kravets/Wehby Gallery quickly signed her. Since 2007, Abney has had two acclaimed exhibitions there. She was also selected for the Rubell Family Collection’s prestigious show 30 Americans, featuring pieces by contemporary black artists. Being included in the exhibition, which was on view at the collection’s Miami museum and at Art Basel Miami Beach 2008, “was cool,” Abney says, “because I was with artists that I read about and look up to.” Forbidden Fruit, a recent painting, hangs in the Brooklyn Museum. Although her paintings deal with charged issues, she remains casual to the point of being mysterious when discussing the work. “A lot of people grasp for meaning. I like to let them figure it out on their own.”
After completing her undergraduate degree in archeology and social anthropology at Harvard, Aidan O’Connor hadn’t yet chosen a career. “I loved research and museum work,” she says. An “aha” moment came during a visit to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. “I thought, ‘This is what I want to do—work with actual objects.’” Parsons’ MA program in the History of Decorative Arts and Design, located within the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, provided the training she needed. Work for the National Design Awards and a design history survey book honed O’Connor’s skills while she focused her studies on 20thcentury design and material culture. Today O’Connor is a curatorial assistant in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design, a job she found through Parsons. She recently worked alongside curator Juliet Kinchin on exhibitions of Cold War-era Polish posters and of objects exemplifying “good design” that were displayed by MoMA in the 1940s and 1950s.
James Burr ’10 Hannes Steen Thornhammar ’09
BFA Design & Management Design and Management students Hannes Steen Thornhammar and James Burr created their website Jamspire.com in part to fulfill the need for social networking within the artist community. “We wanted to bring creative people together to share and promote their work and interact with one another,” says Thornhammar. The site, which has around 900 members, functions as an online showcase, offering artists and designers their own galleries in which to upload images of their work. It’s also a virtual workshop of sorts, where participants can get inspiration and feedback from other members, write about art, and share information about events. But Jamspire is also a kind of virtual extension of its founders’ friendship. “Jamspire is the result of what Hannes and I love the most,” says Burr, who graduates in the coming year. “It’s a combination of his love for art and my passion for technology and interface design.” www.jamspire.com
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