Cecilia Cammisa, Natalia Dare, Mike Fakih, Dustin Liebenow, Lisa Sarma, Craig Tiede
PARSONS ADVISORY BOARD
Cotter Christian, Anne Gaines, Jeongki Lim, Sam Mejias, Rory O’Dea, John Roach, Yvonne Watson
MANAGING EDITOR
Audrey Singer
EDITOR AND LEAD WRITER
John Haffner Layden
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Sarah Fensom, Tory Mast, Julia Lynn Rubin, David Sokol
DESIGNER
Grace Hopkins
PRODUCTION COORDINATOR
Sung Baik
COPY EDITOR
Leora Harris
LETTERS AND SUBMISSIONS
re:D welcomes letters and submissions. Include your year of graduation, the degree completed, and your major or program. Unsolicited materials will not be returned.
CONTACT US/ADDRESS CHANGES
re:D, Attn.: Marketing and Communication, 79 Fifth Avenue, 17th floor, New York, NY 10003; red@newschool.edu
REGARDING DESIGN, SEPTEMBER 2024
POSTMASTER
Send address changes to re:D (Regarding Design), 55 West 13 th Street, New York, NY 10011
CREDITS
Cover—Kaitlin Jostad, Zoe Fitzpatrick Rogers; News—(María Berrío) Bruce White/The Metropolitan Museum of Art; (Hazel Clark and Lauren Downing Peters) Adriana Brioso and Noel Woodford/MoMA PS1; (Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby) Kellenberger–White and Carolyn Kirschner; (Magali Duzant); (Mark Gardner) Daniel Michalik; (Jurien Huggins and Kiara Villa) Anna Malinak; (Selena Kimball) Kevin Sparkowich; (Valeria Oliveros Largo); (Ares Maia) Thomas J. Watson Library/The Metropolitan Museum of Art; (Andrea Osto) Vogue Portugal/Elio Nogueira and Christie Lenkevych; (Parsons Festival) MacKenna Lewis for The New School; (Ester Partegàs) Laurie Lambrecht; (Lauren Redniss) Penguin Workshop; (Jeffrey Riman); (Jonathan Square) Jonny Echevarria; (Ryan Van Der Hout); From Stoppers to Starters—Tânia Carreira; MacKenna Lewis for The New School; Ed Reeve for Rockwell Group; David Edwin Zanardi; Building Blocks—Cheng-Luen Hsueh; Aima Idirissova; Brian McGrath; Turning Data into Dialogue—Preeti Gopinath; Jason Greenberg; John Haffner Layden; Profiles—(Zevin K. Acuña) Miles Burger; (Melitta Baumeister and Michał Plata) Michał Plata; (Meg Crane) Ohta; (Chango Cummings) Renders by Bella Ngo; (Stephanie Dang); (Shefali Dhar and Rishi Shankar); (Logan Monroe Goff) Alex Espina, Fionn O’Toole/ Villa Noailles; (Morna Laing) Adèle Lautellier, Monica Fraile Morrison, Marco Pecorari, and Ilaria Trame; (Grace Parker Puls); (Andrew Shea) Olivia Harris; We’re Parsons—Ben Ferrari; Matthew Mathews; Martin Seck; re:WIND—Berenice Abbott/Nicholas Calcott; George Bates and The New School Art Collection; Tom Moore; the New York Times; Martin Seck.
The New School is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution.
Published 2025 by The New School.
Produced by Marketing and Communication, The New School.
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re:D (Regarding Design)
2025
re:D—an award-winning showcase of work by Parsons students, faculty, and alumni—celebrates more than a century of changemaking creativity and critical thought
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Designing new ways forward
In these challenging times, our community is joining forces with others around the world to maintain progress toward a more equitable, sustainable, and wellnessfostering world. Cities like New York and Paris—our university’s homes—attract and nourish the talent and resilience needed for the task. In this issue, re:D brings you into classrooms where faculty, students, and alumni are developing new approaches to urban renewal, the rise of AI and other challenging technologies, sustainable making, and public engagement with critical issues like forced migration, polarization, and the democratic process.
about the Design
This issue’s cover—REBOOT #3 (front cover) and REBOOT #1 (back cover) by Kaitlin Jostad, MFA Fine Arts ’21—embodies the challenges facing artists, designers, and strategists who seek to connect real-life experience to digital tools and realms both elegantly and ethically. For her painting, Jostad began by sketching with oil sticks and then scanned and processed the results. She concluded by rendering the final composition meticulously in paint on canvas. “The tools let me experiment, distorting and layering what I had already made by hand,” she says. Jostad’s grids reflect her experience as an economist working the stock trading floor, where digital data and humans collide. Her “real-virtual-real” approach yields lush, mysterious canvases that call to mind artifacts ranging from fading embroidery and beading charts to the topographical and heat maps employed by climate activists.
Designer Grace Hopkins chose a building-block motif to suggest the multiple perspectives, approaches, and tools needed to unite society and move it forward toward positive outcomes. The blocks echo Jostad’s matrices and connect to the issue’s contents, including modular pieces by students Zevin K. Acuña (see page 25) and Emily Quinn and Aidan Murphy (see pages 8 and 10) as well as the neighborhood blocks discussed in “Building Blocks” and the data grids explored in “Turning Data into Dialogue.” The fine lines, 3D text boxes, and motifs of Hopkins’ design, which call to mind those found in graphic design software, further hint at the support structures needed to develop design-led solutions to advance us as a global society. This issue’s spot colors—green and burnished copper—call to mind nature, whose regenerative materials students are drawing on in their work as a means of advancing environmental preservation.
The bark of cork trees can be harvested periodically and used as is (see Katarzyna Kubrak ’s project on page 9) or ground and molded into composites dense enough to serve in fabricating buildings, interiors, and furnishings. Read more about this regenerative, versatile, and resilient material—and our community’s work with it—on page 6.
MFA Textiles student Bhoomika Prasad took part in a collaborative project involving the use of sustainable fibers supplied by Aquafil, a longtime program partner, and information from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. Her project, a data visualization in the form of a double cloth weaving, presents statistics related to the barriers to education faced by people migrating to Phuket, Thailand.
NEWS
Recent achievements of our community of student, faculty, and alumni innovators
FROM STOPPERS TO STARTERS: LAUNCHING CORK INNOVATION
A course partnership with Rockwell Group and Corticeira Amorim challenged BFA students to develop new uses for cork for the world’s foremost product fair
BUILDING BLOCKS
On view at this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture is a striking architectural model by Parsons BFA Architectural Design students, who created new buildings to meet local needs in a historic Taiwanese district, using concepts developed by Parsons professor Brian McGrath
TURNING DATA INTO DIALOGUE
An MFA Textiles program collaboration with the United Nations and the sustainable fiber firm Aquafil uncovered surprising connections between craft, storytelling, and social and environmental impact
PROFILES
Meet our changemaking students, faculty, and alumni and discover work that is making the world a better place for all
WE’RE PARSONS
Learn more about us and what we offer 2 6 12 16 22 32 33
RE:WIND
During the McCathy era, murals by legendary Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco installed at The New School sparked debate over freedom of expression, offering lessons for today
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1 DESIGNED FOR DISCOVERY
Our community continues to shape public dialogue on critical matters through exhibitions and courses. In Plain View: Transforming Freshkills from Landfill to Landscape, on view this spring at the Aronson Gallery, was organized by faculty members John Roach , Andrew Shea (see page 30), and Caroline Dionne in partnership with Staten Island’s Freshkills Park and local schools. Installed works brought together art, ecology, and technology to shed light on environmental challenges and share sustainability curricula created for local schools. Led by Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT) faculty member Denise Lam , students worked with the Brooklyn Museum’s collections to decolonize African historical narratives, resulting in an exhibition titled The African Archive Beyond Colonization. Revolisyon Toupatou/Rendering Revolution, an exhibition organized by ADHT’s Jonathan Square, along with Siobhan Meï, showcased Haitian apparel and fashion’s role in cultural expression and activism. Stan Walden (MArch ’24) curated AIDS at The New School: What Is Remembered?, a show examining personal and collective memory and the university’s role in AIDS activism. Walden’s project was inspired in part by an urban design class taught by Brian McGrath (see page 12) on promoting nonheteronormative cultures in NYC. Students taking part in an ongoing collaboration with Pride Live at the Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center and receiving mentorship from Alfred Zollinger and Cotter Christian of Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments recently devised design schemes for Setting the Table, an interactive exhibition examining
notions of queer belonging and chosen families through a reimagined dinner table created by six artists from the university. Visitors handled artifacts from LGBTQ history, wrote in a journal and signed napkins documenting their visit, and shared stories at stonewalltable.com. newschool.edu/red/view newschool.edu/red/archive newschool.edu/red/revolution newschool.edu/red/regenerations
2 FACULTY FEATURED
This year’s Guggenheim Fellows include Selena Roy Kimball (associate professor of contemporary art practice) and Ester Partegàs (part-time lecturer) from Parsons’ School of Art, Media, and Technology. New School President Joel Towers was named to City & State New York’s Manhattan Power 100, an annual list of influential New Yorkers. Glenn Shrum (associate professor of lighting design and interdisciplinary practice) received an award at the EdisonReport 10th Annual Lifetime Achievement Awards. Zinnia, a patented 3D Light created by School of Constructed Environments part-time lecturer Lara Knutson , was featured at the USA Pavilion of 2025 World Expo in Osaka, Japan, this past April. Also in April, Marisa Morán Jahn (director of the BFA Integrated Design program and assistant professor of design strategies) launched HOOPcycle, a mobile unit that transforms streets into basketball courts. The project, supported by the New School Faculty Fund and the Joyce Foundation, was created with BFA Integrated Design senior Zevin K. Acuña (see page 25) and 2024 alum Em Flaire. Christine Facella (director of the MFA Industrial Design program and assistant professor of product and industrial
design) was among the 25 recipients of an Independent Project Grant, given jointly by the Architectural League of New York and The New York State Council on the Arts. Research by Koray Caliskan (professor of strategic design and management) was highlighted in a Financial Times column about Bitcoin, in which he noted that the currency “remains a peculiarly faith-based phenomenon with limited practical use.” Richard The (program director of MS Data Visualization and assistant professor of interaction design) was inducted into the Alliance Graphique Internationale. At the 11th annual Canadian Arts & Fashion Awards in Toronto, School of Fashion dean Ben Barry received the Changemaker Award for his work on expanding curricula on inclusivity and diversity in fashion. Daniel Michalik (associate dean of Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments and associate professor of product and industrial design) (see page 6) was included in the North American Design 2024 series of independent designers selected by the British online platform dezeen and had a solo show at Available Items gallery in Tivoli, New York. Communication design professors YuJune Park and Caspar Lam , assisted by Erin Dowding (MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies ’24), won the Anthem Award for their work on the Tremaine Art Collection website, which was also nominated for a Webby People’s Voice Award. A+A+A, the studio of MFA Interior Design program faculty member Arianna Deane, was cited as an important new firm by AIA NY, which included the studio on its New Practices New York 2025 list. Angeline Gragasin (part-time lecturer in the School of Art and Design History and Theory) completed a Yaddo residency, in which she developed a new feature-length screenplay. Associate
professor of photography Arthur Ou received a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University. Mel O’Callaghan , a Parsons Paris BFA Art, Media, and Technology faculty member, was awarded the Prix Carta Bianca, a FrancoItalian art prize that supports contemporary artistic practice. Mark Gardner—an associate professor of architectural practice and society and the director of design-build at SCE—received the 2025 Van Alen Institute Torchbearer Award for his work creating more equitable cities through inclusive design, including mentorship at Brooklyn’s Youth Design Center.
3 ALL ROWING TOGETHER
When Benedetta Pizzi , MPS Fashion Management ’25, was challenged in a class last year to find ways to make the apparel industry more accessible to low-resourced creators, she created a new live platform for presenting work. Last November, Pizzi and fellow MPS students and alumni hosted Second Row in the university’s Vera List Courtyard, showcasing 12 NYC designers, including members of the Parsons community. Collaborators included Alexander Pidzamecky ’24, who oversaw public relations and sound design, and secondyear student Aanya Singh , who served as executive producer and co-creative director.
4 PARSONS FESTIVAL
Festival 2025 celebrated Parsons’ graduating students through on-campus and online public exhibitions. New this year was the Narwhal Tank Innovative Ventures Showcase, a business pitching event presented by Parsons’ Entrepreneurs Lab and the New School Impact Entrepreneurship Initiative (IEI) and sponsored by Capegemini and Designity, a firm
launched by Shahrouz Varshabi , MFA Design and Technology ’14. Students and alumni competed for funding to support socially and environmentally beneficial ventures. IEI fellow Eileen Level , MS Media Management ’22, won first prize, and the finalists received funding for prototypes. BFA Fashion Design graduates also presented looks on a runway in Barneys, the beloved shuttered downtown boutique. MA History of Design and Curatorial Studies and MA Fashion Studies students held their graduate symposia at Starr Foundation Hall. Communication Design ( AAS , BFA , and MPS ) graduates hosted a book launch at 65 West 11th Street; MS Data Visualization students presented their keynotes and AAS Fashion Design and Fashion Marketing and Communication graduating students held thesis shows at the same location. Students from the BFA and MFA Design and Technology programs presented screenings, performances, and popup displays at Mosaic, a show at 6 East 16th Street; BBA Strategic Design and Management program graduates also exhibited their thesis work there. The BFA Illustration and MFA Fine Arts programs presented shows at the Sheila C. Johnson Center’s Kellen Gallery and Aronson Galleries. BFA Illustration graduates also held a screening at the University Center and participated in the Parsons Animation Festival at Kellen Auditorium—which was also the site of the BFA Design History and Practice symposium. Graduating BFA Design History and Practice students also showed work at La MaMa Galleria. MS Strategic Design and Management , BFA Fashion Design , and AAS Fashion Design and Fashion Marketing and Communication graduates showed thesis work at the University Center.
BFA Integrated Design and MFA Photography program graduates exhibited work at 66 Fifth Avenue, and BFA Photography hosted a thesis exhibition in Brooklyn. Thesis work by BFA and MFA Fine Arts program students graced the walls of 25 East 13th Street. MFA Textiles hosted a thesis exhibition and display of work from a recent partnership at 39 West 13th Street. All programs of Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments— BFA Architectural Design , MArch , AAS , BFA , and MFA Interior Design , BFA Product Design , MFA Industrial Design , and MFA Lighting Design —presented capstone projects at 25 East 13th Street and 39 West 13th Street.. Graduates of MFA Transdisciplinary Design , MS Design and Urban Ecologies , and the Parsons Scholars Program also presented their thesis and endof-year work publicly. During NYCxDESIGN, Kiara Villa , BFA Interior Design ’25, and Jurien Huggins , MFA Industrial Design ’25, took part in a showcase of work by students at NYC design schools held at FIT. newschool.edu/red/festival-2025
5 BOOKED SOLID
Faculty and alumni published widely this year. Robert McKinnon (MA Media Studies ’05, a School of Design Strategies part-time assistant professor) released America’s Dreaming, a children’s book on belonging and the power of reading. Lauren Redniss (associate professor of illustration) published Heatwave, a children’s book that received accolades including a spot on NPR’s Books We Love list. Hazel Clark (professor of design studies and fashion studies) and Lauren Downing Peters (MA Fashion Studies ’12) co-edited the anthology Fashion in American Life, which challenges commonly held ideas about fashion
production. Jeffrey Riman (part-time assistant professor) co-edited Optimizing AI in Higher Education. University Professors of Design and Social Inquiry Fiona Raby and Anthony Dunne released Not Here, Not Now: Speculative Thought , Impossibility, and the Design Imagination Magali Duzant (MFA Photography ’14) launched her book La vie is like that , which explores language, identity, and change. newschool.edu/red/books
6 ALUMNI ACHIEVEMENTS
Nicky Campbell (BBA Strategic Design and Management ’18) and Sable Elyse Smith (MFA Design and Technology ’13) recently won TIME100 Next awards for their contributions in the Creators and Artists categories. An MS Strategic Design and Management team once again won the Rotman Design Challenge, which this year tasked students from leading global business programs with addressing the needs of gig workers for Canada’s Intact Insurance. The winners were Ananya Harshini , Alana Rhodin , Yash Sonwaney , Meenu Jitendrakumar Runiwal , and Jun Shin . Another Parsons team took fourth place, and four other Parsons teams placed in the semifinals. Four Parsons alumni were named to Forbes ’ 30 Under 30 list for 2025: Ada Hu (BFA Product Design ’20, founder of NU Media), Andrew Kwon (BFA Fashion Design ’19, bridal designer), Caroline Zimbalist (BFA Fashion Design ’19, artist and designer), and Colleen Allen (former BFA Fashion Design student, founder of the eponymous design firm). Parsons Paris graduate Milagros Pereda (MFA Fashion Design and the Arts ’24) was included on Forbes ’ 30 Under 30 Europe list. Pereda, along with Youssef Zogheib, Sophia Sacchetti , and Xinyi He, fellow 2024 graduates
6
of Parsons Paris fashion programs, showed work at Hongik Fashion Week 2024. Zogheib (Parsons Paris BFA Fashion Design ’24) was also a finalist for the 2025 MITTELMODA Fashion Award. And Zogheib, He (MFA Fashion Design and the Arts), and two other Parsons Paris 2024 graduates— Layla Al Tawaya (BFA Fashion Design) and Dennis Sanders (MFA Fashion Design and the Arts)—were among the ten finalists in the 2025 Festival de Hyères in France. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s annual Collab Student Design Competition, MFA Industrial Design student Valeria Oliveros Largo won second place for Venn Plate, and Nina Collins , also an MFA Industrial Design student, won second honorable mention for Cadence. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired seven zines by Ares Maia (BFA Communication Design ’20) that celebrate her experiences as an immigrant and artist. Matthew Beeston (BFA Fashion Design ’23) and third-year Fashion Design student Christopher Seng took part in this year’s Gucci Changemakers North America Scholarship Program. María Berrío (BFA Fine Arts ’04), a Brooklyn-based artist known for her largescale paintings (such as Closed Geometry, shown above) is now represented by Hauser & Wirth. The gallery supported her solo exhibition The End of Ritual in London and will mount her solo show at Art Basel Miami Beach in December. Kairu Tong and Ananta Gupta (both BFA Product Design ’25) and Jurien Huggins (MFA Industrial Design ’25) were selected as the three top winners of the IDSA NYC Rising Design Visionaries Awards. Tommy Yang (MArch ’20) received an honorable mention in ACSA’s 2024 Timber Education Prize competition for his work on communitypowered design and Indigenous timber
construction. Emma Joan Foley (BFA Fashion Design ’24) won the 17th annual Supima Design Competition and a $10,000 prize for her collection. Mohammad Valizadeh Alvan (MArch/MFA Lighting Design ’25) was awarded a merit scholarship by the Illuminating Engineers Society of New York City. Parsons BFA Interior Design students participated in the John P. Eberhard Student Design Competition; 2025 MFA Lighting Design program graduates Irene Kwon and Sherry Li received honorable mentions for their project, and Shayni Morakhia and Mirayla Abdullayeva were named finalists. This year, Metropolis named Kiara Villa (BFA Interior Design ’25), Zoha Tasneem (MFA Interior Design ’25), and Khadeine Ali (MFA Interior Design ’25) to its Future100 list, which spotlights top graduating architecture and interior design students in the United States and Canada. Ali was among the three winners of the fourth annual Hazel Siegel Scholarship, presented by the International Interior Design Association’s New York Chapter (IIDA NY). In the recent Global Footwear Awards, BFA Fashion Design senior Xinran Cheng was named a winner in the Artistic Footwear (Student) category for her vegetable-tanned recycled-leather shoe. Six recent Parsons graduates were shortlisted for the most recent Arts Thread Global Creative Graduate Showcase: Richa Modi (BFA Fashion Design ’24), Verena Liu (BFA Fashion Design ’24), Reshma Thomas (MFA Design and Technology ’24), Sidhya Tikku (BFA Communication Design ’24), Melis Dizdar (MFA Industrial Design ’24), and Alejandro Aguirre (MFA Photography ’24). Dizdar, with fellow MFA Industrial Design alum Meltem Parlak ’18 , also created Paw District, postcards depicting New York City neighborhoods as dog breeds, for
NYCxDESIGN’s souvenir showcase. Secondyear MFA Transdisciplinary Design students XuanXuan Huang and Zoë Ryan Evans , along with second-year MS Design and Urban Ecologies student Lauren Leiker, were selected as Community Planning Fellows. Four Parsons seniors were chosen for the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program, which supports study and internships abroad: Tiffany Chung (BFA Interior Design), Nicole Bartnikowski (BA Journalism + Design/BFA Photography), Foster Johnson-Lewis (BFA Illustration), and Anabella Orellana (BFA Product Design). At this year’s WANTED showcase at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), Reese Peters (AAS Interior Design ’25), Nina Collins (first-year MFA Industrial Design student), and Aidan Reinhold (BFA Integrated Design ’24) exhibited pieces and the MFA Industrial Design program showed work. MFA Photography senior Lindsay Perryman , whose work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, was nominated for Cultured magazine’s Young Photographers 2024 list and shortlisted for the Center for Photography Workshop’s 2025 Saltzman Prize for Emerging Photographers. Buzz Beyond Borders , a thesis by 2024 MFA Transdisciplinary Design alums Frida Moreno and Skylar Wang , was featured in Interdependence, an exhibition in Politecnico di Milano’s Design Week, and at an exhibition and event connected to the World Design Capital San Diego–Tijuana 2024 Festival. Several 2024 MFA Fashion Design and Society program alums were profiled in Teen Vogue’s coverage of New York Fashion Week, including Patrick Taylor, Kishan Singh Tahara , and Margarida Feijão. Taylor (MFA Fashion Design and Society ’24) also won
the Graduate category of the 2025 Fashion Trust U.S. Awards, presented to emerging designers; Bashar Abouljoud (BFA Fashion Design ’24) was a finalist. Taylor and Naya El Ahdab (Parsons Paris BFA Fashion Design ’24) were both selected as winners of the ITS Contest 2025, receiving €10K prizes, industry mentorships, and spotlights at Italy’s ITS Arcademy—Museum of Art in Fashion. El Ahdab also won the David Delfín International Fashion Award for Original Talent at the 2024 Sustainability, Purpose, Aura, Mainstream competition held in Málaga, Spain. Thesis work by Andrea Osto (Parsons Paris BFA Fashion Design ’23) was featured in Vogue Portugal’s 2024 Big Book of Trends. To Reflect Everything, a seven-foot mirrored sculpture on the theme of a queer utopia by Ryan Van Der Hout (MFA Fine Arts ’24), was displayed in Washington Square Park through March. Van Der Hout’s collaborators included designer Stefano Pagani (BFA Product Design ’25) and fabricators Victoria Norton (MFA Fine Art ’24) and Shay Salehi (MFA Fine Art ’23); Gino Romero (MFA Fine Art ’23) also presented a site-specific work. BFA Fashion Design alums Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez , founders of the fashion firm Proenza Schouler, were recently named creative directors of the celebrated Spanish fashion house Loewe.
7 IN(TER)VENTION CONVENTION
The MS Strategic Design and Management program hosted Good Interventions , its third annual economic and strategic design symposium and exhibition, aimed at highlighting innovative work that tackles today’s most pressing challenges. This year’s curatorial team and jury selected projects including an initiative that proposes
transforming parts of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park into sustainable burial grounds and a community-driven open-source image data set that highlights the challenges faced by people with color vision deficiency. newschool.edu/red/good
8 PARSONS BENEFIT
The 76th annual Parsons Benefit, held at Halo, in the Financial District, raised $1.2 million for student scholarships while celebrating individuals who have advanced design industries. Parsons Table Award honorees included Artemis Patrick , president and CEO of Sephora North America; Madelyn Wills , CEO of the Fifth Avenue Association and former president of the Hudson River Park Trust; and fashion designer Willy Chavarria . On view was student work from recent industry collaborations—a BFA Product Design class partnering with Rockwell Group and Corticeira Amorim (see page 6) and an MFA Textiles course in which students worked with the United Nations International Organization for Migration (UK) team and the sustainable fiber company Aquafil (see page 16). BFA Fashion Design and MFA Fashion Design and Society graduating students presented work on a runway, while School of Jazz and Contemporary Music students—vocalist Julieta Iris and instrumentalists Hugo Matile, Robert Nicholls , and Phineas Davenport performed for attendees including Calvin Klein , benefit MC Zanna Roberts Rassi and co-chairs Mazdack Rassi and Gena Smith , members of the university community, and industry representatives.
newschool.edu/red/benefit
From Stoppers to Starters Launching cork Innovation
A School of Constructed Environments course partnership with industry changemakers Rockwell Group and Corticeira Amorim challenged BFA students to develop new cork products for Milan Design Week, the world’s foremost product design event—and take the sustainable material and emerging designers to the next level
By Sarah Fensom
T his past April, throngs of design manufacturers, retailers, and journalists shuttled around Milan’s winding streets in search of the next big thing among the exhibitions during Milan Design Week and its centerpiece, the Salone del Mobile product fair. With each passing year, the demand for sustainably made furnishings is reflected more directly in the goods for sale, product orders, and stories filed by reporters.
Answering that call this year was a striking installation called Casa Cork by David Rockwell. The installation invited visitors to rediscover cork, a highly adaptable and regenerative material typically encountered in unstoppering a fine vintage. The project was conceived by the globally renowned architecture and design firm Rockwell Group (think Nobu, W hotels, NYC’s Shed, and the Perelman Performing Arts Center) in partnership with Portugal’s Corticeira Amorim, the world’s leading supplier of cork, and a co-founder, with Rockwell, of the sustainability-focused nonprofit Cork Collective. Connecting the partners was Parsons and the work of a class led by Daniel Michalik, the associate dean of and an associate professor in Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments (SCE) and a product designer who has worked with cork for 20 years.
Casa Cork was located in the heart of Milan’s arts and design district. Entering visitors passed a six-foot 3D-printed replica of a cork tree by the Spanish workshop Factum Arte, and were then met with furnishings and objects by established manufacturers like the New York–based Chilewich textile company and emerging designers—including Michalik and his undergraduate students. The installation was the site of public programs such as educational workshops, design conversations, and other events.
The buzz from the fair, according to Michalik, was that cork “had arrived as a material of the future.” Parsons BFA students, who presented a workshop at Casa Cork on cork’s broad applications in addition to exhibiting their designs, had been an integral part of its arrival.
“ We’re a school guided by material exploration for the purposes of reducing our carbon footprint, and cork can play a big part in that.”
Daniel Michalik , associate professor of product and industrial design
TOP LEFT: Often discarded, corks are an endlessly recyclable, sustainable material that is gaining popularity among designers. TOP RIGHT: On-site in Portugal, students in Daniel Michalik’s class Cork in the Constructed Environment presented their projects for the Milan Design Week industry fair in a house designed by celebrated architect Álvaro Siza. Projects ranged from household goods like door handles and furniture to an experimental item: a privacy hood to be worn in museums. BOTTOM: BFA Architectural Design student Rucha Kumthekar created Tapeçaria—perforated molded-cork tiles inspired by Portuguese ceramic versions. The tiles offer shade while letting some light through.
Stoppers Starters
BELOW: Quinn created a product, shown here, that can serve as a stool or a table. Its elements are joined with wine corks used as connecting pins—an ingenious and practical feature. In their projects, students made use of attributes of cork including its flexibility, moldability, fire and water resistance, and ability to insulate by reducing the transfer of sound and heat.
The journey to the unique learning opportunities of Milan Design Week began in Michalik’s spring 2025 SCE elective class, Cork in the Constructed Environment. Michalik conceived the course as a collaboration with a longtime SCE partner, Corticeira Amorim, and Rockwell Group, founding partners of Cork Collective. The 12 undergraduates in the course represented diverse study paths at Parsons—the BFA Architectural Design, Interior Design, Product Design, and Integrated Design programs—and brought their own perspectives and design solutions. All 12 benefited from the intensive hands-on industry partnership while getting a taste of the product design industry’s competitive side: The course included a design contest in which the students’ final projects were judged by a panel of industry leaders, who selected 6 to be shown at Casa Cork. It also offered students a glimpse of the field’s global reach. The class traveled together to Portugal for a week at Amorim’s iCork innovation lab, toured the region’s cork forests, and explored Milan’s Design Week and industry scene. Along the way, the students gained experience and facility with cork’s sustainability, malleability, and resiliency, properties that make the material endlessly recyclable and ideal for a range of design practices. Ultimately, the course delivered on Parsons’ and Cork Collective’s shared vision of connecting the materials and the designers of the future.
A course like this, with its industry support and the international travel it involves, was several years in the making, Michalik explains. “I have a long-standing relationship with Amorim, and I was able to set up the first iteration of this course as a Parsons–Amorim-partnered elective in
spring 2023,” says the designer. Amorim donated a large stockpile of cork from recycled bottle stoppers to Parsons, and Michalik asked students to experiment with the material, making whatever they wanted on the basis of their study interests. “Amorim brought the students to Portugal for a week to attend their innovation lab, where they test cork as a material and develop new applications for it,” Michalik explains. “When the students came back to New York, they used that knowledge to finalize their concepts and show them in a public exhibition during New York Design Week.” At the exhibition’s opening, a mutual friend put Michalik in contact with David Rockwell, the founder and president of Rockwell Group, who was working on the early stages of Cork Collective. Michalik began consulting with Rockwell on that project, and with the support of New School President Joel Towers, the three gathered resources for a spring 2025 class that could attend Milan Design Week.
“Of course we thought about Parsons as a partner on Casa Cork; Parsons has been such a leader in design education.”
David Rockwell, founder and president of Rockwell Group
For Rockwell, the focus of Cork Collective is to raise awareness about cork and its astonishingly varied uses. He knew Parsons would be an ideal partner to advance this aim. “Cork is an unbelievably robust, renewable material that’s out there unused in great amounts—of 13 billion corks, less than 1 percent are recycled,” Rockwell says. “Once we started to zero in on how to unlock the potential for unrecycled cork and invent ways it can be used and make people aware of it, of course we thought about Parsons as a partner on Casa Cork; Parsons has been such a leader in design education.”
Michalik notes that cork fits nicely into the mission of Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments. “What we teach students is that as the designers of things and spaces, we are complicit in 40 percent of the carbon emissions going into the atmosphere. We’re a school guided by material exploration for the purposes of reducing our carbon footprint,” Michalik says. “And cork can play a big part in that. It is one of the most powerfully carbon-negative materials that can be used for building. Cork can be worked using the same equipment and tools as wood, has tons of helpful properties—it’s waterproof, heat resistant, and sound and vibrationdampening, to name just a few.” It’s also easy and fun to work with, he says.
Rockwell and Cork Collective were keen on launching a high-profile student design competition as part of the spring 2025 course, Michalik says. Michalik developed a contest brief stipulating that student projects had
ABOVE RIGHT: BFA Integrated Design student Carolina Miñana and BFA Product Design student Emily Quinn led a cork-molding workshop at Casa Cork in Milan.
to be made of recycled cork wine stoppers and ultimately recyclable themselves, meaning that designs couldn’t incorporate glue or other materials that can’t be reused. Projects could be prototypes or scale models but had to embody a high level of craft. Designs could be functional— and most were—or purely conceptual or artistic.
Working with a new material was a major draw for students. “It’s not often that a Parsons course focuses on just one material. This class gave us an opportunity that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible: to work with cork, which can be
“This class really built my confidence in my design work. Now I know more about what I am capable of.”
Aidan Murphy, BFA Architectural Design student
LEFT: Shown here are Daniel Michalik and his students after a visit to a montado a Portuguese cork oak tree ecosystem that supplies much of Corticeira Amorim’s raw material. Amorim’s chief sustainability officer considers the visit a critical part of students’ learning: “The best way to understand cork is to experience it as part of a holistic system rooted in nature, tradition, and innovation. It helps students grasp cork’s environmental and social value.” BELOW: For her cordless LED lamp, Katarzyna Kubrak created a shade by blowing glass into a cork mold that later became the lamp’s base. She also used cork to texture the glass shade.
hard to get your hands on,” says Emily Quinn, a BFA Product Design junior whose modular design, Congregation, features anthropomorphic legs that that are connected using wine stoppers to form side tables. Working solely with recycled cork gave students the opportunity to intensively explore the material’s unique features. “We were able to develop a deep relationship with cork and get to know its properties—how we could bend and layer it, for instance—and do so in the very fluid environment that Parsons provides,” says Carolina Miñana, a BFA Integrated Design senior. “I was interested in first playing with cork and seeing how that play could inform the creation of something useful.”
“ We had the space to explore the specific processes and properties of cork that spoke to us.”
Katarzyna Kubrak , BFA Product Design student
BFA Product Design student Katarzyna Kubrak explains that Michalik shared traditional Portuguese designs with the class and showed how cork could be used in a range of products. “Then, going from the history of the material, Dan demonstrated in his studio how he molds cork and showed us all of the machines and processes he uses,” Kubrak says, describing the distinct sheets, blocks, and granules of cork Michalik introduced to the class. “He provided us with a basic knowledge of the material in an approachable way. Then we had the space to explore the specific processes and properties of cork that spoke to us.”
Kubrak developed Krystyna Luminaire, a series of lamps made of cork and hand-blown glass. “I’d already experienced cork through glass
blowing. There’s a cork paddle that glassblowers typically use—it’s used to shape molten glass or squish bubbles because it doesn’t burn,” Kubrak says. “I was drawn to cork’s fire resistance. I learned that in a forest fire, a cork oak tree can survive because its bark will burn but the interior remains protected. I thought that was poetic, and I wanted to use that idea in shaping glass.”
Kubrak’s glass lampshades are shaped twice by cork—first by a cork glass mold that gives the glass its basic form and eventually becomes the base of the lamp and again by another virgin cork mold that gives the glass lampshades their organic texture.
Linnea (Hanna) Wallin, an Interior Design student at Parsons visiting from Stockholm’s Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts, and Design, says, “I previously took a course at my home university in Sweden, where we discussed sustainable materials, but at Parsons, I was able to actually work with the material and
BELOW: Students learned techniques for working with cork— including molding ground cork, as shown here—in Professor Michalik’s studio in Brooklyn.
ABOVE: Linnea (Hanna) Wallin, a visiting student from Sweden, demonstrates her wine cork remover, made from a sturdy, dense type of cork. Students’ projects enabled them to explore different kinds of cork and their applications. RIGHT: Wallin’s cork remover and corkscrew cover sit at the top of a grouping of carved cork objects that form a sculptural tabletop tableau.
understand its capabilities.” In the Parsons course, Wallin created Saca Pedra (the name means “open stone” in Portuguese), a set of bottle openers made of carved recycled cork. Designed to be displayed rather than hidden in a drawer, they resemble boulders or the abstract sculptures of Joan Miró or Alexander Calder.
Modern artists weren’t Wallin’s only influences; the trip to Amorim’s facilities also played a major role in shaping her idea. “It was inspiring to go to Portugal and see the whole circle of the material—the cork seed, harvesting, processing, and the varieties with different densities,” she says. For Miñana, inspiration came from another leg of the class’s sojourn in Portugal—a visit to a montado, a rich ecosystem of cork oak forests. Miñana went on to create Montado, a series of serving trays incorporating the “textures, patterns, and organic rhythms of the landscape.” Cristina Rios Amorim, Corticeira Amorim’s chief sustainability officer, says the student visits are part of her company’s goal of “cultivating awareness around circularity, regeneration, and the importance of working with materials that respect natural cycles. We hope to spark a lifelong commitment to sustainable design.”
It was research on Portuguese building typologies that enabled BFA Architectural Design student Rucha Kumthekar to solidify her concept.
“Because I come with a background in architecture, I spoke with Dan before the course about the ways cork could be used for insulation—that was my first impression of cork in the built environment. In the class, I saw a much deeper potential for cork in architecture; I then investigated local Portuguese tiling techniques and found new opportunities. I was looking at the way people made their terracotta tiling and floor mosaics, and I ended up creating Tapeçaria, my tile project.” Kumthekar’s perforated cork tiles can be connected to make roofs or screens. They filter light and cast striking shadows through their intricate patterns while providing insulation.
In March, Michalik drew on Parsons’ and Rockwell Group’s myriad industry connections to assemble a distinguished jury for the final critique and selection of projects to appear at Casa Cork, alongside the work of students from Politecnico di Milano: David Rockwell; Carlos Bessa, Amorim’s marketing director; Paola Antonelli, MoMA’s chief design curator; Susan
ABOVE: Design experts serving as the final competition judges included, from left to right, John McPhee, CEO of Chilewich; David Rockwell, founder of Rockwell Group (shown holding a maquette of Aidan Murphy’s project); Annie Block, executive editor of Interior Design magazine; and Noah Schwarz, vice president of Product Design at MillerKnoll.
LEFT: BFA Architectural Design student Aidan Murphy shows the competition judges the components of his expandable cork bench—whose design was inspired by classical architecture—and the way they are held together by two rods. In judging the course’s winning projects, Cristina Rios Amorim praised students’ “sophisticated understanding of how design and sustainability can work hand in hand.”
Sellers, a founding partner of the design studio 2x4; Noah Schwarz, head of product development for MillerKnoll; John
innovator Chilewich; and Annie Block, the executive editor
Interior Design magazine.
Jury members point out that the benefits of Parsons–industry partnerships go both ways. “We love working with Parsons students for the fresh perspectives they offer,” says McPhee, who notes that Chilewich is exploring ways to integrate cork into its product line and investigating other sustainable, rapidly renewing, and recyclable materials. “The students don’t know what they don’t know, which is often very helpful. They don’t know, ‘Oh, you can’t do that’ or ‘Oh, we’ve tried that before.’ The new ideas they bring are super-beneficial. They open our eyes. We learn from them.”
Rios Amorim echoes McPhee’s observation: “Parsons offers an incredible ecosystem of creativity and critical thinking, and its students bring ideas that challenge and inspire us.”
“Parsons offers an incredible ecosystem of creativity and critical thinking, and its students bring ideas that challenge and inspire us.”
Cristina Rios Amorim, chief sustainability officer and board member of Corticeira Amorim
“The students presented at the final crit with an impressive level of professionalism,” says Michalik, noting that before the nerve-wracking final round, he assured students that they were “starting from a position of winning” by undertaking the robust research and design process. For Kumthekar, the critique demonstrated the importance of trusting her gut instincts. “Initially I thought I had to make an industrial design project, but I went forward with exploring techniques as an architecture student. It helped me learn how to model a product at a small scale that could be scaled up spatially as needed,”
McPhee, CEO of the textile
of
she says. Similarly, Wallin says that the presentation was a “good test” for her, teaching her how to address a client’s needs while staying true to herself as a designer. Kubrak recalls that Schwarz said she had taken the brief in an interesting direction. “It was really validating, because I didn’t want my use of glass to overshadow how I used the cork. But he told me that he could see how the cork was used to give the glass its shape and texture, which made me really happy,” Kubrak says.
After a long, passionate debate, the judges selected six projects to be exhibited in Casa Cork during Milan Design Week. According to Cristina Rios Amorim, “What impressed us most was the way they engaged with cork not just as a raw material but as a living medium—something with history, texture, memory, and enormous potential.” Rather unexpectedly, Rockwell also purchased Wallin's and Kubrak’s designs at the final critique. “It was a big surprise, and we had to very quickly come up with a price,” recalls Michalik.
Like Kumthekar, BFA Architectural Design student Aidan Murphy wanted to explore the use of cork in a constructed environment. “I wanted to make people consider this lesser-known material’s potential in design. So I combined it with the parabolic arch and keystone masonry technique, which are staples of architecture,” Murphy says. His project, Keystone Seating, which was selected for Casa Cork in Milan, is an elegant stool that calls to mind classical architecture. The stool’s parabolic arch distributes weight efficiently, making it strong and light. Murphy constructed the object with alternating sections of light and dark cork, adding visual interest and enabling users to attach sections to create a colonnaded bench. The feature also made the stool easy to disassemble, thereby meeting one of the contest requirements: The projects had to be portable and fit into the airplane to Milan. Says Murphy, “This lightness was essential—thinking about transporting the stool in my suitcase turned my thoughts to brickwork, where separate elements come together in an arch but can still be split apart.”
Getting Kubrak’s lamps to Milan was no easy feat; TSA rifled through her carry-on, which held newspaper- and bubble-wrapped pieces. “I was so stressed. I was like, ‘These are design pieces for a design exhibition in Milan. Please be careful; I need to bring them in one piece. They’re made of cork, which is a really cool material!’” The students’ projects all arrived safely. Kubrak describes the process of setting up the Casa Cork exhibit as similarly “chaotic” but extremely positive. “There were so many people assembling and putting final touches on displays—we saw Carlos from Amorim and people from Rockwell Group. Everyone was excited to show the work to the public, and it was such a fun experience. I’d never taken part in a show before.” Wallin was particularly impressed by Amorim and Rockwell Group’s pavilion. “Their installation was amazing—they had aprons and curtains made of cork; everything was cork, to showcase its material qualities. I was happy our whole class got to go to Casa Cork; it was such a good mission.”
At Casa Cork, Quinn and Miñana presented a cork-molding workshop that was open to all fairgoers. “It was the widest demographic of people— designers, people who live in Milan, other students—who all wanted to know more about the material,” Miñana recalls. Their objective was to provide an overview of the material they had grown so familiar with. Says Quinn, “Because we went to Portugal and Dan is such an expert, I felt really confident presenting and answering questions—it was a full-circle moment for me, having been the one asking the questions only a few months before.” Michalik adds that it was rewarding to see the students transfer their classroom learning, “sending it out into the world in a literal way.” Having gained facility with using cork, many of the students plan to continue working with the material as their careers progress. They also cite the course as a major driver in their growth as designers. Says Murphy, “This class really built my confidence in my design work—having to give a high-stakes presentation to leaders in the design world and work on such a tight deadline, with so many real-world constraints. It was a challenge, but everyone in this class was supportive, and I got through it. Now I know more about what I am capable of.” Murphy’s sentiments are echoed by Rockwell, who cites the numerous benefits for his own projects of working with Parsons students. “I talk to other designers and clients about how important it is to have the chance to look outside your own set of ideas and get different points of view,” Rockwell says. “If you’re lucky enough to do that with a group of students as smart as the students at Parsons, who have a whole different point of reference, you’re going to make your work better and you’re more likely to come up with something that’s going to resonate.”
Sarah Fensom is a writer based in Los Angeles.
TOP LEFT: Amorim’s Carlos Bessa shows students the fast-growing cork oak tree saplings planted by the company to meet the increasing global demand for cork.
ABOVE: In constructing her patio and pool furniture suite, BFA Product Design student Veronica Speyer drew on the ability of cork to float and to resist mold. BELOW: Rockwell Group’s installation Casa Cork, in which students’ work was exhibited, was on view during Milan Design Week.
Building Blocks
NAt this year’s Venice Biennale of Architecture, a partnership between Parsons and Taiwan’s National Cheng Kung University is transforming a 40-year-old design concept developed by urban design professor Brian McGrath into an innovative collaboration platform for a new generation of architectural designers
By David Sokol
ew York’s East Village in the 1980s is typically pigeonholed as either an incubator of punk rock and street art or a badlands of squatter-occupied tenements. But Parsons’ Brian McGrath describes the neighborhood, which was then his home, in a more conceptual, human-centered way, calling it a “social design laboratory.” His thoughtful approach to architecture, influenced by his years living downtown, led to a recent School of Constructed Environments (SCE) course offering his students a unique learning opportunity.
Blockology: A Homegrown Idea with Global Applications
McGrath describes the 1980s as “a period of both great art production and private owners’ abandoning properties” in the East Village. The neighborhood was home to punk rockers, street artists, and squatters who established community gardens and rooftop sites accessible to all and used local nightspots and galleries as spaces for organizing and creative collaboration. Their imaginative reshaping of the neighborhood led McGrath to view them as ad hoc architects and urban designers.
East Village residents’ urban interventions were influenced by the historical context. The economic and demographic conditions of the United States in the 1970s—stagflation, the decline of manufacturing, white flight to the suburbs—caused many property owners in the East Village and throughout New York City to neglect and abandon their buildings. They also resulted in a decline in municipal tax revenue, which, in combination with a surge in demand for public services, pushed the city to the brink of bankruptcy by 1975. The falloff in investment and deterioration of public services led East Villagers to adopt a frugal lifestyle and focus on pursuits like making music and art. Abandoned lots became community gardens, providing affordable food; bars and arts venues were transformed into grassroots community centers.
“Instead of thinking of the block as just a section of land to fill with real estate, I became fascinated with the block as a social unit,” McGrath says. Whereas many observers viewed the East Village as a troubled area declining into lawlessness, he saw it as a vital neighborhood undergoing positive evolution. Community members were simply adapting their physical environment, albeit outside of traditional redevelopment channels, in accordance with the economic and political dynamics of the period. McGrath dubbed his design framework “blockology.”
ABOVE LEFT: Students in the BFA Architectural Design Studio 5 course gather around their model of the Sweet Potato Hill neighborhood in Tainan, Taiwan, after their final class critique. Students’ buildings appear in white; existing structures are made of brown kraft paper. ABOVE RIGHT: A layered map of the Tainan City shoreline created by Aviela Berk-Silverman, Katina Chang, and Senna Kotlizky.
Building Blocks
McGrath’s observations of the East Village and his daily life there shaped his multifaceted creative practice, which brings together architecture, video and film, and urban design. His love of the neighborhood’s community gardens led him to conduct groundbreaking research in urban ecology. His appreciation for cinema made him aware of the potential of film as a means of documenting space and lived experience and inspired him to develop cinemetrics, a method integrating video ethnography and filmmaking that makes architectural drawings and models more understandable.
McGrath’s blockology concept also continued to percolate through his approaches to interpreting public space; he began using it as a framework for capturing and illuminating the informal, authentic evolution of his environs. And he came to realize that blockology was more than a means of bearing witness. McGrath felt that architects and urban planners could incorporate community-led interventions into their own work to ensure its long-term viability. Blockology could be used to transform vernacular expression into formal design strategy.
McGrath’s blockology mindset has made him a particularly keen observer of Tainan, Taiwan, where, since 2007, he has taught weeklong cinemetrics workshops at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU). Tainan, Taiwan’s first capital, has experienced waves of colonization since 1624, when it was settled by the Dutch East India Company. Informal community responses to these political and cultural shifts are woven into the physical fabric of the city.
To see blockology in action, McGrath recommends examining the 450-foot-square grid that Japanese city planners imposed on Tainan between
Ferrari.
“Our work is based on engaging with your neighbors, getting to know where you live and work, and making community out of it.”
Brian McGrath, professor of urban design
1895 and 1945. This plan required removing Qing Dynasty–era buildings that impeded the construction of thoroughfares, to create a neatly organized, arcaded metropolis. But the five-acre blocks contain alleys lined with buildings, temples, and banyan trees predating Japanese colonization. Perhaps more important, Tainan’s present-day citizens have adapted both the public-facing city and its inner realms for contemporary life, turning clan houses into creative studios and streetfront hair salons into public living rooms.
McGrath’s NCKU workshops have been hosted and co-taught by his former student Cheng-Luen Hsueh, who now oversees the school’s Architecture department. After concluding their class last spring, Hsueh enlisted his Parsons counterpart in brainstorming ideas for the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. McGrath, who had consulted with Hsueh on past proposals for the Taiwan Pavilion, learned that just a few days earlier, the biennale’s chief curator, Carlo Ratti, had announced his plan to showcase urban resilience strategies based on collective intelligence. Ratti’s idea sounded uncannily like blockology, and McGrath suggested to Hsueh that they incorporate the concept in a pitch for this year’s Taiwan Pavilion.
ABOVE: Professor Brian McGrath, Valentina Aguerrevere Jiménez, and Mateo Rembe assemble components of the model for display at the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
RIGHT: Tainan Block Colonization Collage by Valentina Aguerrevere Jiménez, Jana Al-Sarraj, and Gabriela
Discovering Sweet Potato Hill
So began an extended collaboration between the colleagues that would also draw in McGrath’s fall 2024 undergraduate class in Parsons’ SCE and four NCKU students. McGrath imagined modeling one of Tainan’s blocks to illustrate its formal and informal evolution and inviting his and Hsueh’s students “to use empty lots, empty buildings, tops of buildings, and the spaces in between buildings to develop programs and forms that could bridge the interior and exterior block.” The students’ goal was to produce a 1:200 model by employing blockology as a means of engaging sensitively with cities and to continue developing blockology in real-world projects. The class offered an ideal opportunity to demonstrate the potential of blockology as a tool for both observation and intervention.
For a project site McGrath and Hsueh chose the Sweet Potato Hill neighborhood, a location exemplifying Tainan’s urban layering that had served as a subject of the professors’ most recent spring workshop. Sweet Potato Hill is bounded by the arcaded buildings of the Japanese 450-footsquare block; here one can find tourist spots such as A-Mei Restaurant and the Xiao-nan-tian Earth God Temple, along with places more likely to be frequented by locals, such as a tutoring center (known as a cram school) and a hair salon. Sweet Potato Hill also holds lodging and historic temples as well as long-occupied converted clan houses, all crowding the hilly alleys, punctuated by banyan trees.
Although this kind of multilayered setting is typical of Tainan, it is little discussed in the academy. In most undergraduate architecture classes,
FAR LEFT: Daisy Chen’s model for her Shadow Puppet House. LEFT: Professors Paul Goldberger and Alfred Zollinger, serving as critique panelists, offer students feedback on their work.
“Cinema helps us understand what we perceive of places and can guide our architectural work.”
Brian McGrath, professor of urban design
each student is assigned a client, a program, and a clearly demarcated property, whose context plays only a minor role in shaping the student’s design. Parsons professor emeritus Emily Moss—who headed SCE’s undergraduate architectural design program from 2015 to 2021 and served on the panel for McGrath’s final course review—puts it this way: “We still tend to treat the building as the principal object.” In contrast, the richly layered neighborhood described in McGrath’s open-ended brief “pulls urban design thinking into the architectural space.”
McGrath’s expansive challenge is exactly what attracted Jana AlSarraj, a BFA Architectural Design senior, to the course last September. “The studio was completely different from the projects we’re used to,” she says. For her contribution to the scale model Al-Sarraj reimagined a public house—a kind of multipurpose communal space common in the region. In a series of rooftop rooms bridging the exterior and interior of Sweet Potato Hill near the A-Mei Restaurant, Al-Sarraj provided living, dining, and recreation spaces where residents could find relief from their cramped apartments—a professionally designed alternative to the neighborhood’s multipurpose salon around the corner.
“This class allowed us to understand how complex architecture can get and how buildings create communities,” says Al-Sarraj.
“This class allowed us to understand how buildings create communities.”
Jana Al-Sarraj, BFA Architectural Design student
Building to foster community requires profound empathy, and McGrath knew that his Parsons students would need to be acquainted with Tainan and its residents before designing structures for Sweet Potato Hill. To help students walk in the shoes of locals, four of Hsueh’s NCKU students—Ricky Tzu-Chi Chiu, Richard Yi-Chi Fu, Joyce Ching-Yuan Kao, and Josh Tzu-Chin Huang—created ethnographic videos aimed at showing day-to-day life in the neighborhood in a nuanced and impressionistic way.
“It was an interesting way to address my students’ inability to visit the site they’re working in,” McGrath says. “Cinema helps us understand what we perceive of places, and it can guide our architectural work.” The NCKU students also made themselves available to McGrath’s students to answer questions, shoot additional content, and critique their initial proposals.
BFA Architectural Design senior Daisy Chen confirms that the help the NCKU students offered was immense. “Seeing video shot through the entire block captured interactions between people and the intimacy of the scale of the buildings,” she says. Chen designed a shadow puppet theater, which she placed next to Xiao-nan-tian in the scale model constructed by the class. Chen’s classmate Valentina Aguerrevere Jiménez credits her NCKU peers with inspiring her to reconceive the walls of clan houses and a crumbling fortress as the backdrop of an outdoor concert venue.
ABOVE: The Tainan block model for which Parsons students created new structures was mounted on a rotating platform by National Cheng Kung University students, enabling biennale visitors to examine the individual buildings closely.
“Our projects aimed to preserve and bring something new to Sweet Potato Hill.”
Ema Capilla, BFA Architectural Design student
“I wanted to design something that felt like a community living room,” she says. When Fu told her about Tainan’s underground music scene, she quickly reimagined the site as a stage for aspiring performers.
“I’ve never been to Asia, and, without fully understanding the culture, I was nervous I would make an insensitive project,” Aguerrevere Jiménez notes. “The Tainan students’ videos helped us understand how spaces work and why they are important. Their feedback was reassuring.”
BFA Architectural Design student Ema Capilla says that the video content coming from Tainan helped her embrace “an attitude of how to build. In Tainan, buildings are continuously growing off of one another— people aren’t knocking down and starting fresh—so the videos were key to understanding the layering. In program and design, our projects aimed to preserve and bring something new to Sweet Potato Hill.” Capilla’s addition to the scale model is a rooftop community laundry whose water is supplied by an integrated rain cistern; the project fulfills a local need while responding to climate change.
ABOVE LEFT: Professor Cheng-Luen Hsueh presents the work created for the Taiwan pavilion at the opening of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture. ABOVE: Valentina Aguerrevere Jiménez presents her Soundscapes project.
After his students completed their work on the model, McGrath transported it to Tainan for further interventions. NCKU’s Chiu, Fu, Kao, and Huang added their own architectural overlays to Sweet Potato Hill, ranging from a kind of High Line connecting rooftops to an outdoor lounge space for cram school students.
The View from Venice
In the studio course with McGrath, the SCE undergraduates were readying themselves for rewarding careers. According to Moss, the students have a leg up on graduates of other schools because of their exposure to the broad perspective central to blockology—a sharp contrast to the narrow approach of more traditional courses of study, with their lack of attention to context. She also notes that McGrath’s students are positioned to become innovators in their workplaces because they have used video ethnography as a tool for collaboration with their peers at NCKU. A cinematic method of knowledge exchange engenders unique sensitivity to culture in addition to awareness of physical surroundings, she says, “because you’re getting knowledge from people on the ground.” Moss adds, “Getting serious about carbon consumption minimizes architects’ travel to project sites, so this kind of local feedback is crucial to a commission’s success.”
The students, meanwhile, believe their collaboration sets a professional standard for shaping the built environment and the process of carrying out such work.
Last October, Hsueh received word from the Venice Biennale of Architecture that the organizers had accepted his proposal for the Taiwan Pavilion. After learning that their proposed improvements for Sweet Potato Hill would have this prominent stage, Aguerrevere Jiménez and her classmates began deliberating over the message they wanted to share with a global audience.
The aspiring architects couldn’t help but examine their work in light of today’s threats to Tainan’s urban fabric. In Taiwan, the growth of the microchip industry is leading the younger occupants of Sweet Potato Hill’s clan houses to seek opportunities closer to chip production sites.
The microchip economy is also spurring the development of large, car-centric houses elsewhere, which is attracting Sweet Potato Hill’s wealthier residents and further hollowing out historic neighborhoods.
The local economy, in turn, is shifting to tourism, which draws visitors
to the ancient temples and architecture. In response, investment groups are purchasing multiple Sweet Potato Hill properties—knocking down exterior-facing and interior buildings, for example, to erect a hotel with ample parking in their place. According to the Parsons students, their blockology project yields a kind of urban revitalization that commands the attention of younger and wealthier Taiwanese while providing spaces that serve all residents— in a way that doesn’t erase history. As Al-Sarraj puts it, “How can we activate spaces for all, adding dynamism without creating the chaos or disrespect of tearing down existing buildings?”
McGrath notes that the forces acting on Sweet Potato Hill are symptomatic of larger problems endangering cities around the world. And while current conditions— wealth inequality, lack of affordable housing, populism, climate change, even the growth of the AI sector—differ dramatically from the 1970s-era phenomena that gutted the East Village, they also threaten these neighborhoods and the people who call them home. McGrath’s collaboration with NCKU represents a way of training a new generation of designers to contend with change and help partners grappling with community integration, wealth inequality, and other issues to do so as well.
“Whether it was after the Depression or during the 1980s, in times of emergency, people realize that
collectivizing resources is a means of survival,” McGrath says. He believes that student practitioners employing blockology will lead the way in transforming that insight into action. “This isn’t capital-A architecture. Our spatial realignment work is based on engaging with your neighbors, getting to know where you live and work, and making community out of it.”
ABOVE: Daisy Chen demonstrates the lighting scheme for her shadow puppet theater building.
BELOW: Another view of the layered map of the Tainan City shoreline created by Aviela BerkSilverman, Katina Chang, and Senna Kotlizky.
David Sokol is a New York–based writer specializing in design.
Turning into Dialogue
“By weaving meaning directly into their textiles, students can help design a better future.”
Preeti Gopinath, MFA Textiles program director
LEFT: Professor Preeti Gopinath explains the making techniques used in Jingyi Yang and Wenyi Crystal Chen’s project on child labor in Thailand.
RIGHT: Rachel Dana installs her project for the exhibition Passage Patterns: Data Visualization Through Textiles, where work from the collaborative course was on view for the partners— the IOM and Aquafil—to explore firsthand. Dana valued working with the UN and “seeing just how much research and effort goes into what they do.”
In a sea of richly colored yarns, Rachel Dana, an MFA Textiles student, kept returning to vivid pinks and deep reds for her weaving. Among them she added a small patch of green. Although the combination of colors seems like an aesthetic choice, it was actually based on environmental and geographical data. Dana’s palette visually represents environmental collapse in Iraq. Her reds evoke scorched landscapes—fireengulfed land, burned vegetation, destroyed habitats—and the verdant hues stand for living vegetation. Her intricate weaving is a visual and tactile representation of data, in which storytelling emerges not through words and numbers but through color, pattern, and texture.
Dana’s piece was created for Textile Industry Partnership 2, a core course for second-year MFA Textiles students taught by program director and associate professor Preeti Gopinath. Dana and her classmates were responding to a challenge from Gopinath: to present urgent global issues in a compelling textile form. The course involved an innovative fusion of emotion, creative expression, data, and materials research—an educational approach characteristic of Parsons but uniquely arresting when taken up by textile practitioners. Data for the students’ projects came from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM); the raw material was ECONYL®, a nylon yarn developed from ocean and landfill waste by Aquafil, a longtime MFA Textiles partner.
Dana’s objective was to map vegetation loss in five hotspots in Iraq’s Thi-Qar and Missan governorates and to depict the climate-induced migration it spurs. To convey these phenomena visually, she used a gridlike pattern in which the line weights and the size of the woven cells correspond to figures from the IOM data set. “I hope the accent color will spark viewers’ curiosity and deeper engagement” with her story of fragility, resilience, and hope amid devastation, she says.
Data Dialogue
MFA Textiles students collaborating with the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration and the sustainable fiber firm Aquafil discovered unexpected connections between craft, storytelling, and social and environmental impact
By Julia Lynn Rubin
“Textiles are all forms of data representation, even if they’re not graphs.”
ABOVE and RIGHT: Hattie Batstone depicted the internal migration of conflict-displaced Ukrainians in this knitted textile. Darker colors denote areas with higher levels of movement. She and her classmates created wall labels describing their data, research, and process for presentation to the partner organizations.
Hattie Batstone, MFA Textiles student
“The project breathed life into the data.”
Isabella Salom, data analyst at the IOM
“The humanity behind statistics is often lost when it’s expressed only in numbers,” Gopinath explains. “If I say, ‘2,000 immigrants’ or ‘2,000 migrants,’ you focus on the figures. But when I show you a textile and say, ‘Each thread represents a child,’ it helps you better grasp the gravity of the situation.”
MFA Textiles student Hattie Batstone, who transformed a text-based data map of conflict-displaced Ukrainians into a vibrant landscape, agrees. “I was aiming to humanize the statistics,” she says. “I want people experiencing the work to consider the struggles in Ukraine and the region.” Batstone’s textile employs four colors to represent people forced to flee their homes but remaining within Ukraine’s borders, designated “internally displaced persons,” or IDPs, by the UN. Her map’s deeper hues mark higher concentrations.
The IOM has collaborated with universities on initiatives designed to help students understand migration through data. Past projects have focused on educating youth about migration, teaching them to interpret migration data and think critically about displacement in an era characterized by widespread misinformation. Most of the UN’s collaborations have involved conducting social science research with UK partners. “I thought it would be interesting to work with a new kind of partner, one beyond our borders,” says Isabella Salom, a data analyst for the IOM. “My twin brother is pursuing an MS in Strategic Design and Management at Parsons, which got me thinking: Here at the IOM, we have all this data; but what if we approached it in a new way?” she says. She wondered if complex data sets—bar charts, graphs, and migration statistics—could be translated into visual forms a wider audience could connect with. “Our mission with the IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix [DTM] is to inform a larger audience about nuances related to migration and displacement data. I thought, ‘Why don’t we do something with visual art?’”
Salom’s inspiration came in part from the Tempestry Project, a community-led fiber arts initiative founded by artists in Anacortes, Washington, that turned climate data into hand-knitted and crocheted tapestries in which colors chart rising global temperatures. Salom contacted Ben Barry, Parsons’ dean of Fashion, and then Gopinath, whose enthusiasm brought the idea to life. She saw the project as offering a powerful way to make abstract data feel immediate and tactile, a process she describes as “turning numbers into narrative”—a way to draw people in and heighten their awareness of the human stories behind the data.
“People don’t often see textiles as a tool for storytelling or data visualization,” says Gopinath, who designed the course to mirror realworld industry practice through hands-on partnerships and professional mentorship. “I thought: Let’s combine Aquafil’s sustainable ECONYL® material with the UN’s call for a new way to interpret migration data.
ABOVE: Gopinath, flanked by students Yichen Pan and Jing Pei, standing in front of their project on climate change–driven migration in Pakistan, which was exhibited at NeoCon, the world’s leading commercial interior design fair. Aquafil invited students to travel to Chicago to network with industry professionals and share their work at Fulton Market Design Days.
ABOVE: Rachel Dana’s warp-faced weaving depicts climate change–driven environmental degradation and socioeconomic data related to migration in four Iraqi districts. Each bar represents percentages of vegetation loss; among them is one in bright green, indicating an area where vegetation levels have increased. BELOW: Each orange square in Jing Pei and Yichen Pan’s weftfaced weaving, shown here, represents 325 displaced individuals in a district of Sindh, Pakistan. The large number of squares conveys to viewers “the immensity of the displacement,” says Pei.
ABOVE LEFT: Yichen Pan creates a fiber structure to support her tufted map of 11 districts in Sindh where communities have been displaced by flooding and landslides. ABOVE RIGHT: A detail of the map Pan created with Jing Pei.
What if students created work in which every thread, stitch, loop, and color represented migration patterns caused by climate change, conflict, trafficking, or other complex global forces? That could draw people in to learn.”
Having collaborated with Aquafil since 2021, Gopinath knew that the company’s sustainability mission aligns closely with that of Parsons. As Gaëlle Merlin, a design manager for the Aquafil Group, puts it, “At Aquafil, it’s in our DNA to be bold and experiment. We believe we can’t build a better future or a circular economy alone. We need others, like Parsons MFA students, to become informed and feel empowered to make circular decisions.”
Gopinath agrees. “Forward-thinking innovation is what happens at Parsons,” she says. “You get to work with students and faculty who think conceptually and aren’t afraid to try something different—even if it might go wrong in the first few attempts.”
At first, the initiative met with hesitation from several quarters. “When we first heard about this project brief from the UN—I won’t lie—we were a little nervous,” Merlin admits. “But we trust Preeti’s vision after working with her for years. She’s really reshaped the way we approach these projects and collaborate with students. We’ve realized we can’t go into a project with a fixed outcome in mind. It’s about letting the students guide the process.” Salom, too, had reservations, as it was unusual for the IOM to give students an open-ended brief with no clear final product. But Gopinath’s passion and faith in her students’ abilities won Salom over.
“We can’t build a better future or a circular economy alone. We need others, like Parsons MFA students.”
Gaëlle Merlin, design manager for the Aquafil Group
“I had to balance artistic expression and data expression.”
Jing Pei, MFA Textiles student
To start, the IOM gave students a number of detailed migration reports. An organization that operates in more than 100 countries, the IOM compiles large amounts of complex migration data. Each report contained a wealth of demographic data, including migrants’ sex, age, needs, places of origin and destinations, and reasons for migration (and related challenges), offering students an intricate web of human displacement data to analyze and interpret.
Acknowledging that the data reports were complex, Salom helped students understand the DTM, a key tool the IOM uses to gather and analyze data on the mobility, vulnerabilities, and needs of displaced and mobile populations. She then took a deliberately hands-off approach with the students, allowing them space for experimentation and individual expression. Meanwhile, Aquafil led students on a virtual visit to its production factory, including a tutorial on using ECONYL® fibers.
Students then chose the reports and corresponding regions that particularly interested them. Dana was drawn to the case of Iraq by her interest in the environment and natural materials; in addition, as an American, she felt compelled to focus on a country that had experienced
Ian Burt, Aquafil's director of sales and marketing, addresses the MFA Textiles students; program faculty, including Gabi Asfour and Anne Gaines, School of Fashion interim dean; and the IOM’s Luciano Arroio.
Yichen Pan, MFA Textiles student
upheaval and destruction as a result of U.S. intervention. Batstone, who has been following the conflict in Ukraine closely for years, also felt a personal connection to her chosen region. “I wanted to translate my ideas and emotions about it into a textile that speaks to the destruction and disruption of lives,” she says. “I chose knitting as a medium to convey those serious matters in a way that still felt beautiful.” Yichen Pan and Jing Pei chose the same report and collaborated on a project dealing with the recent devastating storm- and monsoon-driven floods and landslides in Pakistan, which have affected upwards of 33 million people. In their piece, they layered Pei’s weaving over Pan’s tufting, using contrasting textures to symbolize the ruptures caused by displacement.
Other students chose a more abstract approach. Eva Ziqi Chen created three pyramidal structures, each representing a major entry point for migrants to Thailand. Her highly detailed, exquisitely crafted tentlike pieces convey facts on immigrant populations and their income, education, and expectations for well-paying employment. The structures combine to form a rich, multifaceted visualization of data related to the displaced population. The vibrant, multicolored flowers in her piece represent children, while the white knitted ones symbolize adults. Each colorful petal is meticulously woven as velvet on a small tapestry frame, then hand-painted and assembled into a delicate, data-laden bloom.
“I think being flexible worked in our favor, because it allowed the students to take the data and make it their own,” says Salom. “The project breathed life into the data.”
Gopinath and her students took Salom’s sentiment to heart. “The data represents actual humans,” says Pei. “So I needed to find a way to present it accurately in what can be an abstract format; I had to balance artistic expression and data expression.”
“The MFA Textiles students are setting new standards for the industry.”
Gaëlle
Merlin, design manager for the Aquafil Group
Eva Ziqi Chen, MFA Textiles student
In her three pieces, Eva Ziqi Chen uses handmade velvet flowers and leaves and knitted blooms to represent the diverse demographics of Thailand’s immigrant population. The three elements combine to form an intricate textile portrait of displaced people.
IOM representative Luciano Arroio examines a piece by MFA Textiles students Jimena Bedoya and Luisa Mantelli tracing people’s migratory routes in Panama’s Darién Province. The piece will be on view at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva.
LEFT: A detail of MFA Textiles student Moie Qian Yang’s crocheted piece of data tallying Turkish citizens apprehended while trying to migrate to the European Union. Her design borrows from traditional Turkish tile motifs.
ABOVE: Anette Millington, associate director of the MFA Textiles program, shows attendees of the Passage Patterns exhibition opening details of research related to Yang’s project. Yang explains that wires in her piece represent coastlines and city borders and crocheted pieces mark migration routes.
“I was working with a lot of graphs and numbers, so translating that into my own practice was challenging,” admits Batstone. Dana adds, “At one point, I had three pieces of data I needed to combine, including size and territory. It was making my head spin, but Preeti advised me to chart my ideas on paper.”
Batstone had a similar experience. “Preeti helped me see that the data wasn’t as overwhelming as it first seemed,” she says. “She reminded me that much of our creative work relies on numbers and that everything we do in our program has meaning and a story behind it. Textiles are all forms of data representation, even if they’re not graphs.”
The course culminated in a virtual student presentation to the IOM and Aquafil in late 2024. Merlin, Salom, and their teams were impressed by the blend of information and emotional expression in and the beauty of the students’ textile projects. Merlin was also struck by the students’ embrace of sustainability in their work. “The MFA Textiles students are setting new standards for the industry,” says Merlin.
The students gained valuable experience by collaborating with an innovative industry leader like Aquafil and a global organization like the IOM. “The collaboration made me think more about the importance of knowing where your materials come from,” says Batstone. “I feel a responsibility to raise people’s awareness of forced migration through my work."
Gopinath and Merlin will be bringing students from the class to NeoCon, an annual furnishings trade show held in Chicago. Students’ work will be exhibited there, enabling them to reach a broader audience as they are exposed to other designers, architects, and industry professionals. The students made their exhibits more compelling by means such as interactive displays. “I want people to touch the work as a way of ‘touching’ the data set,” Pei explains. This tactile experience, she says, enables viewers to engage with the data at a deeper, sensory level, connecting them to the stories behind the statistics.
“Projects like these benefit students throughout their careers, not just as artists and designers but as human beings,” says Gopinath. “Now more than ever, initiatives like this are essential, because it’s easy to become desensitized when we’re inundated with data and statistics. Textiles encourage us to engage.”
“Forward-thinking innovation is what happens at Parsons.”
Preeti Gopinath, MFA Textiles program director
Gopinath hopes to continue collaborating with Aquafil and organizations like the IOM, using similar data sets to inspire future projects. She envisions new iterations of this initiative, in which students engage with similar prompts, offering their own unique perspectives and creative responses. Through such collaborations Gopinath aims to foster a deeper understanding of global issues while expanding the boundaries of design and storytelling through textiles.
“It’s been a great opportunity not only to raise public awareness of global issues like these but to effectively demonstrate to people in the textile industry ways to create work with impact from these circular threads and yarns,” says Gopinath. “This project also helped those in the class realize they have power and agency in their work; whether through building professional networks or by weaving meaning directly into their textiles, students can help design a better future.”
Julia Lynn Rubin is a graduate of the MFA Creative Writing program at The New School. She is the author of three young adult novels and currently serves as a copywriter for The New School's Marketing and Communication team.
Meet our changemaking alumni, students, and faculty and discover work that is making the world more beautiful, just, and sustainable
Melitta Baumeister and Micha� Plata
Alumni and Faculty
Future-Facing Designers
melittabaumeister.com
Melitta Baumeister, MFA Fashion Design and Society ’14, and Michał Plata, a part-time assistant professor at the School of Fashion, run the brand MELITTA BAUMEISTER, acclaimed for its artful construction and dramatic silhouettes. Their path began at a university in Germany, where Baumeister mastered tailoring and Plata learned to design cars. Both were standouts, dissolving creative boundaries and employing unconventional approaches to their craft.
It was there that Baumeister met Shelley Fox, Parsons’ Donna Karan Professor of Fashion, who was visiting schools in Europe before the launch of the MFA program. “I had an immediate connection with Shelley,” says Baumeister. “She is an amazing thinker, and her approach to fashion drew me in.” The meeting convinced Baumeister to pursue a master’s at Parsons, where she developed her creative voice. “The MFA program gave me the platform to experiment and push my work farther than I had before,” she says.
After graduating, Baumeister was offered a spot in a New York Fashion Week group show. Her collection caught the eye of Mel Ottenberg, stylist for Rihanna, who later wore one of Baumeister’s jackets at a show in Paris. Soon after, buyers for the influential boutique Dover Street Market asked for pieces. “That was the launch of my brand,” Baumeister recalls.
For years, Baumeister produced garments in her Harlem apartment. “I did it all,” she says, “from patterns and cutting to production and sales.” Wearing many hats let her learn to run a business and minimize costs. Her brand grew organically, on her terms. Plata joined MELITTA BAUMEISTER in 2017 as co-owner and art director. Earlier he worked on BMW’s innovative automotive design team, earned a fine art MFA, and exhibited striking multimedia installations. His experience in automotive design serves the fashion brand well. “Melitta uses fabric in a sculptural way, similar to what a sheet of metal might be,” explains Plata. And the duo are experimenting with car manufacturing techniques, such as vacuum forming to bond materials.
Today MELITTA BAUMEISTER is sold in more than 40 stores worldwide and has garnered critical acclaim, winning a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award in 2023 and the prestigious Smithsonian’s National Design Award in 2025. Baumeister and Plata are currently working on a multiyear collaboration with a major brand. Baumeister and Plata have maintained the brand’s forward-looking aesthetic. “We always imagined we were making garments for future humans,” says Plata. As the cultural landscape has evolved, so have their collections. “Now there’s more of a realness to our clothes,” says Baumeister. “We’re still thinking about the future, but it feels more uncertain; we need to live in the present.” Whatever the future, Baumeister and Plata will be interpreting and influencing it through their arresting creations.
“The MFA program gave me the platform to experiment and push my work farther than I had before.”
—Melitta Baumeister
ABOVE: Bold silhouettes and precise tailoring are key features of the brand, which recently received a National Design Award from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
RIGHT: Plata’s experience in form making has helped the brand expand into accessories that embody its distinctive aesthetic.
Apprentices from Juxtaposition Arts’ Environmental Design Lab are building a sculptural pavilion designed by Cummings for a vacant lot. The pavilion’s design was inspired by the West African symbol Ahoden, representing strength and the ability to overcome adversity. The structure is the centerpiece of the Healing Pavilion design-build project, a Minneapolis park and healing garden.
“Working with young people leaves me with a lot of hope for the future.”
Changó Cummings, BFA Architectural Design ’21, is a firm believer in the power of architecture and design to transform communities. Cummings leads the Environmental Design Lab at Juxtaposition Arts, a nonprofit organization in Minneapolis dedicated to providing young people with arts education and opportunities to build skills through hands-on experiences. It’s a position that brings him full circle, as he participated in the program during his youth.
One of the projects he is spearheading is the Healing Pavilion, the centerpiece of a community garden in north Minneapolis. Cummings is using parametric architecture to design the pavilion, a space for reflection and meditation that will be fabricated by youth at Juxtaposition Arts. “People need a place to be unpoliced and unsurveilled,” explains Cummings. “Design can be an impetus for healing and change.”
Cummings also brings his community-focused perspective to students at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, where he teaches courses that combine urban design and social justice. “Working with young people leaves me with a lot of hope for the future,” he says.
As a student, Cummings was adept at bringing people and communities together. He was the president of Obsidian Group, which connects and supports Black designers across disciplines. He also organized The Black (Critique), an event celebrating the work of Black students and showcasing it to an audience including instructors, professionals, and community members. It was the first program of its kind at Parsons. “I wanted to find a way to connect faculty and practitioners with work being done in the classroom,” explains Cummings.
Reflecting on his time at Parsons, Cummings cites Mark Gardner, a faculty advisor on both his senior project and Obsidian Group, as instrumental to his success. “He had a profound effect on my academic experience,” says Cummings.
Of particular significance to Cummings is Hattiesburg House, a plan that developed from his capstone project at Parsons. His design involves the creation of an educational center promoting regenerative and sustainable agricultural practices traditionally employed by Black farmers. The site of the center is his grandparents’ farm in Mississippi, which he often visited growing up. Cummings hopes the center will serve as a site for dialogue around the troubled racial history of the region and the disappearance of Black-owned farms. “A regenerative farm is a way to honor the past but also imagine the future,” explains Cummings. “There is a lot of healing that needs to be done.”
Creative Convener juxtapositionarts.org
site plan
and discussion.
Cummings reimagined Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments space as a virtual gallery and critique area in which to present Black students’ work in the Obsidian Group event The Black (Critique).
This
for Cummings’ BFA Architectural Design capstone project, titled Hattiesburg House, reimagines his grandparents’ Mississippi farm as a site for regenerative farming, education,
mornalaing.com
“How can we use fashion platforms to change the sustainability narrative?”
The master’s program’s curatorial project Objects in Trouble—a collaboration with the Palais Galliera fashion museum—features objects from the museum’s archives deemed problematic for their connections to colonialism, racism, or cultural appropriation. Students created a performance to contextualize each item and shed light on its complex history. The cultural context of the Mandchou coat shown above was examined in the Objects in Trouble project, which was directed by Marco Pecorari.
FASHIONABLE DISCOURSES: RETHINKING TODAY THE WWD ARCHIVE(1990-2001) A RESEARCH EXHIBITION BY THE MA IN FASHION STUDIES THE NEW SCHOOL PARSONS PARIS 3-15 DEC 2021
GALERIE D FONDATION FIMINCO
“Fashion is about dreaming and desire,” says Morna Laing, assistant professor of fashion studies at Parsons Paris. “To effect change on a broader level, we need to make sustainability compatible with that.”
Laing’s latest research looks at storytelling around fashion, an industry that has historically promoted overconsumption, and the ways media can support environmentalism. “How can we use fashion platforms to change the sustainability narrative?” she asks.
Laing’s forthcoming book, which she is editing with two colleagues in London and will be published next year, presents best practices in fashion media for image making, styling, and creating aesthetically appealing ways to advance sustainability. She is also writing a monograph that delves into the history of fashion media— from independent and activist content to commercial publications— and the ways sustainability and fashion are represented. “Media drives the fashion industry, because it is through words and images that fashion becomes desirable,” says Laing.
The integration of social and contemporary contexts into Parsons’ curriculum is what drew Laing to the school and what she finds most rewarding about teaching at Parsons Paris. Most of the research on fashion in France is on its history and heritage, she explains; Parsons Paris is unique in offering a more critical lens on the industry. “Parsons is the only master’s program in France that offers fashion studies,” she says. Her courses reflect this forward-thinking ethos, covering topics related to fashion systems, sustainability, the body, and identity.
Laing also appreciates the way the program combines theory and practice. While fashion studies is traditionally taught through lectures and seminars, the Paris program gives students hands-on experience, such as curating exhibitions and creating media content with cultural institutions like Palais Galliera and the Azzedine Alaïa Foundation. “Working with these organizations means students learn in a deeper way and come out of the program with examples of applied research in their portfolio,” explains Laing.
As for the future of fashion and environmentalism, Laing says, “Sustainability is, unfortunately, susceptible to political and economic pressures. It’s important to keep it on the agenda.” Laing and her scholarship are playing an important role in that effort.
Fashionable Discourses is an annual public exhibition by MA Fashion Studies students that draws from Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Wear Daily, and other source materials in the extensive archives of Parsons Paris.
BFA Integrated Design senior Zevin Acuña has always been passionate about building things. “I enjoy using my hands and working with different materials,” he says. The BFA Integrated Design program’s emphasis on cross-disciplinary creative inquiry has pushed him to develop his natural talents. “The curriculum gives us the freedom to explore a variety of themes, processes, and media,” says Acuña.
His thesis, titled Internetted, is a multidisciplinary work encompassing research, woodworking, public engagement, and video on the topic of political subcultures and public discourse on the Internet. One component involved Acuña designing wood covers for milk crates, turning them into reconfigurable blocks that served as seating for dialogue, interaction, and dance at a public performance. Acuña also sees the blocks as facilitating public gathering, collaboration, and protest and even serving as adaptable storage. It’s an open-source design that Acuña says can be replicated inexpensively almost anywhere.
Breaking down barriers is also the theme of Acuña’s Gallery Libre, an outdoor guerrilla gallery space allowing anyone to display work. Acuña aimed to democratize the gallery system, giving underrepresented young artists an opportunity to exhibit their art free from the restrictions and exclusivity of traditional galleries. Gallery Libre has a digital component as well: Artists scan a QR code to add their piece to an online archive, inviting broader engagement.
Acuña served as a studio assistant to Marisa Morán Jahn, assistant professor of design strategies, on her HOOPcycle project, a mobile interactive art installation currently on view outside the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago. Working with Jahn gave Acuña insight into the process behind creating a large-scale socially engaged project. “I learned to solve problems and, in my creative decision making, to consider a range of outcomes and consequences. And I learned that designers are the most motivated to fight for the authentic representation of their projects,” says Acuña of the experience.” “Our job as designers is to observe, reflect, and prepare for many futures.”
Acuña seeks to apply the multidisciplinary perspective nurtured at Parsons to his professional journey. “I love the idea of a career in creative collaboration,” he says.
“Our job as designers is to observe, reflect, and prepare for many futures.”
ABOVE: Acuña made a plaster cast of his teeth and used the lost-wax method to create this silver grill as a way to capture his unique identity and skills. RIGHT: Acuña calls his public art intervention Gallery Libre a “first step” in sharing the art of emerging talents more broadly. His project enables artists to hang their works in the city, to be documented in an online gallery for others to enjoy, buy, and appreciate in accordance with fair-use policies.
Endlessly reconfigurable, Acuña’s blocks encourage social interaction and dialogue in public spaces.
When Meg Crane, CGRD Graphic Design ’60, relocated from New Jersey to New York City to attend Parsons, she moved just a few miles but a world away. Life in the city challenged her at first, but she quickly acclimated. “It was a new world for me,” she says, “and I loved it.”
At the time, “Parsons was in an old factory on East 54th Street near the East River,” recalls Crane. Students from different departments collaborated on projects, giving the school “a great vibe. I took two years of fashion illustration, which I enjoyed,” she says. Crane took a course with the celebrated art director and artist Marvin Israel during his first year teaching at Parsons and studied under other notables, including the artist and environmentalist Alan Gussow and the groundbreaking fashion designer Norman Norell. When Crane noticed the advertising industry shifting from illustration to photography, she began studying graphic design.
After leaving Parsons, Crane worked as a freelance designer for trade publications, at the aerospace firm General Dynamics, and—at the invitation of Marvin Israel—at Harper’s Bazaar, where she worked with him and photographer Richard Avedon.
In 1967, Crane began designing for the pharmaceutical company Organon. After seeing pregnancy tests in the company’s lab waiting to be processed for physicians, she imagined a version that women could use at home. “The test kits had very simple components,” remembers Crane. One day, she noticed a small plastic box on her desk that held paperclips and used it for a mockup. "The skills I learned as a designer helped me create my prototype.”
Although the idea of putting tests into the hands of consumers met with fierce resistance, Crane advocated for her invention, called Predictor. Organon’s Dutch corporate owners saw its potential and released it in Canada and Europe in the early 1970s, making it the first home pregnancy test. It became available in the United States in 1977. Crane's product quickly became a commercial success and marked a pivotal moment in women’s liberation.
By then, Crane had gone on to form the consultancy Ponzi & Weill with Predictor’s marketing executive, Ira Sturtevant. The two were partners in business and in life for 41 years, serving clients including Bristol-Myers, IBM, and the Japan Society.
Today Crane takes on selected design projects and creates illustrations and cartoons, mostly for friends. In 2015, her Predictor prototype was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Her story inspired the play PREDICTOR, which has been staged in several cities; a book and a movie about her are also in the works. Reflecting on her wide-ranging career, Crane says, “Being a designer is like being an explorer. You never know where it will take you.”
TOP: Crane invented Predictor, the first at-home pregnancy test, which produced results in just two hours. It was marketed to women with the message “Every woman has the right to know whether or not she is pregnant.” The prototype is held in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. BOTTOM: FDA approvals delayed Predictor’s path to the U.S. market for nearly a decade, but once it was available, it became part of a $40 million home testing market. This advertisement—created by Crane and her new partner, Ira Sturtevant—was for the Canadian version, launched in 1971.
Crane’s product quickly became a commercial success and marked a pivotal moment in women’s liberation.
Inventor and Advocate
Meg crane
Crane wrote and illustrated the humor book Insanity Claus
LEFT: Festival d’Hyères judges awarded Goff the Mercedes-Benz Sustainability Prize for Asphalt Cowboy, tailored motorcycling wear created with remnants of Goff’s father’s leather jumpsuit and drawing on Goff’s research on historical motorcycle gear.
Logan Monroe Goff (BFA Fashion Design ’23), a second-year MFA Fashion Design and the Arts student, has already accomplished a lot, and he’s just getting started. A recent achievement—winning the prestigious MercedesBenz Sustainability Prize at the 39th Festival d’Hyères in France—earned Goff coverage in British Vogue and is now propelling his fashion career forward.
Goff’s prize-winning look is a motorcycle suit that combines a tailored garment with remnants of his father’s discarded cycling gear, found in his family home in suburban Texas. “It was just sitting in a box and was probably going to end up in a landfill,” says Goff. The work reflects Goff’s interest in motorcycle culture and exemplifies his approach to sustainability, which focuses on repurposing cast-off garments and fabric. “I like the idea of taking what’s already here and giving it a new life,” he says.
Long interested in fashion, Goff attended Parsons’ Summer Academy in New York City before his high school senior year. The experience opened his eyes to new possibilities and solidified his future plans. “After the summer program, I knew that Parsons was where I wanted to go. It was the only school I applied to,” he says.
He was inspired to continue his education at Parsons Paris after spending his junior year there and taking a course with Tuomas Laitinen, director of the MFA Fashion Design and the Arts program. “Tuomas and Miki Omari were a big part of my decision to pursue my master’s at Parsons Paris,” explains Goff. “I want to learn from professors who have done what I eventually want to do.”
Access to creative resources and the small campus community in Paris are other features Goff values. “Parsons Paris feels like my own atelier; I have the freedom to experiment and do my own thing,” which includes intensive exploration of tailoring techniques. He has completed internships with Isabel Marant and EgonLab and recently created two looks for a Parsons Paris collaboration with legendary designer Ann Demeulemeester. “The exposure to Paris fashion houses is so valuable,” he says.
Goff is currently working on a sustainable fashion capsule collection for a major global brand, set to launch later this year. Of his future ambitions Goff says, “The d’Hyères festival collection set a high bar, and I’m trying to top it.”
ABOVE and LEFT: Goff’s MFA class worked with the Ann Demeulemeester team to develop looks reflecting the brand’s creative DNA. In his designs, Goff channels his fascination with motorcycling and Demeulemeester’s love of boots and fasteners, together with her artful blend of sober palettes, innovative patterning, and androgynous silhouettes.
logan Monroe goff
Student
Emerging Designer @logan_monroe_goff
“I like the idea of taking what’s already here and giving it a new life.”
Stephanie Dang
Alumni
Data Visualization Designer
stephanie-dang.com
Stephanie Dang, MS Data Visualization ’23, enjoys making discoveries as she works. “A lot of my projects start from me learning something I didn’t know, which leads to more questions,” she says.
Her inquisitive nature served her well as she developed Art Off the Rails, an interactive map that highlights public art in New York City’s subway stations. The project won the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s 2024 inaugural Open Data Challenge, a competition that tasked participants with using the MTA’s extensive data sets to create projects that offered insights into the city’s transportation system.
Growing up in Southern California, Dang didn’t use public transit regularly. But living in New York gave her a deeper appreciation of its unsung benefits. “People come here to see art in museums, but there is also art in everyday life and places we don’t expect,” Dang says of her project. “Art in urban public spaces is a very gentle form of kindness.”
Dang was inspired to apply to Parsons’ MS Data Visualization program after seeing students’ work on the Parsons website. “I was really wowed by the projects,” says Dang, “and they opened my eyes to a type of career that I didn’t know existed.” Being in the program also changed Dang’s perspective on the type of work she wanted to do. “I started to realize during my first semester at Parsons that I don’t want to create things just for myself; I want my work to have a wider impact,” says Dang.
In a studio class, for example, Dang and her classmates worked with United Nations data sets to create narratives around important global issues such as public health, sustainability, and the environment. And the Designing for Usability course, taught by Emily Saltz, got her thinking about the importance of designing from the perspective of others and finding solutions that work for them. “Parsons kick-started the idea of creating things for the greater good and telling bigger stories,” says Dang.
Dang sees her work as a way to create positive change in the world. “Today we have so much access to so much information that it can be overwhelming,” she says. “Data visualization distills the information and tells stories in creative, engaging, and powerful ways.”
“Parsons kick-started the idea of creating things for the greater good and telling bigger stories.”
Dang’s Art Off the Rails, an interactive map highlighting public art in the NYC transit system, won the 2024 MTA Open Data Challenge.
Dang’s Adventure Awaits!, a data visualization of facts about U.S. national parks, was recognized by the 2024 Information is Beautiful Awards. The interface enabled her to refine the mapping skills she had developed for her thesis.
shefali Dhar and Rishi shankar
Shefali Dhar and Rishi Shankar, both MS Strategic Design and Management ’24, often worked on projects together during their time at Parsons. Their thesis, Breaking Echoes—an analysis of the media’s role in fostering political and ideological polarization in the United States—was named the program’s capstone project of the year.
“The way people consume news is very myopic,” says Dhar. “How do you break the echo chambers?” To address this problem, Dhar and Shankar developed Abridge, an AI-powered app that aggregates news from sources across the political spectrum. As users interact with the content, the app generates a dashboard that identifies their biases and encourages them to reflect on their news consumption habits. “The aim is to address black-and-white thinking and get people to communicate with empathy and nuance,” explains Dhar. The app also features a moderated forum where people with differing opinions can engage in conversation. “Polarization often stems from a lack of visibility of the nuances of complex issues. Our app encourages users to actively engage with different perspectives and across divides, helping them find understanding and common ground,” says Shankar. “Our app gives people a better way to engage and helps them understand different perspectives.”
The project was inspired by Dhar’s observation of increasing polarization and antagonism in political discourse. It’s also personal. “I’m from Kashmir, which is a conflict zone, and I’ve seen the ill effects when two groups can’t see eye to eye,” says Dhar.
The collaboration drew on the strengths of each, with Dhar leading the concept development and research and Shankar bringing the idea to life with his branding and product design expertise.
Both say the Strategic Design and Management program changed the way they think about their careers. “For me, Parsons amplified the scope of what you can do with design and how it can be applied,” says Shankar. Dhar explains that her education at Parsons transformed her career goals. “Instead of chasing trendy problems to solve, I now want to focus more on people problems.”
They cite instructors Jeongki Lim, Sareeta Amrute, and Matt Robb as having played a major role in shaping their thesis project and their Parsons experience. The product Dhar and Shankar developed may have an impact beyond news and politics by serving as a tool to bridge other divides. “Empathy, fairness, making sure there is room for everyone—that’s what design is all about,” says Dhar.
“Empathy, fairness, making sure there is room for everyone— that’s what design is all about.”
Dhar and Shankar map out the UX and functionality of their app.
The Abridge app is designed to change the way people consume news and regard their own views.
anDRew shea
Faculty
Design Ethicist andrewshea.com
“If I can help position us to weather the changes coming our way, then I’ll feel I’ve helped accomplish something meaningful.”
The exhibition In Plain View: Transforming Freshkills from Landfill to Landscape was conceived by Shea and professors John Roach and Caroline Dionne with Parsons students and staff from Staten Island’s Freshkills Park. The show featured work bringing together art, ecology, and technology and reflecting on the site’s history and potential.
ABOVE: Shea launched the Creative AI Magnifier, an interface that informs users about the features and impacts of AI tools and the degree to which they align with the users’ values.
BELOW: In one of Shea’s classes, students created Future AI Artifacts, an exhibition presented during the Management and Social Justice Conference.
Studying the use of AI in the creative community often brings up more questions than answers for Andrew Shea, an associate professor of integrated design and the associate dean of the School of Design Strategies. “How are AI tools changing us as people, as creative individuals, and as a society?” he asks.
Shea is committed to finding ways to address questions like this one and helping people gain a better understanding of this rapidly evolving technology. “There’s a sense of urgency to decide how we’re going to use it,” he says. Shea recently developed the Creative AI Magnifier, an online tool that raises awareness of ethical issues surrounding AI, including accessibility, transparency, intellectual property rights, data privacy, and bias. Users respond to a series of prompts, and the site generates a visual representation of the topics most important to them. “I want to help people quickly understand these issues in an engaging way,” explains Shea.
To spur conversation and action around the use of AI, Shea and Sareeta Amrute, an associate professor of strategic design and management, created the Lab for AI, Ethics, and Creative Labor at the School of Design Strategies. The lab is designed to help students and faculty from across The New School come together to share perspectives about the use of AI, build tools, and conduct empirical research about the ways AI is changing creative fields. “By engaging the New School community, the lab uses a bottom-up approach," explains Shea. It also reflects the social justice mission of The New School and reinforces its reputation as a forward-thinking institution. Although the lab was established only recently, it has already held several events and launched studies on the topic. “This work will hopefully help lift up our students and the broader creative community at The New School,” says Shea.
Shea’s interest in responsible use of AI stems from his previous work promoting social justice and civic engagement. His book Designing for Social Change: Strategies for Community-Based Graphic Design focuses on using design to create positive social impact. More recently, he taught a course on AI, ethics, and social justice with Jeongki Lim, the dean of the School of Design Strategies and an assistant professor of strategic design and management. Shea is also the founder and leader of MANY, a design studio that partners with nonprofit organizations, government agencies, schools, and civic-minded groups on social and environmental causes.
Shea is eager to see where this new technology will take us in the future. “If I can help position us to weather the changes coming our way, then I’ll feel I’ve helped accomplish something meaningful,” he says.
Parker Grace Puls, BA Journalism + Design/BFA Photography ’24, sees her work as an extension of her identity. “It’s important to be yourself and show who you are in your work,” she says.
For her Journalism + Design senior thesis at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, Puls created An Indigenous Persons Guide to NYC, which highlights Native American resources, artists, and organizations across New York City. It was inspired by the challenges she faced finding other Indigenous people in the city. “Sometimes it takes just one person to open the door and introduce you to a community,” says Puls. “I wanted this guide to be like that one person.”
For Imprint, her photography program thesis, Puls made a traditional Diné (Navajo) skirt from hand-printed cyanotypes of collaged images representing the Navajo Nation reservation. The project includes documentary-style footage of Puls wearing the skirt as she goes about her day in New York City. “It was like bringing the reservation with me and the idea of literally wearing my heritage,” explains Puls.
At Parsons, Puls was encouraged to create art that was true to her experiences. “The faculty took the time to get to know my story and understand my perspective,” says Puls. “I wouldn’t have gotten that at many other schools.” Earning a dual degree let her pursue two of her passions simultaneously: writing and photography. “The programs complemented each other and helped me learn how to say more with less,” says Puls.
Through Her Eyes is a deeply personal conceptual photographic project that honors her late grandmother. In this collection, Puls captures moments in a teenage cousin’s life, imagining how her grandmother would have seen and experienced them.
Puls is now based in Savannah, Georgia, where she freelances as a photographer for Bloomberg Media. She’s also taking part in the Betti Ono Foundation’s Artist in Residence project ‘lweš-‘iweš kečkeyma: 100 women, in which Indigenous women are making 100 ribbon skirts, representing 100 women and girls who died in the brutal Spanish colonial mission system in what is now California. The skirts will be displayed in an installation suspended from the ceiling, creating a powerful tribute. The project helps preserve the craft of sewing traditional garments that has been passed down from generation to generation. It also reflects Puls’ desire to use art as a vehicle for storytelling and advocacy. “The representation that art can bring is so important,” she says.
BELOW: Puls sewed the traditional ribbon skirt shown here. It will be part of ‘lweš-‘iweš kečkeyma: 100 women, an exhibition honoring Indigenous women and girls who lost their lives to colonialism.
parker grace pulS
Alumni
Documentary Photographer and Writer parkergrace.co
and communities.
“It’s important to be yourself and show who you are in your work.”
ABOVE: In her documentary photography project Through Her Eyes, Puls explores her late grandmother’s presence in her family’s lives.
Puls’ An Indigenous Persons Guide to NYC , an image from which is shown here, creates connections between Indigenous people
We’re Parsons— and we’re designing a world you want to
live in
Parsons School of Design—consistently top-ranked among art and design schools in the United States and internationally— has sent changemaking artists and designers out into the world since its founding more than 120 years ago. Today we’re part of The New School, a major university in New York City offering programs in subjects ranging from the liberal arts and humanities to the performing arts to media, management, and more. Here and at our Parsons Paris campus, a diverse community channels its creative and critical capacities into fostering a more equitable, sustainable, and beautiful world through innovative art, design, and architecture.
WHAT CAN YOU STUDY HERE?
Degree Programs
Architectural Design (BFA)
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Art, Media, and Technology (BFA) Parsons Paris only
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Design and Technology (BFA, MFA)
Design and Urban Ecologies (MS)
Design History and Practice (BFA)
Fashion Design (BFA, AAS)
Fashion Design and Society (MFA)
Fashion Design and the Arts (MFA) Parsons Paris only
Fashion Management (MPS) on campus or online
Fashion Marketing and Communication (AAS)
Fashion Studies (MA)
Fine Arts (BFA, MFA)
History of Design and Curatorial Studies (MA)
Illustration (BFA)
Industrial Design (MFA)
Integrated Design (BFA)
Interior Design (BFA, MFA, AAS)
Interior Design and Lighting Design
Double Major (MFA)
Lighting Design (MFA)
Photography (BFA, MFA)
Product Design (BFA)
Strategic Design and Management (BBA, MS)
Strategic Design for Global Leadership (MS)
Textiles (MFA)
Transdisciplinary Design (MFA)
newschool.edu/parsons/academics
Continuing and Professional Education
Parsons also offers courses that help you prepare a portfolio, explore art and design, or fast-track your career or entrepreneurial ambitions. newschool.edu/parsons/continuing-education
facts at a Glance
#1 art and design school in the U.S.1
5,700+ students at Parsons (11,000+ at The New School as a whole)2
48% international students at Parsons
45,000+ Parsons alumni worldwide
1 Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings, 2025.
2 Fall 2024; includes Parsons Paris.
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BELOW: Longtime Parsons faculty member George Bates created Red Scare, Yellow Curtain, a graphic narrative of the Orozco mural incident (known as the “curtain hysteria”), for Offense & Dissent, a 2014 campus exhibition curated by Julia Foulkes, Mark Larrimore, and Radhika Subramaniam. The show explored controversies involving art, identity, and community at The New School. In Bates’ illustrated panel, Alvin Johnson is shown addressing the community, claiming that Orozco had not intended to promote communism by including Lenin and Stalin in his New School mural.
ABOVE: Protests against depictions of Lenin, Stalin, and the Red Army led the school to cover part of the mural with a yellow curtain during the 1950s. In a letter to a New School colleague, Alvin Johnson wrote that he looked forward to “a future date when politics will let art alone.” In a petition signed May 21, 1953, one student said, “You don’t judge a painting by its politics.” BELOW: The Orozco Room was occasionally used as a classroom. Seen here are Orozco’s Table of Universal Brotherhood (left) and part of Struggle in the Occident (which includes portrayals of Lenin and Stalin) on the right.
Creating Space for Dialogue
The New School’s Orozco murals—masterworks currently being restored and preserved for the future—demonstrate the university’s century-long commitment to art that sparks debate
Arguably the oldest and most important of The New School’s site-specific art installations are the Orozco Murals, a series of frescoes created by José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) for the university’s first permanent home at 66 West 12th Street. One of the “three giants” of Mexican Muralism (along with Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros), Orozco created the works at the request of Alvin Johnson, a founder and the first director of The New School, who gave Orozco complete artistic freedom in his commission.
Unveiled in January 1931 at the opening of the university building, designed by Joseph Urban, Orozco’s five-panel Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood reflects the social and political struggles of his time and addresses themes of justice, equality, and liberation. Four panels surround what was then a student dining room, with the fifth panel located just outside.
Among the figures appearing in the murals are Lenin and Stalin, whose presence ignited controversy during the McCarthy era. Responding to complaints and fearing vandalism, the school curtained off a section of the
mural in 1953 to hide the Soviet leaders from view. Despite a student petition calling for the removal of the covering, it remained in place until the early 1960s. In the years since, the murals have inspired public conversations on democracy and freedom, including dialogue around exhibitions such as Reimagining Orozco (2010) and Offense and Dissent (2014).
The frescoes are both historic and rare; they make up one of just three Orozco murals in the United States and are the only surviving sitespecific frescoes by a Mexican artist in New York City (Rivera’s unfinished piece inside Rockefeller Center was destroyed after clashes over artistic censorship). But the murals have suffered the effects of time and climate change–driven fluctuations in temperature and humidity. Over the years, the university has implemented a number of measures to restore and protect the frescoes, including restricting the use of the Orozco Room to occasional meetings and special events.
Today the murals are undergoing a comprehensive multi-year restoration involving a range of stakeholders, including New School President Joel Towers, an architect who supported the design of a climatecontrol system for the room. Since the university’s founding, finding innovative ways to address contemporary challenges like climate change has been as important as supporting thought-provoking artists. Preserving these murals will help ensure that they remain part of the cultural conversation for the next 100 years and beyond.
ABOVE: Orozco’s Table of Universal Brotherhood presents a scene of unity among people of differing races, ethnicities, and religions. BELOW: The appearance of Lenin and Stalin in Struggle in the Occident stirred controversy and prompted Alvin Johnson to cover the part of the murals where the two historic figures appeared. In protest, students formed a committee, calling Johnson’s act “a capitulation to the forces of darkness” and urging university leaders to reconsider in light of the resulting “dangers to democratic tradition and cultural freedom.” “We will have little democracy, indeed,” said the committee in a letter to the New School Board of Trustees, “if majorities were thus granted dictatorial power.” The committee went on to say that while the curtain remained in place, “there should be continued talk about it; especially should there be widespread discussion about freedoms and democratic values generally” among “classmates with diverse views.” Students proposed the creation of a Forum for Freedom, aimed at “supporting and encouraging student efforts to grasp the reality of democracy in an open exploratory forum.” Such an effort would help students “learn to live as creative, expanding healthy personalities by drawing upon the resources of fellowship for strength and enrichment.”
Orozco, photographed by Berenice Abbott in 1936. Abbott taught photography at The New School from 1934 through the 1970s, guiding students including Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus. She created the only known image of Orozco in which the loss of his hand, the result of an accident in his youth, is evident.
