The school year is over, but ADHT faculty members are still hard at work publishing, teaching, speaking, and pursuing their research and projects throughout the world.
David Brody will continue research for his book project Do Not Disturb: Design, Hotels, and Labor. Traveling to Chicago, Honolulu, and Kauai, he will interview a number of housekeepers there about issues related to hotel design and its affects on labor.
Julia Dault will be participating in Everything Must Go: A Project with Ceramica Suro, taking place at Casey Kaplan Gallery from June 30 – July 30, 2011. She will also be an artist in residence at the Millay Colony for the Arts during the entirety of July, joining five other artists, writers, and composers on property formerly inhabited by poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in the town of Austerlitz, New York.
Todd Nicewonger will be preparing three articles for publication, launching a new research project, and traveling to Brazil to present two keynote addresses on his work in fashion. The first article is based on a talk he gave last fall at Parson’s inaugural fashion studies conference. In this essay he sketches out ethnographic methods and analytical frameworks for studying the embodied practices of fashion designers and relating them to larger socio-political processes. This article is part of an edited volume being produced by Dr. Heike Jenss, which will include a diverse range of approaches for studying fashion as both practice and process. The second article is based on his dissertation research in Antwerp, Belgium where he spent 15 months conducting ethnographic fieldwork at a fashion design academy. Drawing on his background in language studies, he examines the communicative practices used in student-teacher interactions to translate illustrated design sketches into toiles. Such engagements, he argues, are critical sites for not just understanding how designers come to embody design techniques, but also provide a vantage for analyzing the cultural specificities of pedagogical practices in design institutions. In addition to these projects he will be co-writing a review with Dr. Christina Moon for the Journal of Design Studies on the Alexander McQueen exhibit that is currently on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Finally, the rest of his summer will be spent beginning a new research project on the circulation of sustainable design knowledge among western and non-western institutions and preparing for two invited lectures in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in August. His talks in Brazil will be part of a youth conference organized by ESPM and Globe University, which will explore the meaning and value of fashion through a series of activities, including a film screening, lecture, and a public youth debate on the social life of fashion.
On June 11th, Radhika Subramaniam will join Tania Bruguera (Artist), Peter Marcuse (Columbia University), and Damon Rich (Architect) for City As Stage, a conversation following a screening of Yto Barrada’s video Beau Geste. As part of the Whitney’s exhibition at The Kitchen, Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, this discussion will approach “the city as a stage of conflict, desire, and imagination” by exploring vital questions within the fields of artistic and curatorial practices, urban planning, and design.
In July, Professor Subramaniam will teach an intensive workshop, Framing a Practice, as part of the MFA Creative Practice program at the Transart Institute in Berlin, Germany.
